It’s been a full decade since the first Charlie Davies book slid kicking and screaming into the world!
That makes it sound like I’m shooting for a metaphor about birth, but no – Charlie just really loves kicking and screaming.
I feel like I should have something Deep N Meaningful to say here, but I don’t. So instead, here’s the (very much subject to change) opening of Charlie Davies Mystery #14, Digging Up Problems.
“Do you want to talk about the dead body?”
“What? No. That’s not even on my list.” I really did have a list — Charlie’s Litany of Deep-Seated Issues and Small Grievances to Discuss in Therapy — and if Ricardo kept going off book, we were never going to get through it. “What I need to tell you about is the bitch at the post office with the leopard-print nails.”
“Let’s start with the corpse, then circle back to the post office.”
I frowned. “Or we could talk about my road rage. Or my regular rage. Or maybe my brother going missing, that’s always fun to mine for content.”
“Why are you avoiding talking about the body?”
“I’m not avoiding it. Blood. Viscera. Packing peanuts. The cold dead body is irrelevant. Now please help me prevent me from having a cold dead relationship with my big bro, OK?”
“I thought you and your brother got along well.”
“We do,” I admitted.
“Then maybe we should address the body.”
I sighed. He wasn’t going to let go of this. Ricardo was like a T-Rex with a bone. Or a T-Rex made entirely of bones – you had to dig deep if you wanted him to move out of this area any time soon.
“It wasn’t a body,” I told him. “It was pretty much just a head.”
“Pretty much?”
I picked at a bit of fluff on the couch. “There was some neck in there too.”
“OK. Tell me all about it.”
I sighed. “No one else I’ve ever met would want to know this much detail about the time I was sent a dead guy’s head in a box.”
Ricardo smiled. “I think that’s probably untrue. Pretty sure everyone would want more detail about that.”
“I guess you have a point.” I sighed again, more dramatically this time. “Fine. It all started with a dinosaur.”
I hope you enjoyed it! 🦖 This is literally all I’ve written of the book so far, so there’s a good chance I’ll heavily edit or delete it entirely when I actually start writing the book in earnest, but I guess we’ll see, haha.
And while we’re looking ahead –
Here’s a little teaser for what’s coming up in KautsVille:
Some old things getting a new look, some entirely new things, and some that are kind of half and half… Can you tell which is which? (It’s hard for me to know if it’s super obvious or not at all.)
Thank you for an awesome decade filled with ridiculous fun, pigs and mayonnaise. 🐽
Well, maybe not so much that last one. 😉
xx