The Musical Innertube - Volume 2, Number 153 - Katherine Ramsland Caught Dead-Handed

JOHN

Today on the Musical Innertube, we welcome back a great friend of the podcast, Katherine Ramsland. She's here to talk about her novel Dead Handed, which is the third installment in The Nutcracker Investigations series. Katherine is different from other mystery writers, however, in that she brings in her very detailed expertise in forensic psychology into the writing and creation of her fiction. Katherine consults for coroners, teaches homicide investigators, and has appeared as an expert on more than 200 crime documentaries. She was an executive producer on Murder House Flip and A&E's Confession Of A Serial Killer BTK, the author of more than 1500 articles - that hurts my writing hand just to say that - and 73 books, including the Serial Killer’s Apprentice and How To Catch A Killer. She also pens a regular blog for Psychology Today. Is that Shadow Boxing? Is it called Shadow Boxing? Beautiful name for a blog. It's almost as good as Musical Innertube! And we should congratulate Katherine. She is now an Emerita Professor at De Sales University in Center Valley, PA, where she teaches courses, but only online. Congratulations on all that, Katherine, and welcome back.

KATHERINE

Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be here with you guys.

JOHN

So, let's just start. I have so many questions, but. Let me start with the most easy question of all. How did you focus on Concord, MA as the setting for this book?

KATHERINE

Well, a couple of reasons. I like weather and the first two books, had one at a hurricane,  the other had a tornado. I wanted a winter storm, and I had been to Concord for the MFA program I recently completed and noticed all this stuff. All the writers, Emerson, Alcott, - I learned how to say his name - Thoreau.

JOHN

No, everyone says it wrong.

KATHERINE

And of course, Hawthorne. And Hawthorne then became thematic for me. So, it's such  an interesting town for its history, and also it’s where the American Revolution started. So, it just was the natural place. And it was also the place I was when I sold the three-book contract for this series.

DON

There you go. Let me let me say also that when you go out and purchase this book, dear listener, I would suggest reading it right away, but then putting it on the shelf and picking it back up at Halloween, because this book has everything for Halloween. It's got dark and dusty mansions. It's got family intrigue. It's got graveyards and gravestones, and it's got a New England forest setting. And it it'll probably run chills up and down your spine, which is exactly what you need at Halloween.  So, I want to make that that recommendation right up front. Now, Katherine, you've taken your main character, who's kind of loosely based on yourself, and put her in the middle of not only all of the goings on, but a lot of family mysteries that were hinted at in the earlier books, that kind of come together in this one. Was that the plan all along, to kind of gradually ease the reader into this mixed-up family that that Annie, your heroine, is involved in?

KATHERINE

Had no idea.  None at all. I wanted to do something in Hawthorne, and, you know, the House of Seven Gables, and the two families that are intertwined, and with the curse and all that. And I also had always wanted to write about this particular place in Connecticut called Dudleytown. And so all the stuff of Dacretown in my novel is actually about a real piece of property. So, the two things seem to come together for me. I want to say something about the title, Dead Handed, because I had written that phrase down several years ago as something I wanted to use. I had no idea it was a real estate term for the influence of past generations on current generations over land transactions, and it was such a perfect fit! And then Hawthorne has a story about a birthmark and on some woman's cheek, and it was like, oh my God, all these things are working perfectly! And I did not plan that. So, the same with Annie's family. I did not know. I discovered a lot as I went through this novel.

JOHN

So, Annie is your sort of central character, your protagonist, but Annie Hunter is never alone. And one of the things that's very different about this series, I think, and I'd love you to talk about this, is that Annie is the center of, and sometimes orbiting, and sometimes working directly with, and often on the phone or computer too, a small group of other forensic scientists who take different parts of the case that they're on. And that's very different for me. I had not read a novel or any novels really that work like this, that when Annie has a problem that she doesn't have time to solve, she could just hand it off to her rough and ready sidekicks in a far-off office who are waiting to do their research, to trace people. And yeah, I think that back and forth is really, well, I think it's very singular. I haven't seen it before, but I'd love for you to talk about that, because in a sense that interplay becomes sort of a central character.

