Today it’s my pleasure to review the latest release from John David Bethel – Mapping the night!.
I was also lucky enough to be able to pin the author down to answer a few of my burning questions so do read on for more 🙂
Here’s the blurb
The evil that hides in the dark is not always what it seems.
FBI Special Agents Eileen Prado and Ira Fisher are inserted into the investigation of the Upper East Side serial murders at the instigation of forces working within government who want the identity of one of the victims kept quiet. Their partners in the NYPD have their own agenda. They are hiding the true identity of the man known as The Uptown Savage.
Review
A young woman is found unresponsive in bed.. no one knows what happened to her but her little boy was found at the scene trying his best to wake his mam up. Unfortunately for the little boy is mother is beyond saving.
Two investigators arrive to arrive and set about chatting to those in the area but no one has seen anything out of the ordinary…When asked the little boy recounts his morning and how he discovered his mother, but nothing seems out of the usual either.. there’s no real clue to what happened.
As the investigation continues, they look deeper into the victims life, and her visitors, but can they figure out what happened? And is she the only victim? How did no one see anything?
I really enjoyed Levitt and Broaden as they investigated the case, they played off each other nicely and their style was just what you’d want, they keep it simple and focus on the task at hand. They believe in clues.. evidence.. studying the victims to gain insight into the motives of the perpetrator. They are also clearly good at what they do.. they don’t miss a beat eliminating evidence or the risk of contamination.. these guys know what they are doing!
I think what really brings this story up to the cracking tale it is would be the pace… it’s got a bit of suspense there.. just the right amount of detail to keep you hooked but never enough to spoil anything..I also really liked the ending.. not to give anything away but it feels like the author wants to leave the reader with their own imagination abit.. once you put the book down you’ll be left in contemplation..
The little boy, Zane is very intriguing too.. he’s traumatised clearly by what has happened but is that the reason he’s unresponsive to questions? Does he know something that might help the case, and if so how do they tease this out of him without him shutting down. Levitt and Broaden really do want to do right by the boy.
I’m a big fan of flow and pace and what Mapping the Night does is spot on.. the author is clearly a master at the descriptive art.. there’s tonnes of little detail thrown in but nothing stops the flow, it all works and just adds to the whole mystery as you take in all the surroundings like you are there yourself.
For me it’s the natural flow, pace and development of the characters that make it a resounding 5*.
Interested? – Buy link
Keep reading for a bit more info about the author followed by my Q&A!!
Author Bio
As the son of a U.S. State Department Foreign Service Officer, J. David Bethel hopscotched around the world, from one of his father’s embassy postings to another, finding himself, in 1959, in Cuba, sitting in a hotel room with Fidel Castro, just one week after Castro had come to power.
“He was there with his brother Raul, and Che Guevara – all these men with big beards, long hair, the rifles and handguns, just a week after they came out of the mountains,” recalls Bethel. “When Castro noticed I was looking at his pistol, he asked my dad, ‘Can I show your son my gun? And my dad said yes, but first unload it.’”
As David held the heavy gun, he couldn’t help but like the revolutionary leader — until a few minutes later when Castro gave a press conference that Bethel’s father, a press attache for the American embassy, helped organize. A reporter badgered Castro with questions the Cuban leader clearly didn’t want to answer. Bethel watched, stunned, as Castro’s entire personality changed. Castro’s stone-cold glare toward the reporter still chills down Bethel’s spine. “He was a completely different person,” recalls Bethel. “It was a lesson to me about the dark side of human nature.”
Today, Bethel is an award-winning author, mining his memories from his globetrotting youth as the son of an embassy press attache for his political and psychological thrillers that explore the violence always simmering in the dark recesses of human nature. As Bethel says, “My childhood was fertile training ground for a fiction writer.”
His latest novel, Mapping the Night (2024), follows a pair of investigators – one for the FBI, the other for the NYPD — whose probe into a New York City serial killer is being hampered by a person – or persons – in government. The question is why?
