Book: Trail of Evil
DH: Janson, after breaking onto the crime fiction scene with your first novel The Chemist, what challenges did you face as a writer with your follow up book?
JM: Hi Derrick. Yes. Good question. And it’s one every writer faces. The Chemist was very well received and the reviews were fabulous. When it won first place in the Sharp Writ international fiction contest, that was very exciting. So the challenge of a second book—or follow up—was to decide if I was going to go a different route completely with Detective Cale Van Waring, or somehow continue the story line from the first book.
DH: And you decided to feature Cale again, right?
JM: Yes. The Chemist had left open a perfect story line to pursue a second book: that of the still missing pair of kidnapped victims. This plot hole was never resolved, and I had done so purposely. So I decided that being the dogged detective Cale is, it would make perfect sense for him to pursue any leads he had to see if he could locate them.
DH: Thus the Trail of Evil. Right?
JM: Right. Only we immediately ran into a huge logistics problem. The method devised by the human traffickers was to transport their victims out of the country. So both Green Bay girls were long gone. And there’s no way the Green Bay PD can afford to send one of it’s detectives off on a search and rescue adventure of this magnitude. The budget wouldn’t allow it.
DH: But a suspended detective? That’s another matter?
JM: It was a convenient way to get Cale off on the pursuit trail. Albeit on his own dime. But the problem is he’s only suspended for one week. So the timeline is tight, and flying to Europe, locating the missing girls, dealing with some very evil bad guys, it all creates a huge amount of stress on Cale Van Waring—especially with the clock ticking down.
DH: Not to mention his situation in dealing with Maggie. I’d think being pregnant with—potentially—someone else’s baby, would add just a pinch of additional stress to anyone?
JM: Yes. And while Cale’s away on the case, no less. He gets blindsided by this. On top of everything else, it adds an even greater degree of pressure on a personal level.
DH: All right. One more question. In The Chemist, Cale had to face down Tobias Crenshaw, who is a pretty nasty serial abductor. How do the bad guy human traffickers in Trail of Evil measure up? On the bad guy scale, I mean?
JM: We certainly like our bad guys, don‘t we? (laughs) Well, we’ve got a sociopath in Kinsella, a thuggish brute whom Cale is tracking. Then we’ve got a sadistic pervert in Prince Mir Al-Sadar—he’s the guy who likes to collect females as trophies for his private harem. Then finally Tazeki Mabutu, a powerful witch doctor—one who doesn’t seem to care much for Cale at all. I think that combined they provide a pretty formidable trio.
DH: Not to mention that they’re all cannibals, right?
JM: Yes. Just a minor point to their winning personalities. They do have slightly exotic tastes in nutrition, so it seems.
DH: And on that note, we’re out of time Janson. Just in time for lunch, I might add.
JM: And after that last note, Derrick, all things considered, I’d consider you order a nice chef’s salad.
