by Sasscer Hill
Author of the Nikki Latrelle mysteries
When I heard a recording of Amanda Berry’s desperate 911 plea for help, I wept for this girl who was abducted, torn from her family, and abused for ten years.
I’ve watched every episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, I saw the 2005 documentary Human Trafficking, I wrote The Sea Horse Trade, a just released novel where underage girls are abducted and forced into the sex trade, so I think I’m pretty tough.
Yeah, right. I heard Amanda’s voice pleading with the dispatcher to have the cops save her "before he comes back,” and I lost it.
Those words, “before he comes back,” are laden with terror, with evil, and with desperation. These are the kinds of words authors hope to use in exactly the right place at exactly the right time to grab their readers with the kind of emotion I felt listening to Amanda’s plea.
The idea of female abduction and slavery has always fascinated and horrified me. How could I weave the subject into a story about my jockey Nikki Latrelle?
As a breeder, owner, and avid fan of race horses, I had occasion to visit Gulfstream Park racetrack in Hallandale Beach, on the coast between Fort Lauderdale and Miami. I spent time at the track, toured Fort Lauderdale and Miami and saw the glitz, the glamour, the sex, the horses, and the money. A man could work at a desk for forty years and not earn a fraction of what it would cost to buy the immense yachts and huge mansions I saw there. Who owns something this valuable? Where does the money come from?
One morning, I got up early and walked down to the beach. A cold wind blew off the sea. Far, far out on the horizon, I saw a huge container ship shrouded in mist. It was creepy, like seeing a ghost on the water. The white caps were roiling, and a keen awareness of the depth of the water, the distance to the yacht, and the ice cold spray made me wonder how anyone could possibly feel safe out there on the ocean.
What if Nikki Latrelle was working the January meet at Gulfstream? What if her oldest friend’s daughter was missing, a girl Nikki has never met? What if on that first night in Hallandale Beach a girl is shot dead at Nikki’s feet? The story all came together. What a perfect safe harbor a city like Fort Lauderdale would be to spawn the trade of human trafficking.
I had to write this story.
I flew home to Maryland and rented the documentary, Human Trafficking. It was appalling, but it was fascinating. It was shocking, but it was engaging. It was disgusting, but it was believable. More than ever, I wanted to write my story, so I did.
I hope you will take The Sea Horse Trade for a ride! You can hear me read the first chapter on my Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/SasscerHill. You don’t have to be a member of Facebook to go to this page. Just click the link and leave me a note!
Learn more about Sasscer and her books at http://www.sasscerhill.blogspot.com/.
Sasscer HillHorse racing is my inspiration – the risk, the beauty, the speed, the endless opportunities for skulduggery, and the extraordinary “Upstairs Downstairs” quality of the characters who inhabit the life. 
Picture the winner’s circle: a poverty-level groom holds a hundred-thousand-dollar horse for a trainer who may be living large, or only hand-to-mouth. With them stands the rich or possibly almost-broke-owner who may also be a white-collar-crook. Or he might enjoy a golden life of lofty social status. I’ve seen them all.
Following the Triple Crown trail three years ago, I was fascinated by the stories surrounding Derby favorite, Recapture the Glory. The horse was owned by wealthy New Orleans Ford dealer Ronnie Lemarque, a showman who liked to sing and dance.
Back In 1988, Lemarque and his trainer, Louis Roussel, came close to winning the Triple Crown with a horse named Risen Star who won two legs of the famous series. When the horse annihilated his Preakness competition, Lemarque snatched the microphone from the TV host and belted out, “Way Down Yonder in New Orleans.” There was no stopping him.
Twenty years later Roussel and Lemarque got their hands on another talented colt, naming him “Recapture the Glory.”
In the middle of the fanfare surrounding this 2008 comeback, Lemarque’s wife hired a hit man to murder her husband, and did it while under the microscope of the sports paparazzi. 
Maybe she was tired of him singing. Maybe LeMarque was two-timing her. Whatever the reason, the press crawled over this story like bees on a beignet.
Watch Lemarque sing and dance.
In the end, the horse failed to win the crown, the murder plot was discovered in time, and the wife was convicted and imprisoned. It’s hard to make up a plot better than this!
But since I have to try, here is how I might use a memory from the track and morph it into a murder mystery.
One day at Laurel Park racetrack, the stubborn child in me was determined to catch a brown hen that pecked for grain outside my horse’s stall. 
A number of trainers raise hens in their barns at Laurel, and I’ve been fond of chickens since I kept them as a child on the family farm.
After chasing the hen into an empty stall, I asked a buddy to close the top and bottom doors so I could catch the hen before she escaped. I caught the bird, stroked her smooth feathers, and thoroughly enjoyed myself, just like a six-year-old.
Of course, I couldn’t stand around holding a
chicken all day, so I pushed against the doors and discovered my buddy had fastened the latches on the outside. I called out and waited for him to come back. He didn’t. After a while, still holding the chicken under one arm, I stuck my hand through a hole between the doors where some anxious racer had gnawed the wood. I waved and yelled for someone to come and let me out.
A woman I’d never seen before did. She opened the door and said, “What are you doing in there with that chicken?”
