V M Giambanco is the author of the Alice Madison series of police procedurals.
It
was a grey, chilly March morning and I was sitting in the reception area of the
downtown precinct of the Seattle Police Department, waiting to meet the
officers I would join on the day shift. I was wondering how many silly and
inappropriate things I would manage to say in the eight-hour stint, and still I
couldn’t have been more excited.
I had just spent a couple of hours chatting
with the detective in charge of criminal investigations in Lynnwood near
Seattle – thanks to a very kind family connection – and I was about to spend a
day on a ride-along. If you are a crime fiction writer, life doesn’t get any
better than that.
My novels are set in Seattle, Washington
State, and the main character, Alice Madison, is a homicide detective; to have
the chance to spend some time with real police officers and watch them do real
work is pretty much gold.
Seattle is a mid-size town in the Pacific
Northwest surrounded by water on one side and mountains on the other. It’s a
great place to set a story because I can use the urban, cosmopolitan feel of
the city and yet in half an hour I am in the middle of complete wilderness.
That day in March I was lucky in many ways but
maybe the biggest stroke of luck was that the officer who had drawn the short
straw and would effectively be babysitting me for eight hours was a thirty-year
veteran, a brilliant woman who had worked in the Vice and in the Domestic
Violence units and who knew by name most of the homeless people in her precinct.
Downtown Seattle is not a residential
neighbourhood: it has a busy harbour with ferries to Canada and British Colombia,
a vibrant shopping area crammed with restaurants and cafés, and it borders with
an International District with Chinese businesses and warehouses; most
importantly, it also houses at least five shelters for the homeless and most of
those who use their services have mental health and addiction issues.
It was a busy day: in eight hours we were
called on to deal with an assault, some shoplifting, a police officer in need of
assistance, a homeless person relocation into a medical unit and a number of
other matters in the local shelters, and, to top it all, some death threats. It
was an endless stream and everything required written updates on the patrol car
computer and through the radio.
Mostly
I tried to make myself entirely invisible as I stood by and watched. I was in
fact completely invisible and no one looked at me twice because the minute the
police officers arrived on the scene they
were the ones in charge and people turned to them for support and direction. The
officer I was with asked me to stay in the car only once and that was because the
person they were pursuing was a man known to be aggressive and even though I
had signed all kinds of waivers she wanted to bring me back to the precinct in
the same condition as I had left it at the beginning of the day. I remained in
the car and watched them as they went after their man in the alleys behind
Pioneer Square. They did not find him.
The Seattle Police Department had received
some bad press in the previous months and I had been quite surprised when they
had agreed to let me ride with them and even more so when they openly talked
about the department’s problems. I asked each officer the same question: if
there was one thing you could tell the public about what it’s like to be a
police officer what would you say? Mostly they had the same answer: there are always
two sides to a story and not everything is what it seems. I agree, the group of
people I saw working on the street – in patrol cars, on bicycles and on horses
– were dedicated, capable and compassionate; they were generous with their time
and talked to me about how they became officers; they showed me the best place
to grab lunch on the run (the Grand Central Bakery on 1st Avenue
South) and even taught me the ultimate trick to remember the sequence of key
streets in the Downtown precinct grid (Jefferson, James, Cherry, Columbia, Marion, Madison,
Spring, Seneca, University, Union, Pike, and
Pine)…the mnemonic is ‘Jesus Christ Made Seattle Under Protest’. Brilliant.
What I remember from the day is feeling in my bones that
the reality of police work is both incredibly mundane and easily misunderstood
unless you’re right next to them, on the street. I will go back for more the
next time I’m in Seattle. The reality is as compelling and as mysterious as the
fiction.
Blood
and Bone by V M Giambanco is out now (Quercus Books Hbk £18.99 Kindle £9.49)
After
two years in the Seattle Police Department Homicide Unit Detective Alice
Madison seems to have found the kind of peace in her private and working life
that she has not known before. When a
burglary escalates into a horrific murder she is put in charge of the investigation
and finds herself tracking a killer who might have stalked the city for years
and whose existence is the stuff of myth in high security prisons. Alice Madison and her partner Detective
Sergeant Kevin Brown will have to re-open old cases and old wounds because
mistakes were made and Brown might be responsible for letting a killer go free. The bond between the detectives is tested to
its limits as they navigate the case and learn more about the consequences of
Brown’s error. Madison’s own past comes
under scrutiny when Internal Affairs officers begin to investigate her and she
realises that enemies close to home want her to fail. In the middle of the storm
Madison and her partner must hunt down a skillful, determined murderer with a
talent for death. And Madison’s private life and fragile peace fall apart.Read an extract here.
Purchase from Amazon
You can follow her on Twitter @vm_giambanco
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