BIOGRAPHY:
Kevin Flynn’s non-fiction book “Relentless Pursuit” was an Edgar Award nominee. He is a life-long resident of the Washington, D.C. area, and served as a violent crime prosecutor in the city for more than 30 years. “Rock Creek” is his first novel. He lives with his wife Patrice in Northern Virginia; their two children, Connor and Megan, are lawyers living in New York City.

AUTHOR'S PERSONAL STATEMENT ABOUT "ROCK CREEK":
ROCK CREEK is a murder mystery interwoven with a portrait of Washington D.C. at a time that has been largely overlooked in the popular imagination. From the late 1940’s to the early 1950’s, the nation’s capital was just coming into its own as the dominant seat of power in the post-WWII “free world.” It was also st BIOGRAPHY:
Kevin Flynn’s non-fiction book “Relentless Pursuit” was an Edgar Award nominee. He is a life-long resident of the Washington, D.C. area, and served as a violent crime prosecutor in the city for more than 30 years. “Rock Creek” is his first novel. He lives with his wife Patrice in Northern Virginia; their two children, Connor and Megan, are lawyers living in New York City.

AUTHOR'S PERSONAL STATEMENT ABOUT "ROCK CREEK":
ROCK CREEK is a murder mystery interwoven with a portrait of Washington D.C. at a time that has been largely overlooked in the popular imagination. From the late 1940’s to the early 1950’s, the nation’s capital was just coming into its own as the dominant seat of power in the post-WWII “free world.” It was also still a small town, where the government existed separate and apart from the ordinary working people, mostly Black, who were the majority population. For most in D.C. and throughout the country, the emotional toll of the war was still a significant factor in personal and public life – sometimes overtly, mostly not.

I was born in D.C. into a family whose roots ran deep there. The city of my youth was divided into two parts: political and small town. And so it is still.

As a child, I had a foot in each part: in the political, through my mother, who’d worked on Capitol Hill for years, and in the small town, through everything else I saw and knew. As an adult, my connection to the city has been intensely forged. For over 35 years I handled D.C. violent crime cases as a prosecutor: no politics, all small town.

Several years ago, a book I wrote about one of my cases was published. Much of the book was about the relationship I developed with the Black family whose mother and daughter were the victims of a horrific murder. Their roots in D.C. were as deep as mine, and for a time our families became intertwined in wonderful ways.

ROCK CREEK rose from that book and experience. A friend asked what my next book would be: “Surely,” he said, “you’ve worked on a high-profile case that would be a natural basis for the next one.” In fact, I’d worked on a case that had drawn national attention. A government intern had been slain in D.C., her body found in Rock Creek Park. A congressman, her former lover, was a suspect.

The catch was that I couldn’t write about it. The case wasn’t in court yet. All the details of our investigation were confidential.

I came to realize that if I took the basic facts of the case and reset it in the post-war period as fiction, I had an opportunity to write a far richer story: a better whodunit with more distinctive characters and a much more original, revelatory account of the city and its people that I knew so well. This was my chance to write a detailed, unsentimental portrait of the famous, flawed city that I’ve long loved across its many cultures, capturing it at the time when it was the most fraught: after the war and before the supposed “happy days” of the Eisenhower years.

D.C. might be the capital of the free world, but in those days it was also a small, segregated town riddled with casual and institutional racism – a distant mirror, in some meaningful ways, for all of us today.

Rock Creek Park – the geographical and spiritual center of this book – runs south to north on a line that starts a few miles from the White House and ends past the city limits. It’s a vast expanse of beautiful wilderness, then as now a favored haven for locals, and one of the largest urban parks in the world. In the period of this novel, the Park had a dark side: it divided lower class Blacks on its east side from upper class Whites on its west, to the point where Blacks were arrested for straying past its western edge.

And, it had a strange history of being a dumping ground for randomly murdered women.

The present-day mysterious murder of a compelling and enigmatic victim gave me a plot, and the detective on this unlikely fictional case became ...more

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Average rating: 3.77 · 228 ratings · 42 reviews · 2 distinct works • Similar authors

	Relentless Pursuit: A True Story of Family, Murder, and the Prosecutor Who Wouldn't Quit 3.81 avg rating — 183 ratings — published 2007 — 11 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Rock Creek 3.62 avg rating — 45 ratings — published 2024 — 5 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

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Kevin Flynn's Blog: Trial by Writing

Trial by Writing Part 10

Another in a series of posts about the intersections between the art of trial lawyering — which I performed, so to speak, for 35 years — and the art of writing.

This is all about a skill that both art forms have in common: being able to plan backwards. It’s not a skill that’s commonly considered to be essential to either. In fact, it’s essential to both.

As a trial lawyer I was a prosecutor, which m Read more of this blog post »

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Published on November 14, 2024 10:23

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Kevin Flynn wrote a new blog post Trial by Writing Part 10 Another in a series of posts about the intersections between the art of trial lawyering — which I performed, so to speak, for 35 years — and the art o Read more of this blog post »
Nov 14, 2024 10:23AM · like

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