But suppose I’d been in there with a dead body? Or suppose a man with a long serrated knife had opened the door. What then? What would my protagonist Nikki do? No doubt Nikki would launch the hen, flapping and squawking into the face of the man with the knife, then run for her life. But who was this man, she’d ask. Why did he carry that wicked knife? Hadn’t the wife of a trainer been knifed to death some months back? And a mystery story begins.
I've never wanted to write the great American novel. I believe my job is to entertain with stories about chasing a dream, fighting the odds, and helping the helpless. I want to create a world that’s a bit scary, sometimes funny, always informative, and a reliable destination for escape.
Photos: Sasscer Hill; Sasscer, pretending to live large with racehorse owner George Strawbridge and his hall of fame trainer, Jonathan Sheppard. Keeneland races, Kentucky, October 2010; Full Mortality; Sasscer living it real on her Maryland farm in January, 2011.
Sasscer Hill lives on a Maryland farm and has bred racehorses for many years. A rider and winner in amateur steeplechase events, she is author of the Agatha Best First Novel nominee, FULL MORTALITY. Several of her short stories appear in the Chesapeake Crimes anthology series, and her articles have appeared in numerous magazines.
Sandra Parshall
John Betancourt’s Wildside Press is hundreds of miles from New York, but from his vantage point in Bethesda, Maryland, he has a clear vision of what’s happening in publishing and what the future holds. His wide-ranging talk at a recent meeting of the Sisters in Crime Chesapeake Chapter had me furiously scribbling notes so I could share his comments with PDD’s readers.
Betancourt is a successful science fiction author of many short 
stories and about 40 novels. He and his wife Kim started Wildside Press in 1989 to publish speculative fiction, but it has grown over the years and now publishes mysteries (including my friend Sasscer Hill’s first book, Full Mortality, out in May) as well as nonfiction, e-books and magazines. One of the company’s imprints, Juno Books, became a co-publishing venture with Simon & Schuster as of January 2009, with an emphasis on dynamic female protagonists in contemporary/urban fantasy/paranormal fiction. Authors like Carole Nelson Douglas are publishing with Juno. One of the imprint’s budding stars is Washington area writer Maria Lima, who began with an obscure small press but moved to Juno after Betancourt read her first book and fell in love with her captivating style and voice.
He came to our meeting to present the chapter’s new anthology, Chesapeake Crimes: They Had It Comin’, which Wildside is publishing. The anthology is a trade paperback, one of the formats that Betancourt believes will replace mass market paperbacks. “I’d like to see mass market paperbacks go away,” he said, pointing out the generally low quality of the paper and binding used in the books. He believes e-books will replace a lot of the print book market within a few years and could become the favored way to introduce new writers. He predicts that e-books will soon be making more money than mass market paperbacks. For print, trade paperbacks and hardcovers are of higher quality, last longer, and earn more money per copy for both the author and the publisher.
Online publishing, he believes, can be a good way for beginners to attract attention and break in. “Online publishing is your friend,” he said in answer to a chapter member’s question. “Even if it doesn’t pay, it can get attention for your writing.”
The inevitable questions about finding an agent led Betancourt to tell his own career story. He has sold his books himself, then hired agents to negotiate his contracts. He doesn’t believe agents are particularly good at selling books because of their limited contacts and their tendency to give up quickly. However, with big publishers that accept submissions only through agents, writers have no choice but to use them from the start. He advised meeting personally with an agent before signing with him or her. A personal meeting at a conference or workshop is the best way to find an agent, preferable to cold querying. Be at your best for such a meeting, he said. “Make them want to know about you and your writing. Be outgoing, funny, charming.” Sell yourself and you’ll make the agent eager to sell your work.
Publishers have become frighteningly quick to drop writers these days, Betancourt pointed out, so after signing with a publisher, you have to be pleasant to work with, or you might discover that you’re replaceable. He recalled a bestselling science fiction author of Star Trek novels who phoned her editor several times a week for lengthy conversations. The writer’s contract was dropped. The moral of the story: “Don’t piss off your editor.”
The internet offers a lot of opportunities for self-promotion, Betancourt said, but a heavy-handed me-me-me approach will turn off potential readers. Don’t plaster the internet with self-promotion and “don’t push yourself as a writer” on internet groups, he advised. “Be interesting, be entertaining, contribute something.” Nobody will read a blog that is about nothing but the writer and her new book, and if the only time you show up in an internet group is when you have something to sell, you won’t win over any readers.
A few other bits of Betancourt advice culled from my notes:
Make sure people remember you and your books. Memorable titles and memorable author names are always a plus. Betancourt advised Lynda Hill to use her middle name, Sasscer, for writing. He advised Maria Y. Lima to drop the middle initial to make her name flow more easily off the tongue. Change the spelling of your name if that will make it stand out.
Try to avoid selling the paperback rights to the same company that brings out your hardcovers. You’ll get more money by going elsewhere.
Never let an editor keep anything for more than three months. Always hold editors to the time limits they give in their guidelines or on their websites.
Try writing intelligent, thoughtful online reviews of other people’s books as a form of self-promotion. If readers respect your opinions, they’ll check out your writing.
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