We hadn't planned to visit a murder scene.
But there we were. There was even a white taped outline of a body on the ground outside the entrance.
Someone had said, "Is that Lee Child?" as we were following a man along the road, just before he disappeared into a building. I had less to go on, not knowing what this author of Jack Reacher novels looked like, but I did agree that man we had spotted looked like An Author On Duty.
He was dressed in a dark jacket and a crisp shirt. Not a full suit, which could look a little too formal. And he was being accompanied by someone official making sure sure he would be at a certain place at a certain time. There were various other eyes of recognition as he approached the big building.
On the lawn was a huge tepee complex. We decided to peek inside.
Yes, it was full of authors and readers.
Some chatting, some queueing and some signing books.
I didn't know Lauren Beukes either, but she was signing books and has written a cracking yarn about a time-traveling serial killer.
It's set in Depression-era Chicago, where the perpetrator finds a key to a house that opens on to other times.
The cost of his time travel is to kill the shining girls: bright young women, burning with potential. He stalks them through their lives across different eras, leaving anachronistic clues on their bodies, until, in 1989, one of his victims, Kirby Mazrachi, survives and starts hunting him back.
Yes, now we were certain, we had stumbled across a most Peculier crime convention.
2 comments:
Shame we were in the same place at the same time and I didn't know!
If the man was tall, it was probably Lee Child... He was wearing a leather jacket on Friday evening (I know, in all that heat!).
Nikki-ann It was definitely Lee Child. Funnily enough, I saw someone reading one of his books on the tube a couple of days later.
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