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I typically go through multiple titles before landing on the one that finally feels right, and this book was no different. I think I went through four working titles in all.
The novel premise is based on the idea of one crime exposing another. The story begins with two missing paperboys two years apart in the early 1980s, but the cases themselves are just the center tentpole the main plot is built around. They set in motion a chain of events for my fictional characters who live in the same neighborhood as one of the missing boys—twelve-year-old Sammy Cox, who also has a neighborhood paper route and is keeping a terrible secret, his eighteen-year-old sister, Crystal, who dreams of going to college to become a serious journalist and is desperate to win a major writing scholarship to pay for school, and Sergeant Dale Goodkind, who has been assigned to both missing paperboy cases and has a complicated past of his own clouding his professional judgement.
The title then comes from the idea that by dehumanizing criminals as “monsters,” we can blind ourselves to perpetrators who are just average, everyday people. It also eventually becomes, by the end of the story, the...[read on]
Q&A with Kali White.
--Marshal Zeringue
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