Last week I did a book report on Downfall. Of the two books I needed revisit, that one was published first. Turns out, I’m not only an IOW—In-Order Writer. I’m also an IOR—In-order Reader.

It was interesting to notice that in Downfall, Joanna is both running for re-election and expecting a baby. In some cases a period of years may pass between books. In this instance, it’s only a matter of weeks. The baby in question, Eleanor Sage Dixon, decides to make an early entrance into the world during the course of an election night party and before the vote count is complete.

Throughout the story it amused me that a number of people were willing to make bets about Joanna’s ability to make it all the way to the end of her maternity leave without going back to the job. FYI—she definitely flunks out of maternity leave long before it’s over.

This is an ugly case where a monster, living in the wilds of the San Bernardino Valley in southeastern Arizona, kidnaps young women and holds them prisoner in an Arizona ghost town where he tortures them them physically and sexually before doing away with them once he’s finished. Much of the story is spent with one of those unfortunate girls. We see Latisha Marcum’s history—a challenging childhood, a rebellious adolescence, her kidnapping, the agonizing months of captivity that followed, and her eventual escape and subsequent rescue.

Did the story give me goosebumps? Yes, several times. Not surprisingly, one of those came when, after months of being forced to eat dog kibble, she takes that first heavenly taste of her rescuing deputy’s meatloaf sandwich. A second one came along Joanna was reading her father’s handwritten journals, enabling her to have a better understanding of both her now-deceased parents. A third occurred when, in the after of Latisha’s rescue, she learns that even more unidentified remains have been found on the bad guy’s property. Latisha tells Joanna that she would like to pray for those newly discovered victims, but she can’t because she doesn’t know their names. At that point Joanna replies, “Go ahead and pray for them anyway. You may not know who they are, but God does.” That one gave me goosebumps just now when I wrote it down again.

But the next thing that really struck me came from something else entirely, but before I tell you about it, we need to take a look back. Sometimes my books have amazing way of crossing paths with real life. For instance, Beaumont #7, Dismissed with Prejudice, was published in 1989. In that book the murder weapon was a samurai sword brought to the US as a souvenir from war-torn Japan after World War II. Weeks after the book was published a group of Japanese businessmen set up shop in a local hotel lobby in order to buy-back samurai swords that had ended up in the US and return them to Japan. That coincidence has stayed with me ever since.

In 2018 the use of familial DNA became headline news when it was used to bring down the Golden State Killer who had spent decades eluding arrest in numerous cases of rape and murder. But in an Ali book called Moving Target, written in 2013 and published in 2014, one of Ali’s associates helped her do the same thing with yet another long-unsolved case. You maybe be wondering, how in the world did a Liberal Arts major’s mind peer into the future and see that coming? I’m not sure about that one, but I can tell you the origin of my now beloved AI character, Frigg, in the Ali books.

Sometime in 2014, while I was sitting here in my writing chair and minding my own business, Bill, my retired electronics engineer husband who was seated next to me remarked, “You know, AI is pretty interesting. You should write a book with an AI in it.” I looked at him in utter astonishment and said. “Are you talking to me? I’m the liberal arts major in the family.” But Bill is nothing if not persistent, and he kept passing me one article after another about the emergence of AI.

I’m not at all tech-minded; I am a storyteller. All that scientific information went in one ear, passed through what Bill refers to as the blender inside my head, and came out through my keyboard fingertips as a character named Frigg. She’s an AI, of course. Unfortunately, the brilliant computer scientist who created her was also a wanna be serial killer, and he expected his AI to serve as his partner in crime. To that end, he made sure all her deep learning was aimed at teaching her to do bad stuff—all kinds of illegal black-hat hacker activities—and it turns out she was pretty damned good at doing all of it. Once Frigg’s creator was out of the picture and with her under new management, she’s gradually learning to “color inside the lines.”