As with Bethel’s other books, Mapping the Night is fast-paced, intricately plotted, with compelling characters in the kinds of glamorous, high-stakes worlds in which Bethel grew up and later worked.
A graduate of Tulane University, Bethel followed his father into a government career and politics. He served as press secretary and speechwriter for Members of Congress as well as a senior adviser and speechwriter for the secretaries of Commerce and Education.
Bethel also worked as a media consultant for prominent communications management firms, and wrote speeches, opinion editorials in leading newspapers, and congressional testimony for CEOs from the nation’s largest corporations.
Getting so close to political and business leaders, Bethel saw the dynamics of power first-hand. And while he never stumbled into the kinds of murderous conspiracies he’d later write about — “I worked for very smart, dedicated people trying to make a difference,” he says, adding with a laugh: “Not like today.”
Still, he recognized the literary potential of his experiences in politics. “I was always writing down ideas,” he said. “Politics mixes everything that fiction authors write about: sex, crime, psychology, power — all of it. I take a kernel of an idea and weave it into a story.”
Not surprisingly, many of his novels lean into politics. Evil Town (2015, Tell-Tale Publishing Group) tracks an FBI investigation into the murder of the wife of popular Florida congressman that takes the story from the Pentagon to small-town Florida. No Immaculate Conceptions (2018, Two Dog Publishing) follows a frantic young presidential speechwriter who is pursued by a psychopath.
A meeting with a fan broadened his writing. A private investigator who admired Bethel’s work recruited him to write a true-crime book about the case of a man who was kidnapped, tortured, and extorted for millions of dollars. Bethel felt it would make a better springboard for a psychological thriller, albeit one that brought him from political intrigue to a psychological thriller.
After the ensuing novel, Blood Moon (Tell-Tale Publishing Group) in 2016 came Wretched (2022, AAEB Publishers), in which the justifiable homicide of a town bully leads to the investigation of a serial killer; Unheard Of (2019, Whiz Bang Publishing), about a serial killer haunting the Las Vegas Strip; Little Wars (2020, Whiz Bang Publishing) about a family murder-suicide local officials seem strangely intent on keeping under wraps.
“I’m always trying to understand these people, the Ted Bundys of the world, to understand what leads them to such horrible ends,” he says. “I now understand that these people are predators and for them hunting other human beings is like a hunter going after an animal. Nothing is going to stop them unless they themselves are caught or killed.”
Now living in Florida in the Orlando Area, Bethel has retired from politics and government and devotes himself to writing. “I have the experiences, I have the imagination,” he says. “I take all this stuff that’s in my back pocket and with a lot of hard work and muscle turn it into fiction.”
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10 Questions With…
I’m very excited to have had the chance to ask the author a few questions, let me know what you think 🙂
Q: Your latest offering, Mapping the Night, is gripping from the start and the ending. It leaves the reader fulfilled but at the same time it’s thought provoking. Did you always have this story planned from when your first put pen to paper or did the plot change and evolve as you wrote the story?
A: When I begin writing I have no idea where I’m going. I have the kernel of an idea and dive in. With Mapping the Night, I began with a scene I read about in a newspaper article covering the investigation of serial murders in New York City. The police found the young son of a murder victim applying ice to his mother’s forehead trying to revive her. He said it was what she did when he was sick and he wanted to “make her better.” That scene haunted me and it was my jumping off point for the novel. I had no idea where I was going with it.
Many writers work from a detailed outline and prepare elaborate backstories for their characters. This provides a foundation that takes them from the first sentence to the final one knowing where they are going and how they are going to get there. I tried that approach initially but found it took the fun out of writing for me. I wanted to write the way I read. Being surprised about what is around the corner. About how characters react to their situations. I discovered early on that the outline and backstory process would not work for me.
Q: You’ve quite a nice collection of works to your name now, do you have a favorite? And is there anything particularly, review, award etc, that makes you feel especially proud?
