January Justice

Book Synopsis

Reeling from his wife’s unsolved murder, Malcolm Cutter is just going through the motions as a chauffeur and bodyguard for Hollywood’s rich and famous.

Then a pair of Guatemalan tough guys offer him a job. It’s an open question whether they’re patriotic revolutionaries or vicious terrorists. Either way, Cutter doesn’t much care until he gets a bomb through his window, a gangland beating on the streets of L.A., and three bullets in the chest.

Now there’s another murder on Cutter’s Mind.

His own.


Quick Facts


Release Date: November 29th, 2012.

​Genre: Murder Mystery.​

Formats Available for Purchase: Paperback, Kindle, PDF

The Author


A master of profound suspense.

Athol Dickson's mystery, suspense, and literary novels have won three Christy Awards and an Audie Award. Suspense fans who enjoyed Athol's They Shall See God will love his latest novel, January Justice, the first installment in a new mystery series called The Malcolm Cutter Memoirs. The second and third novels in the series, Free Fall in February, and A March Murder, are coming in 2013.

Critics have favorably compared Athol's work to such diverse authors as Octavia Butler (Publisher's Weekly), Hermann Hesse (The New York Journal of Books) and Flannery O'Connor (The New York Times). Athol lives with his wife in southern California.

Find more about Athol Dickson

Why I Write Murder Mysteries

Recently I read a fascinating article in The New York Times about what may well be the first true murder mystery novel ever written. Conventional wisdom holds that the honor belongs to Wilkie Collins, who published The Moonstone in 1868, but the author of the Times piece discovered a novel written six years earlier called The Notting Hill Mystery, which he claims has all the ingredients of a modern murder mystery, and deserves the credit as Whodunit Number One.

The novel was published in serial fashion in a periodical, as was common in those days, and the author used a pseudonym. But apparently there’s good reason to believe The Notting Hill Mystery was written by Charles Warren Adams, one of the publishers of the periodical. Hopefully, Adams will one day receive the full credit for his invention of my favorite genre. It was a monumental achievement.

But intriguing though this is to a mystery aficionado like myself, the real meat of the article for me come almost as an aside near the end, where the Times piece says, “Adams was also notably religious, which points to an unexpected characteristic of the first detective novel: it’s profoundly moral. It asks not just how evil exists, but what is to be done about it. Detective novels, like sermons, can offer gratifyingly simple answers to those questions, or thoughtful and troubling ones.”

It seems to me we love a good murder mystery because in the end they’re the stories which touch most directly on death and justice. Death is the ultimate mystery of real life. What is it, exactly? Why must it exist? What should we do about it? Even the best of murder mysteries can’t answer those questions completely, but the best murder mysteries all explore the possibilities.

And when we start exploring death, something in us cries out that it isn’t right. We all long for justice, don’t we? That’s the other thing a good murder mystery delivers: a little imitation justice. The bad guy gets his in the end, or else someone has the guts to stand and rage against the second greatest mystery of all, which is why injustice exists in the first place.

I love that about murder mysteries. It’s why I’ve read, oh, about a thousand of them. And it’s why I’m writing “The Malcolm Cutter Memoirs.”


Excerpt


Chapter 48:

​​One of the strangest things about the city was the sudden way it disappeared around the edges. One minute you were down on Sunset Boulevard surrounded by glass and concrete, and the next thing you knew you were up on Mulholland Drive, alone in the rough country. From a high window or a rooftop almost anywhere in Los Angeles you could see the mountains, and there was always something ravenous up there looking down.

I was up among the hungry creatures, standing at the edge of a cliff, with Hollywood and Santa Monica far below me in the distance. One step forward and I would be in midair. I was looking down and wondering if Haley had considered how suddenly you could go from city to wilderness. Then I wondered if it was a distinction without a difference, if the city might be the wilderness and the wilderness the city, and maybe Los Angeles’s edges seemed to disappear so suddenly because there really was no separation between sidewalks and mountain paths, buildings and boulders. Up in the mountains or down in the city, either way the carnivores were in control.

I imagined Haley, out of her mind, running full speed off the cliff. I wondered what it had been like, that final second or two before she hit. Had she realized what was happening? Did she recognize the city lights below for what they were, or did she really think she was flying toward the stars? And did she think of me?

Stepping closer to the edge, I slid the toes of my shoes into the air. I looked down two hundred feet, toward the spot where she had broken on the rocks. I stood one inch from eternity and tried to imagine life without her. I could not summon up a single reason why I shouldn’t take that final step, except for one. I thought about the kind of animal who would drive someone to do what my wife had done. Predators like that were everywhere. I should know. I had trained for half my life to be one of them. I was hungry, looking down on the city. If I was going to live, the hunger would have to be enough, for now. But I would sink my teeth into him, sooner or later. I would do that for Haley, and for myself, and then maybe it would be my turn to see if I could fly.

I stepped back from the edge. – Chapter 1

I paused to look at Simon and Teru, wishing there were some way to avoid it. I said, “The village we went back to on that second day was Laui Kalay.”

Neither of them reacted at first.

Then Teru said, “Oh no.”

Simon rose and carried his teacup to a sink. I watched as he carefully washed out the cup with a soapy cloth. He rinsed the cup, then placed it on a wooden rack beside the sink. When that was done, he didn’t return to the table. He stood still, looking down into the sink.

Teru said, “You were there? When they cut off all those fingers and knocked out all those teeth? You were really there?”

I said, “The court-martial found me guilty.”

“But I remember that video like it was yesterday. That marine with the knife, chopping off the corpses’ fingers for their rings. The others breaking out dead people’s teeth for gold. All those marines cracking jokes. They must have showed it a thousand times on television.” Teru looked at me. “You weren’t in it.”

Still staring down into the sink, Simon said, “If memory serves, the sergeant in command was convicted of filming the unpleasantness with his cell phone, so of course he was not shown in the video.”

“Holy mother of God,” said Teru. “You’re that guy?” – Chapter 8

Olivia screamed again, and a vision overwhelmed my thoughts. Suddenly, instead of the shack with its glowing window, I saw Haley’s face contorted with terror in the darkness up above, Haley screaming at a mirror on the wall in her trailer, Haley screaming that she saw Satan, Haley screaming out for Jesus as she slammed her fists against the mirror, breaking it, bloodying her hands and yet slamming on and on. I heard the screams and saw Haley in her final moments and knew that what I saw wasn’t a madman’s fantasy but was instead my true and final memory of our last moments together.

I shook my head. I wiped rain from my eyes. I told myself to think of what was noble, good, and true. The vision faded, but the screams remained. I had to stop the screams this time. I started up the trail, and with my first step out into the open, a strange sense of peace descended. This was what I had been created to do. This was who I was and who I would continue to be in whatever time was left to me without Haley. It wasn’t about a death wish. On the contrary, life at last had regained meaning, even if the end of life was imminent. Climbing that path, knowing bullets might slam into me at any instant, I was happy for the first time since I lost my wife. I still had a purpose, after all. I was useful. It felt like I was going home.