Hard Case Crime: The Max Read Online Free PDF

Nothing too dark or too scary. Her heroine, McKenna Ford, was a lovely combination of sensitivity and street smarts.
    But not according to Kirkus , which called her last book, “Tired, unoriginal and pointless. Read Megan Abbott for the real deal.”
    Jesus, she hated Megan Abbott and Alison Gaylin. Not only did the guys love them but they got rave reviews. Don’t get her started on female mystery writers, except for Laura of course. Hey, that blurb might still happen.
    Her agent ran her rapidly through lunch, then said, with no gentle breaking in, “You’re screwed.”
    Lunch that.
    He added, “SMP’s dropping you.” Then asked, “You ever try true crime?”
    What? She was an artist. She couldn’t slum andwrite non-fiction. She was going to just say, fuck it, it wasn’t for her. If she couldn’t write mystery fiction she’d rather go back to the telemarketing cubicle.
    But then her agent told her about the Max Fisher story and something sparked. She thought, Hello? This could be a goldmine; it was like the book was already written. She couldn’t believe Sebastian Junger hadn’t beaten her to it. Could The... A.X. be her ticket all the way to the top? Or, well, at least back to the middle.
    As usual, she got ahead of herself. She imagined winning next year’s Edgar Award for best true crime book, with her old editor sitting in the audience watching, thinking about the one that got away. Maybe Laura herself would present the award. Though they’d only spoken that one time, at the bar at the Left Coast Crime convention in El Paso, and let’s face it, Paula had been so nervous she barely spoke. She just did a lot of smiling, nodding, and blushing. Still, she felt like Laura actually liked her, that they’d, dare she even think it, made a connection that went way beyond mystery writing. The encounter had ignited something in Paula, gotten her off the fence, so to speak. She’d experimented in college — who hadn’t? — and a bit after college, too, and yeah, once or twice in recent years, but basically she’d thought of herself as straight. But that smile Laura gave her had pushed her over the edge. Hell, over the cliff. Yep, Paula was playing for the other team now. She was on the lookout for apretty, intelligent, mature, successful lover and Laura Lippman fit the bill. She imagined them living in Baltimore, their Edgars side by side on the mantel, traveling the festival circuit in Europe together...
    Okay, okay, it was time to focus, buckle down, get this damn book written.
    She attended the trial of The... A.X. She sat in the back, taking lots of notes. This Max Fisher, he was some character all right. She’d never seen anyone so caught up in his own delusion. He was on trial for major drug charges, and it was like he was gleefully oblivious to it all. Even when the judge sentenced him, Fisher didn’t seem to get the gravity of the situation. As he was led out of the courtroom, he chanted, “Attica, Attica, Attica...”
    Paula knew she’d have to dig deep, really make readers understand the psychology of Fisher, but deep wasn’t her strong suit. Her writing was surfacey, superficial. She often told friends that this was purposeful, that she could write with more depth any time she wanted, that she consciously tried to “dumb it down for the masses.” As if the masses had ever seen one of her books. She had a better chance of bedding Laura Lippman than of getting a book into Wal-Mart.
    But a superficial take just wouldn’t work for a guy like Fisher, and neither would her usual cozy-to-medium-boiled style. This guy made In Cold Blood seem like chick lit. The things the man had done, the unsavory people he’d been involved with, especiallythat woman he’d been engaged to, Angela Petrakos — she sounded like she could be the subject of her own true crime book. Paula was already thinking, sequel? But telling the Fisher story properly would require some serious hardboiled, noir writing. She didn’t