HEAT FROM ANOTHER SUN

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SYNOPSIS

“…determination to confront his own potential for evil as he pursues the evil of others…”

“Nothing on earth can equal the sensation and excitement of violence. The energy it generates is like a fabulous heat from another sun, and the human race is attracted to it like the proverbial moth to the flame.”

Police detective Stuart Haydon returns in another suspenseful, psychologically-charged mystery, that unravels a story of murder and corruption involving both the superrich and the desperately poor during Houston’s boom years of the 1980’s.

When a motion-picture cameraman is found murdered in the darkroom of a Houston ad agency, Stuart Haydon begins an investigation that ultimately brings him face to face with the darkest side of human nature. Bit by bit, clue by clue, Haydon comes closer to what his mounting suspicions can only begin to imagine. As the case progresses, the story twists and coils its way from a luxurious mansion in the center of a posh estate, to the seamiest parts of the city’s gritty ship channel where an abandoned warehouse gives up its gruesome secrets: astonishing evidence of appalling crimes.  

At the heart of all this is a reclusive business magnate—a man as mercurial in his personal life as he is in his business dealings. Josef Roeg has enormous wealth and takes for granted the power that comes with it. Obsessed by a perverse passion, Roeg indulges every whim his appetite demands, and he will go to any lengths to satisfy it. He denies himself nothing, not even when his desires require everything of others—even their lives.

For Stuart Haydon the Roeg investigation is further complicated by the fact that Haydon himself has a secret about violence that he has never shared with anyone. He has hidden certain facts about his own psychological struggles with the mysteries of violence that directly affect why he continues to be a homicide detective. And why he continues to turn down the many promotions that the Houston Police Department has offered him over the years. Haydon’s singular determination to confront his own complex potential for evil while he pursues the evil in others pulls him dangerously closer to the  verge of his emotional breaking point.

AUTHOR’S COMMENTS

“…I was stunned by the irresistible attraction to violence so deeply embedded in human nature.”

When I first conceived of the Stuart Haydon novels, I knew nothing about the life of a homicide detective. I hadn’t even read any mystery novels. I quickly plunged into a regimen of reading and research, and was fortunate enough to establish a working relationship with the Houston Homicide Division that lasted, off and on, for nearly two decades.

But I wasn’t prepared for the intensity of violence I encountered in my research. I was stunned by my initial education in the real world of real homicide, with the grisly textures of the crime scenes, with the sometimes dumfounding complexities of the investigations, and with what I was discovering about the irresistible attraction to violence so deeply embedded in human nature. This novel was intended to explore that universal fascination.

The idea for this story came to me first as a fragment of imagined dialogue in which one character speaks to another about violence, saying that it generates an energy so intense that it was like the “heat from another sun”. That bit of dialogue was the spark that set the fire. It wasn’t much; but I knew instantly that I had my title, and the thematic framework for my next novel.