KATHERINE

Yeah, well, it gets her out of her head. I mean that's one of the death knells of a lot of fiction is, you're always having a character thinking. This way, everything's in dialogue. And also, I can introduce, because there's a range of experts she works with, I can introduce unusual ones like forensic meteorology. And I recently just actually met a forensic gemologist. So that will probably end up somewhere along the line. But she's a core team. The dog handler’s based on someone I actually did work with, who keeps track of all their records and is able to look up stuff. And then she has a PI who then can do the leg work, and part-time digital examiner who is a friend of mine. Every time I need digital stuff - and I will say, he's the one who came up with that really neat little trick at the end, where they catch the bad guy, that was that was directly the result of him brainstorming with me about what can digital things do here. So, I have this team, because I myself and all the investigations I've done always have teams. There's sometimes as many as 20 people involved. So that way Annie can always have, like, a forensic geologist, maybe a forensic, you know, anthropologist, any of those things are things that she can call on when she needs it for a particular case. And that way I can actually teach forensic stuff in the novels without it being heavy-handed.

JOHN

What does a forensic meteorologist do, Madam Author?  Tell our listeners, because I am very certain that you passed over that very quickly. I would love to know what a forensic cloud-spotter does.

KATHERINE

Well, in the second novel, In the Damage Path, which has a tornado in it, JoLynn, the Forensic Meteorologist, brings in a tool to help find the body that they that think is buried in the woods. And it's a real tool, one that has been used to spot marijuana fields and whatnot. And she puts it up on a drone and it is able, with the help of cadaver dogs, is able to pinpoint the burial. At the end of the book, that novel, she has found a new potential case, so I kind of trapped myself into that. I'm not doing that again! I trapped myself into a storyline that I didn't think would work with the Concord line, and it turned out they came together in a very surprising way. Unplanned, entirely unplanned!  And so, JoLynn ends up in Concord because she's following up on the weather-related deaths that appear to be accidents but turn out not to be accidents. And she's the one that is tracking them. And so that's what they do. They look at how does weather affect bodies outside, for example. That's called taphonomy. That's a forensic science. But the weather people can give you the conditions and how it might have affected time since death, decomposition rates, etcetera. And I want to say one thing - in the beginning of the book when Annie is in Concord and wants to talk to her team and they're not around, her PI has been set to an art class, a forensic art class, drawing from decomposed faces for identification. And I just got invited to that class! So, I get to go and actually experience what Aidan learned.

JOHN

Oh my goodness.

DON

This is life imitating art all the way down, doesn't it?

KATHERINE

Right, right.

DON

I know that you you've had a fascination with weather as you mentioned - all of these Nutcracker books, the Nutcracker theme comes from the fact that Annie and her team take on what looks like impossible cases, so they call themselves Nutcrackers, or she calls the team Nutcrackers, anyway - but all three books are entwined with weather. You have a hurricane in the first, a tornado in the second, now you have really massive snowstorm in the third one. Again, what is your fascination with weather, and how does it tie into the forensic stuff that you do?

KATHERINE

Well, weather has a big impact on mood. And I'm throwing up hindrances, like when Annie needs to go get her daughter, now they have to contend with icy roads. So, you feel that sense of, you have to get there fast as you can, but you don't want to be in an accident. So, kind of ups the tension. Weather itself is I think so interesting. But it brings in layers of things, like with the hurricane, I found that there is such a thing as a hurricane that commits suicide! So, like that was perfect for being in that novel. A tornado, I called the book In the Damage Path because, in the damage path of a tornado is how you learn its behavior. And that's what we do with serial killers. Same exact thing. So, the snowstorm idea actually came from - Peter Straub, I always loved his book Ghost Story, and I do start the book a little bit with reference to it, not remembering that quote from Hawthorne that opens the book, so it was it was perfect. But then again, I didn't want them to be buried in snow, with power outages, I said I didn't want it to go that far. I just wanted weather to be a way to sustain and build suspense. But also, you know, Annie hates snow, she hates being in the cold. She hates snow, but hen it ends up being her ally. So, it's a way to flip her and her attitude and to show her that all the stuff she's been fighting is actually what she should be using.

JOHN

That's often the challenge, I should think, when you're in the midst of one of these rather elusive, complex cases, is to recognize your resistance to aspects of it, and perhaps turn them to advantage as you try to take it apart.

