A Note From Sandra

You know those iconic photographs that capture and define an event? The Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima. The sailor kissing the nurse on V-E Day. The Vietnamese girl running from raining napalm. The fireman carrying the child’s body from the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City.

Those images, and others, are unalike in every regard except one: they rocked the world.

But what about the individuals captured in them? Did the photograph rock their world? Was the impact on them as everlasting as the impact made on the world?

Asking myself those questions resulted in SEEING RED.

John Trapper was only eleven years old when his father, “The Major,” led a group of injured people from the bombed Pegasus Hotel in downtown Dallas. The Major’s act of heroism was immortalized in a photograph, and overnight he became a celebrity. His future was sealed.

But so was Trapper’s, and he’d had no choice in the matter.

That’s what I began with. I couldn’t wait to see what happened.

Act One. Scene One: Trapper, now in his mid-thirties, his life a train wreck, is awakened from sleeping off a massive hangover by a knock on his office door. Enter Kerra Bailey, television journalist. She announces to Trapper that she’s determined to interview The Major about the Pegasus Hotel bombing on its upcoming twenty-fifth anniversary, which is six days away. She has come to ask for Trapper’s intercession with his famous – and estranged — father.

Fat chance. Trapper tells her in no uncertain terms that no such interview is gonna happen. Ever. Period. “Have a nice life.”

But Kerra is as headstrong as he, and, by the time she swans out of his office confident that she’ll get that interview, Trapper is (You guessed it!)…SEEING RED.

So, at the end of the first scene, I had a title, characters at cross purposes, sexual chemistry despite the fact that Kerra had looked like she’d stepped out of a bandbox, while Trapper… well, “. . .a pile of dog shit had nothing on him.”

I also had the first ticking clock in the story – six days. At this point, a reader’s fair guess is that within that six days all hell will break loose.

It was a good start, but I was left with several key questions that had me scratching my head.

Why had The Major, who had basked in the glow of worldwide fame, quit cold turkey and gone into seclusion three years ago?

Why was Trapper so opposed to Kerra’s proposed interview with The Major?

Why had Trapper been fired from the ATF?

Wait! What? Trapper had been fired from the ATF, the federal agency that investigates bombings?

That was a big “WHY?”

Gradually, the answers to those questions were revealed to me.

But the one vital thing I didn’t have was the thread that would pull the whole thing together. And then, finally, I did. One afternoon while driving home after picking up carry-out barbecue for dinner, Kerra told me her secret. There, behind the steering wheel of my car, I had that ah-ha moment, that instant of shivery realization that I had not just an idea, but a story.

Trapper is wily and unpredictable, keeping everyone – especially this shocked novelist – off kilter. But Kerra trusts his instincts and his conviction. She puts her career, and life, on the line as she and Trapper seek to expose an evil mastermind and to find answers to the questions that have bedeviled Trapper for years. He must get to the truth…even if it kills him.