Is it nature or nurture that drives Adele Baxter Warren’s teenage daughter, Mercedes, to become a mass murderer? Town Without Mercy, a complete novella,is contemporary women’s fiction dealing with current event drama of mass shootings and gay marriage. Told through the eyes of the mother, a TV news correspondent, Adele must find the answer, even as it takes her away from Mercedes’ deathbed where she lays in a coma from the police bullet that stopped the carnage. If Adele follows the leads, the cost could be her seventeen-year-old marriage to same-sex partner, Jodi Warren. The townspeople of Concord Park want revenge. They blame Adele and Jodi’s lifestyle as the cause of their daughter’s actions, but are they innocent of all blame?
Town Without Mercy, my second novel, published in 2013, was inspired by watching the news during the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. Watching the horror of the day, my husband and I discussed not only the terrible loss of the children and the grief of their parents, but the question was raised, “What would it be like to be the parent of that shooter?” And Town Without Mercy was born.
Writing Under Fire 