KATHERINE

Yeah. And I think in each novel her attitudes are the things she has to reexamine in order to move forward. And it's weird because I don't actually plan it to be like that. It's not a formula, but clearly, she is certain, she's strong, has strong opinions, and those are the things that get nowhere.  And she teaches that. This is what happens in investigations, and why they go off the rails, as people develop these blind spots, and so does she. And so, Natra, her closest assistant, is constantly reminding her, “Here's what you're not seeing,” as well as the attorney Jax, he comes in too. And they're able to give her perspective. But usually, the story will turn on her ability to forget the attitude and figure out how is this to my advantage?

DON

And there's something else about her personality that reflects it. It comes to bear in this novel more than some of the others, because this novel has more of a horror aspect, of a horror movie aspect, and there are a couple of times when she's thinking, “This is where the horror movie woman gets killed because she goes in here no matter what.” And that's something I think about, not just with horror movies where you're saying. “Don't go in the basement,” but also with heroes and heroines who sort of say, “This isn't right. I'm going to go in there and check it out.” And again, you sit back and say, would I really have the guts to put all of my reservations aside and just walk right into this maelstrom? And she does that over and over again.

KATHERINE

So, I do that.  She does it over and over because that is partly how she deals with scary things, is moving toward them. And that's actually something I learned from Anne Rice when I read her biography, and I talked with her a lot, and she had a tendency to do that as well. And it's just a way of - certain characters that think that, some people just go, “Here's my way.” But with her in that particular instance, about where she says this is what crazy people do. But if she doesn't do it, she could lose the biggest clue to the things she most wants. So, you're putting her in the situation where, yes, it’s so stupid of you to go get in the car with this crazy guy and go in there, but if you don’t, that may be it for what you most want. So she's always got that tension going.

JOHN

Yes. And, of course, one of the nice things about detective fiction is that these fixes which investigators get themselves into where they have to make decisions about what to do and what to walk away from, and a lot rides on it. But these are workable metaphors for situations we all find ourselves in and things we all have to do, sort of, to wrestle with ourselves to, you know, solve things.

KATHERINE

Yeah, I think so. I think it's very reflective of the things that we have to face, maybe to the extreme what she does, but certainly I think she sort of models, sometimes you just have to drop the attitude. Sometimes you have to change the way you're doing this.

DON

I think also some of the more interesting passages in the book are the passages where she's talking to a newspaper reporter about the case, and he knows stuff and she knows stuff, but they don't necessarily know the same stuff, and they are trying to get that stuff that the other person knows that they don't.  I've seen that interviewing technique up close firsthand a couple of times when talking with officials about a news story, and they don't want to let something slip out that that might harm the case. So, they're talking around it. You must have gone through a number of these sort of interviews where there is a give and take, or maybe a blockage on both sides to come up with that sort of situation in your books.

KATHERINE

Yeah, I'd go through it quite a lot, and especially if I'm involved in with a subject and you know specifically that somebody wants to get information and they have some advantage over me. So, there's a trade, you know, the tradeoff is on the table, but how much can I trade it up? I actually, though didn't know how much that guy knew!  The most amazing thing to me about this particular novel was the things that would come out of characters’ mouths that I had not planned for them to say. And as I mentioned, I had the two storylines and I wasn’t at all sure how they were going to link up, until one character said. “Oh, starfish.” And you went, what did he know? He knew a whole lot. But I didn't. I didn't figure that into him when I created him as a character. And the same thing with that reporter. I had a specific thing I wanted him to be by the end. But then, as it turned out, he was doling out all kinds of information that took me by surprise. But at the same time, I know Annie can't give to him. She wants information, but she can't give back to him, but so she has to figure out that strategy. And that's certainly, you're absolutely right. I have been in that situation many times.

JOHN

We'll return to our show in just a moment, but first, here's a soothing musical interlude.

DON

Our guest, Katherine Ramsland, is an expert on many things, including crime Scene investigation, psychological sleuthing, serial killers and mass murders, vampires, sex offenders, ghosts, and the writing process.

JOHN

Katherine has written 73 books. And 1500 articles she's participated in many crime investigations and runs the Shadowboxing podcast at Psychology Today. She's a frequent guest in the television and podcast world, including her work as executive producer on Roku TV's Murder House.

DON

Long heard nonfiction books are Confessions of a Serial Killer, The Criminal Mind, The Science Of Vampires, True Stories Of CSI, and Snap! Siezing Your Aha! Moments.

