Rick Soper's Blog - Posts Tagged "the-rock-star"

Jon Stevens will be the central character in many of my books and stories. Stevens is an all star FBI agent who has specialized in serial killers and unsolvable crimes like The Bainbridge Killings, The X-Spot murders, The Casino Killer, The Internet King, The Central Valley Sniper, and The Stoner. But as Stevens enters in to the book The Rock Star he's been severely damaged. In taking down The Stoner Stevens had his head bashed in and the experience has left him in doubt of his own skills and instincts. But he's sick of rehab and waiting, so he lies his way back into the field, and once he gets there he finds himself lost in his own anger, bad dreams, and questions about his sanity. Stevens is a big man, who's used to being the leader in an investigation, who's used to intimidating others, but being hurt by the Stoner has bruised his confidence, and he needs to be at the top of his game to find the killer who left his teenage female victim with her heart cut out and her body on fire on an altar in a beach in Carmel, California, because Stevens is sure that this won't be the killers last victim.

The entire idea of the Rock Star came from one simple question, "How would your life change if you saved a Rock Star from drowning?" Jake Martin is the first character you meet in the book because he was always that man who saved the Rock Star from drowning, the man who gets thrown into a world he doesn't understand, and can't control. In some ways I was shooting for what Hitchcock did in a lot of his movies by taking an ordinary man and throwing him into an unordinary situation to see how he would react. But Jake to me is a little more than your average ordinary man. You get hint of his history and his tragedies right up front, but not full explanations. I did this purposely so you'll try to fill in the blank, and be either happy with yourself at being right later, or mad at me for not doing what you thought I should. You should know that I absolutely hate books that I pick up and in the first few pages I'm already guessing the ending. If that happens then the book is just a chore of getting to the point of proving myself correct, and you can rest assured that if I put myself through that experience with any author I'm probably never coming back to that author again. Hopefully you can't guess the ending to the Rock Star at the beginning, and if you do, my guess is you'll be wrong, and hopefully you'll be surprised when you get there. What happened to Jake, and what will happen to him, is a closely guarded secret, that I hope you'll stay around to read about. But don't worry before we get to that point I'll come up with a few things to keep you entertained.