A: Asking me which novel is my favorite is like asking a parent which child is their favorite. My first, Evil Town has a special place, of course. It proved to me that I could write a novel. That said, my follow-up Washington Trilogy (No Immaculate Conceptions, Sirens, No Country Loved) demonstrated the ability to sustain a series and delve into the workings of American politics and government, and write in depth about the men and women who involve themselves as the nation’s leaders.
With Blood Moon, I chose a completely different path. With that novel, as well as Unheard of, Holding Back the Dark and Wretched, I probed the darkness of people who commit unspeakable crimes, and set them against those who fight such evil. This required a great deal of research and learning about the impulses and deviancy that drives the offenders, and learning about the training and skills of those who fight this evil. I consulted everything from true crime books, to psychological studies, to law enforcement tracts to create believable scenarios.
Mapping the Night is yet another departure. More than my previous novels, it combines both political and psychological themes, and looks more closely at how the characters deal personally with the demands put on them by the circumstances in which they find themselves.
Little Wars is an outlier on this list. The plot unravels in a small rural town during the final few days of World War 2. The investigation into the murder of a family strips the veneer of normality from the surface of the community revealing threats to an anticipated bright future following the war years.
As to reviews or rewards, all positive reviews provide some legitimacy to my choice to be a writer. Even negative ones can have that effect if seen in the right light. That someone read a novel I wrote and found it worthy of comment – positive or negative – is a plus. The commenter took the time to read my novel and was affected enough to share their thoughts.
Q: You’ve clearly mastered the dark and bone chilling tales, would you ever consider writing in a different style, or genre?
A: As I noted earlier, I am motivated by the germ of a story and go from there. To date, my imagination has been tweaked by political and psychological “germs”, but I would not rule out other directions. I doubt science fiction is in my future. I’m more a “here and now” person.
Q: Reviews are clearly important to readers and authors alike, but we all know sometimes reviews can also be unhelpful. How do you handle negative reviews? And is it hard to let negative comments go and focus on all the positives?
A: I have enough rejection letters to paper every wall in my house, and that doesn’t count all the email rejections I’ve received in recent years. If I allowed those to influence me, I’d never have written a word. Rejection and negativity are part of the business. Literature is an art, not a science.
I have learned from rejection and critical reviews. Writers should always be open to criticism and suggestions for improvement, whether we agree with them or not. When fully engaged in the task it’s possible to become so invested in the product that you lose perspective. That is, you’ve worked so hard to get it right, it’s difficult to accept that sometimes you get it wrong. Accept criticism gracefully and allow yourself to carefully consider what you’re being told. In the end, it’s up to you to accept or reject edits, and even rewrites, but I’ve found that critiques can be helpful and can improve your product.
When I look back at some of my earlier novels, I see where I fell short. I also see improvement come as I moved ahead with my writing. I never consciously went through my writing and identified weaknesses or made a list of areas that needed improvement. It happened organically. For example, early on I don’t think I developed fully three-dimensional characters. I put them in the center of the plotline and let it revolve around them without offering readers a depth of insight on why the character took a particular course of action, or reacted to their circumstances as they did. The story itself worked and the plot remained intriguing judging from the comments of critics and readers. But I discovered complexly drawn characters in the novels I was reading. They had relationships that impacted how they pursued their work; they had backgrounds that affected how they viewed their workmates and antagonists; and so on.
Each novel is a learning experience.
Q: Where does your inspiration come from? And do you find the writing process difficult?
A: Inspiration has come from a number of different sources. As noted, for Mapping the Night, it came from a newspaper article; Unheard of drew from a series of murders of homeless people in Las Vegas; Wretched is based on the true story of the unsolved killing of Ken Rex McElroy, the town bully whose crimes included sexual assaults, robberies and physical violence over a three decade reign of terror; Holding Back the Dark mined the crimes of such serial killers as Ted Bundy, Edward Kemper and Herbert Mullins.