JOHN

For fiction, books include Blood Hunters, The Heat Seekers, and many others, including The Nutcracker Investigation series. Dead Handed, the book we're discussing today. is the series third and most recent installment.

DON

For more of this truly Renaissance personality, check out Katherine's website at Katherine Ramsland's NUT CRACKER INVESTIGATIONS, or her Facebook page, Katherine Ramsland | Facebook

JOHN

And now we return you to the Musical Innertube, already in progress.

So. I think we need to give a thumbnail sketch sort of just an overview of the plot. I'm gonna not give away any big things, and you can correct me as I move forward. This is gonna be just, really dumb, 10,000 feet up. Annie comes to Concord on one case, and pretty soon she's trying to solve about four, in fact, five, in fact six, in fact seven. There's a there's a way in which this gets barnacled over, because one case often leads to another. We all know this, and we find out that she is involved, her family is involved. She has a dying grandfather and an absent father who she's been told is dead, but she's wondering if that's really true. So, there's that. But there's also the possibility that she is investigating what's known as a “suicide cluster,” at least at the beginning. Explain to us what a “suicide cluster” is.

KATHERINE

1. Yeah, she came to Concord because her grandfather's ill. She reads about the suicide cluster in the newspaper. She knows that there are very few experts even in the field of suicidology, who really understand that phenomenon. And she happens to be in the area. So, she wants to get involved because she's just hanging there anyway, and this is her research. So, her assistant sets up a meeting with the chief of police and one of the town officials to get her started as a consultant. And her consulting is really about what should towns do? A “suicide cluster” is where - and there's several different types of “suicide clusters” - where in a limited period of time, people began to commit suicide. Usually kids, and weirdly, it's often by places with railroad tracks. Often, they're in affluent communities, it's high school and college kids primarily. They seem to mimic each other, and sometimes there's something called an “echo cluster” where there's been (suicides) 1-5 years before, 10 years before, even 100 years before, and they're going through the motions of when it happened before. It's a really weird, mysterious kind of thing. And people have tried studying it to figure it out, but what you're trying to - a lot of it is media involvement. So, there's been a clear sense of causality with these clusters from papers covering it. Memorials, romanticizing victims, etcetera. So, with her knowledge, she gets involved, but very quickly figures out this this isn't a suicide cluster. There's more to this story, and it all has to do with this particular property that has this old-time curse on it from, you know, a couple of centuries before. And so, is that what's going on? These kids know something. They're late teenage years, so she has to figure that out. But she gets into the Dacretown thing through this suicide cluster and then finds out that's not what it is.

DON

We've had stories in the past, newspaper stories, about people who die, apparently, from suicide. There's a big one going now in Philadelphia, where there was a woman who was stabbed to death. She had 20 stab wounds, and they said it was a suicide. And the family is challenging that. When you go into a situation, and you may have gone into these before, where is it suicide? Is it homicide? What do you look for to tell the difference between those two things? Because that works out in the book too. Where is it a suicide? Or is it a homicide?

KATHERINE

Yeah, and. And I do this with Annie throughout, ‘cause she is a suicideologist. It's really important to know the cases and especially the weird ones, Because I know of a case where a guy stabbed himself  98 times and it was definitely suicide and the cops absolutely could not believe that anybody would do that. That's actually a cognitive bias - if I wouldn't do it, he wouldn't do it, what they do. That that there's so many bizarre suicides. I collect them. in part for the purpose of teaching. Just because she has a lot of stab wounds would not eliminate her as a suicide, having killed herself, by any means. So it has to be about how many stabs, what kind of stabs, like hesitation marks or not, you know, not very deep ones. But I think that in the Philadelphia case, it had to do with where they are on the body that makes it really suspicious. And so, it's definitely an interesting case, should be reopened, should be reexamined by an independent person, absolutely. But it's not the number of wounds, or the type of wounds that would automatically eliminate it as a suicide. It's really, is it possible for that person to have done it? Now we do find people stabbing themselves multiple, multiple times, or shooting themselves even several times. three or four times - if they don't get their shot off right, they'll shoot again, then maybe again. So that when people automatically say oh, that can't possibly be a suicide, it's because they're not familiar with the cases. And I've consulted on some cases that in coroner's juries, where I've had to say, but look at the look at the literature, this is possible. Is it probable? You're weighing that against, is it possible? And what are the factors leading up to this person's death? You have to look at what other people knew about the person, what the deceased was going through, what their ability to buffer themselves against life's disappointments was, there's so many different factors involved that it's really complicated. It's called a psychological autopsy. And it's a complicated, time-consuming process. But if you want to get it right, you have to go through it. And that's what Annie’s specialty is. It's what I taught as a course and continue to teach.

