ASKING FOR TROUBLE is June’s book of the month. This is my new collection of crime stories. The paperback just came out the other week.
ASKING FOR TROUBLE isn’t just a title but also a theme that runs through the stories. The characters have all courted disaster. Some will live and learn from the experience while other won’t. Hopefully, the book’s back jacket copy will give you a feel for what I mean.
The road to crime begins with a single decision—the wrong one. Not every decision belongs to the criminally minded. Some belong to the ill-informed, the weak and the plain unlucky. In these tales, trouble isn’t an indiscriminate force of nature. It’s a manmade occurrence that comes when called upon.
In these stories, you’ll find Richard who is so tired of supporting his deadbeat in-laws that he’s going to cut themm out of his life—for good. Jamie Lassen is just Protecting The Innocent when he tells Chris Forbes to stop dating his sister. A simple Fender Bender with a drug dealer’s car put Todd in hock with the mob and the kingpin makes Todd responsible for a much larger debt. The Taskmasters picked Matt out just as the right time. Tired of his dead-end life, he was looking for someone to turn his life around.
These tales and others prove that ASKING FOR TROUBLE is a case of good intentions gone bad and bad intentions gone worse.
The book features the CWA Dagger Award nominated, Protecting The Innocent.
Praise for the book:
“Wood’s ability to spin the commonplace into the quirky and then into the deadly puts me in mind of Roald Dahl’s gift for the same.”
— The Drowning Machine
In the coming weeks, I’ll talk about why short stories mean so much me and how the collection’s theme plays into the stories. In the meantime, you can read one of the stories from the book here.