Yes, writing is a challenging process. It requires a tremendous amount of discipline to dedicate hours of your life pounding on a keyboard, alone with your thoughts, and not getting up until you have exhausted yourself for the day.
For me, it means no less than four hours every day no matter what else is going on in my life. That is a chore not only for me but for those in my life. As my wife says, “You’re gone not only during the hours you’re holed up your office, but for most of the rest of the day because your mind is still on what you’re writing.” And that means that I’m unavailable to those around me for at least six months.
There have been times when events caused an interruption in my writing. It was not only frustrating being away from the story, but reinserting myself and picking up on the train of thought — the flow — was difficult. There are usually false starts before the engine is humming again. And the only way to get that engine humming smoothly is by refusing to give in to any frustration or desire to get out of that chair.
Q: What do you feel makes a great story?
A: A compelling plot does it for me. If a story captures my imagination, I can get lost in the narrative. And I’ve found that the most effective novels have multiple, intertwining plots that crisscross each other. Each introduces complex stories and characters who, although unique to a particular plotline, reveal traits that allow the actors to come together comfortably when the denouement brings the various storylines to a conclusion.
Stephen King comes to mind immediately as a master story-teller. His novels put the reader in the middle of the action and drive relentlessly to the finish line. Characterization is also important in King’s novels as demonstrated in Misery and The Stand, for example, and showcase his ability to paint memorable characters. But it is the story that define his novels and, for me, distinguish King’s talent.
Q: What is your favourite part of being a writer?
A: The creativity. Filling a blank piece of paper (or screen) with words and conceiving cities, towns, neighborhoods, streets, houses, men, women and children. Putting these locations and the characters under some pressure or making demands on them requiring their good and bad angels to surface and interact; using that interaction to reveal human strengths and weaknesses.
Creating worlds and people within them has allowed me to better understand how disconnected we can be from each other. Most of us live a very self-contained existence. We work with a finite number of people; we go home to our families; we have a small circle of friends; we interact in the same environment and with the same people on a regular basis. When writing, I have to broaden my horizons. Different characters live in different worlds. They have different interests and diverse connections. Writing have taught me to look around. See more than what’s in front of me. If we all can do that, we’d better understand each other and the worlds we live in. Writing has broadened my perspective on life
Q: What’s your favourite under-appreciated novel?
A: I have no idea which of my novels is under-appreciated, or, for that matter, which is the most appreciated. Changing the criteria just a bit, I’d say the novel that should garner more public consideration is No Country Loved. Written prior to the tragic events of January 6th, it anticipates this day and the political fallout that ensues. Although not completely prescient, there is enough in the novel that will be familiar to readers. Disturbingly so, I think.
Q: What was the most recent book you’ve read yourself that you would recommend?
A: I recently finished Jolie Blon’s Bounce by James Lee Burke. Burke’s descriptions of the swamps and marshes in Louisiana put the reader shin deep in the muck and mire, and on alert for dangerous critters that are lurking about – human and animal. He builds his story upon the foundation of history and tales that define that region, and creates characters that are current, but defined by their past. Burke is a master story teller with an incredible ability to paint a world the reader will fully inhabit.
Q: What’s next for J David Bethel? Can you give us any hints what we can expect next?
A: I have completed a sequel to Mapping the Night entitled Squinting at Shadows. The sequel is based on the murder of the daughter of Senator Charles Percy; an unsolved crime that occurred during his first campaign for the Senate.
A quick synopsis: FBI special agents reopen the cold case and begin to peel back layers of lies and the misuse of power that have hidden the truth of the murder. The investigation takes them from the toney neighborhoods of suburban Chicago to the halls of Congress and the corruption-ridden nation of Suriname. Along the way they become embroiled in a complex web of political intrigue and enmeshed in the dangerous world of international weapons trafficking and regime change.
I’ll keep you posted on publication possibilities.
My thanks today go to the author and also Lori @ De Waal & Associates for the chance to review the book and for taking the time to answer my questions 🙂
David's Book Blurg 