Get the low-down on Jonathon Marcel’s private investigators
I am writing two crime series. One, a series of full-length novels, bounces all over the Midwest before settling in Colorado. My female sleuth in that series is Kelly Reed. The other, a series of novellas, is set in Kansas City and features PI DeShawn Mills.
Kelly Reed
Kelly is an Ozark, Missouri girl and former Army Ranger intelligence officer, and the only woman to have ever made it into the elite 75th Regiment, who is now a DEA agent.
In The Samogon Affair, Kelly is this veiled badass of a background character, who stands out in every scene she is in, demanding her fifteen minutes of fame. Kelly is south of the border with her team when the story starts, always in extreme situations, and hamstrung by a bureaucracy that favors the criminal. But that never stops her. If she has to, Kelly will break the law to bring down the cartels and keep her team alive.
Playing for Blood is Kelly’s story. In the first chapter, Kelly reveals what she wants and doesn’t want, which conflicts heavily with the one thing she deeply desires. Kelly’s superpower is that of the protector. She’s all about preserving the status quo and eradicating the evil that threatens what she holds dear. But she’s not God; she can’t be everywhere all the time. Her journey in Playing for Blood takes her on a hell-bent pursuit of a Russian gangster, who shot her partner/lover and left him for dead. The journey is rife with conflict, and leads Kelly into making a life-altering decision.
In Whispers That Kill, Kelly has moved out of the DEA into the private sector where she has started her own agency: KRI (Kelly Reed Investigations). She calls Boulder, Colorado home and works primarily out of Denver.
An integral part of the series is my partner-characters, Kelly and Lori Bishop. Lori, a former member of Kelly’s DEA team, is this sultry, tattooed, punk-rocker techie. If it involves computers, Lori is all over it. In The Samogon Affair, their relationship starts out as just teammates. but In Playing for Blood Lori gets more involved in Kelly’s life, and towards the end, we witness their professional relationship budding into a trusting friendship as Lori follows Kelly to Colorado. In Whispers That Kill and Tainted Justice, a lot of their back-story is revealed as their friendship tightens.
DeShawn Mills
Take Kelly Reed and flip the script, and you have DeShawn Mills, an African-American ex-con. Growing up DeShawn dreamed of being a police detective and cracking big capers, but when gangbangers murdered his sister, his life changed. While in prison for almost thirteen years, he decides to make something of himself. He earns a college degree from behind bars, and then after winning his release he takes his life back and becomes a private investigator, working primarily for a small law firm.
Readers first meet DeShawn six years after his release from prison. Despite his prison stint, DeShawn is a good person, who seeks to do right. But he also knows the justice system doesn’t always do right by the people, so he’s willing to break the law, like Kelly Reed, to get justice for the righteous and deserving. He’s the kind of investigator you go to when there isn’t anyone else, much like Burke, the ex-con private investigator in the Andrew Vachss novels.
I introduce DeShawn in the Kelly Reed series, during the final chapters of Tainted Justice. This was perfect. Kelly Reed works in Colorado, but her case in Tainted Justice takes her to Kansas City where DeShawn is based. Circumstances put them together. Another reason I did this was because it provides opportunities for my series-characters to crossover and interact with one another. DeShawn’s first novella, Deception’s Game, starts the morning after Tainted Justice ends, and includes a couple of scenes with Kelly and Lori. One scene is in both books—in Tainted Justice it is told from Kelly’s point of view, and in Deception’s Game it is in DeShawn’s point of view.