She made her first appearance in an Ali book called Man Overboard which was published in 2017. At the time, discussions about AI weren’t nearly as widespread as they are now. I expected to get a lot of blowback from the computer science world about Frigg, but that never materialized, because it turns out I was on the right track. My fictional AI is far closer to the current reality than I ever expected. So although I don’t write science fiction, I somehow seem to be able to write predictive fiction.

Unfortunately, at the moment, there are plenty of people out there using BAD AIs. Unfortunately I have some experience with those as well.

The first instance was an email from the organizer of a UK reading club, the Tea and Crumpets Reading Society, which turned up last fall. The writer began by praising my work and saying, for a small feel, she would introduce me to thousands of readers, thus providing enough positive reviews for me to be listed on the first page of Google. After explaining that it’s illegal to pay for positive reviews, I offered to do a zoom with her readers at no charge. That didn’t happen because the bottom line was money.

Since then I’ve heard from countless so-called reading clubs. They generally start out by saying they hope I’m having a pleasant day. They go one to heap praise on one of my books—usually one of my older titles—and end by saying that, for “a small fee,” they’ll be happy to connect me with their readers and all those “positive reviews.” I no longer explain that buying reviews isn’t my thing. I simply hit my delete key before bothering to finish that first sentence.

This past week, however, I received an email from a guy claiming to be a Scottish horror writer letting me know he’d just read The Girl form Devil’s Lake, and he thought my way of mixing the police procedural part of the story with Joanna’s personal life was downright masterful. There was no bookclub involved and no mention of first page placement on Google, either. Thinking this was legit and that I was writing to someone, writer to writer, I responded to that first note and several more. He mentioned that early in his career he had really struggled but that he’d found the right promotional people and they’d really helped him.

I’m a people person. After a few exchanges I realized he wasn’t sharing anything personal. That’s when I Googled him. His books are on sale all right, but at Etsy, not on Amazon. At that point he wanted to know if I’d like to be connected to the people who had helped him to see if they could help me. There was still no request for money, but he offered to let them know what kind of help I needed. I told him I wanted to contact the people involved myself to find out exactly what they had to offer. At that point, he sent me an email address. I googled the person’s name. Guess what I got? An obituary!!!

He sent me another email yesterday, but since the Gods of Apple have given me a delete key, I used it and will continue to do so. I haven’t bothered to tip him off about what clued me in that he was phony because I’m afraid the people behind it will regroup, change tactics, and use those on someone else. By the way, this week I also joined a class action lawsuit against a company named Anthropic. The case has been filed and won on behalf of thousands of writers whose books have been scanned and read into an AI in order to mimic them. It turns out that 68 of my works—novels, short stories, and novellas—have been pirated in that fashion.

As I said, Frigg, my fictional AI, is now under new management and doing what she does for good rather than evil, but I can tell you from personal experience that bad AIs are out there and waiting to scam the unsuspecting. Just this week, I heard about a group of people who were all patients of the same dentist. While the dentist was on vacation, his patients’ information was hacked, and they all received emails saying the dentist had been robbed—please send money. Fortunately none of them did. I’ve also heard from grandmothers who have been scammed by someone claiming to be their grandchild needing to be bailed out of a jam. In other words, as Evie would say, “Look before you leap.”

Okay, I’m way off topic here. Back to Field of Bones. I loved the scene at the end of the book where Butch Dixon’s editor calls to let him know that his newest novel, Just the Facts, has made the NYTimes list. Those phone calls, typically made on Wednesday afternoons or ini the early evening, can be pretty up-lifting. My first one of those came in 1998 for Joanna # 5, Skeleton Canyon. Bill and I were on a month long Rick Steve’s tour of France, and the call came in as we checked into our hotel on the Dordogne in the south of France. That night at dinner we sprang for champagne all around.

But yes, my tour through those two older books has given me characters I can use to people the next Joanna story. The novel doesn’t have a name yet, or even a solid plot line, so I’m not sure what they’ll be doing in the story, but I’m pretty sure they’ll be there.

Sounds like it’s time to stop writing a blog and start writing a book.