In Fate Can Toss a Boomerang, a detective faces his own teenage trauma when he investigates the murder of a loathed gym teacher with a dark past. What was the idea, or spark, that first set off the need to write this book?

I attended several different schools growing up. Decades later, I began to hear horror stories from other former students, and they revealed that not one, not two, but three of the female teachers I had known in two different schools had targeted children for perverted purposes.

All of these women were surly, unpleasant, and seemed to deliberately try to make themselves look like “plain Janes.” Two of them had flown completely under the radar, and you couldn’t have picked them out of a crowd for any reason. The third one, on the other hand, had body language that would have been more suitable for an actress playing a stripper in the musical Gypsy, and she behaved seductively around everybody, kids, adults, boys, girls, just whoever was standing in front of her at the moment. This was a sight to behold, let me tell you! She was constantly, ahem, “shaking her maracas” right in everyone’s faces. I thought she was “crazy,” but I was just a child and couldn’t really add all of this up. Nobody was cognizant of child molesters back then, in the early 1970s, and somehow this bizarre situation never got addressed. I’ve always wondered, though, if I could see there was something extremely wrong with this pathetic excuse for a human being when I was just a kid, where were the adults who worked at that school? Were they blind as bats, or what? So when I heard it was even stranger than I had thought back then, and this creature had been trying to seduce little boys, that, and the stories I’d been hearing about the other two teachers as well, was what gave me the idea for writing this book. Everything I’d picked up on about all three of these creepy gals went into the story.

What were some of the emotional and moral guidelines you followed when developing your characters?

It’s a story of a contrast in opposites. I created the main character of Detective Knox Wanamaker as a guy with a very strong moral fiber who always tries to do the right thing. He fought off Petra the child molester when he was a boy, and she didn’t get her way with him. Naturally, she hated him for it. Now he’s stuck with the job of solving her murder, and even though he thinks his town is better off without Petra in it, he goes about fulfilling the excruciating assignment. In contrast, there’s Petra, who couldn’t care less about doing what’s right, and probably doesn’t even know the definition of the word. She’s all about taking whatever she wants for herself, and that includes children’s innocence. She made a mess of her life, and several other people’s lives besides, and now she’s the victim in a whopper of a murder case that falls in Knox’s lap. Some people think their job assignments are bad, but get a load of his!

How did you decide on the title of this novel?

Oh, that one was so much fun to come up with! I was brainstorming a title and zeroed in on the whole idea of “what goes around comes around.” Murder may never be the right course of action to take, yet there is some sense of poetic justice at play with this one, given what Petra was doing to children. It finally caught up with her. So, “Fate Can Toss A Boomerang!”

Can you give readers a glimpse inside the next book you are working on?

I’ve got two more in the works at the moment. The one that should be finished soon involves an American family that inherits property in Argentina during the 1960s, but they don’t realize the lovely mansion they’ve been handed had an outrageous former purpose. That mystery starts up from there!

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