JOHN

On the way, in this book, we learn a lot about something I've been aware of thanks to my friendship with you, Kathy. There are situations in which a person or persons sets up a kind of game or challenge in which they sort of position or invite or coax other people to harm themselves, possibly to kill themselves. And first of all, I'd like to know, in these games, what is the incentive for the person to participate? What kinds of incentives are set up?

KATHERINE

Yeah. And they have a whole conversation about that. And all of the challenges they name are real challenges, except for mine, except for the one.

JOHN

The “Blue whale,” I think you mentioned.

KATHERINE

The “Blue Whale” challenge. The incentives depend on the person, but sometimes it's simply to get as many likes on their TikTok or Instagram as possible. There are people with that kind of illness where they, they just have this deep need for attention, attention, attention to the point where they'll do very, very risky things. The “choking game” was to prove yourself, and people died doing something - that's where you where you have people actually choking you. And people die. Or sometimes it's like a self-asphyxiation kind of thing, and they underestimate just how dangerous it is.

DON

Or something silly like that “Tide pod challenge.”

KATHERINE

Yes, exactly. And sometimes - the “Blue Whale” was a succession of things you had to do up to the point where it was just so dangerous. Then you would break your ear drum, you might break your arm there. They're all these things you have to do to put yourself at risk because you have to prove yourself. You have an audience to whom you are proving yourself. And the more you can get, the better. And it's a bizarre social media phenomenon that people have to run for all these likes and comments and whatnot and put themselves - they think of themselves as influencers. But, you know, they're not, particularly, especially if they die. But these challenges are like that. And so, when my digital guy suggests maybe we're looking at one of these. Now, they talk about incentives, and it could be somebody has a lot of money, there's a big pot at the end or you are affiliated with something larger than yourself. I mean, we're seeing a lot of cult like behavior these days in politics where people are doing all kinds of things that just seem so bizarre. But it's because they're affiliated with a cause or mission, or a group, and that has given them as a purpose. So Annie and her team have to figure out what could be the incentive for doing this kind of thing. And that's part of the mystery of it.

JOHN

I think one of the. Tragic overlays in the story is that we have to think about how susceptible some folks are, how you only need to be a little bit shaky for this kind of call to have resonance for you. And to be drawn to it.

KATHERINE

There's many susceptibilities that that make people really vulnerable to this kind of thing, that people set them up don't think about or aren't aware of. It's really sad and tragic sometimes with people who get sucked into it.

DON

Take a step back to your writing process, because something you said a little earlier is something that I've talked to other people who write, about this situation. And that is, you start with characters and a plot, and now you're filling them in, and as you write the characters - it's weird, it's bizarre, but it happens constantly with authors - and that is the characters start telling you what they're going to say, how they're going to act. You have things set up, you have an outline, but the characters start dictating what they're going to do as you write. Is that sort of the case with yourself? And this book, and other books you've written?

KATHERINE

Yeah, I'll tell you, I can remember clearly the day I had this plot, I knew exactly what was going to happen. It was all - and none of that happened. None of it.

JOHN

You know exactly the book you didn't write.

KATHERINE

And this, this book probably more than the other two, was really instinctive, really. The characters would speak, and I didn't know what was going to happen as a result. Whether to write that down, because that was going to lead me in a certain direction that I couldn't see my way. And I thought I'll just trust it, I'll just trust it, see what happens.  There were a number of things happened, especially toward the end that I did not know. But when they happened, it was perfect. Like, it's my subconscious guy:  I'm the magician, leave this to me and it will work out. Just relax. But honestly, when I tried plotting it, none of that worked, and even the characters that I thought they had certain roles, they ended up doing things that I didn't expect at all. So it was scary. That is not my way. I like to kind of see my sense of direction, But it was exhilarating at the same time to see these characters know where they wanted to go and how it was going to work out. And I just had to say, OK, hop on board, I hope it works out by my deadline.

DON

This book did seem to have a lot more moving parts than your other books, and a lot more input because, as John says, there's at least four or five cases working here. Plus all of the involvement of her family, which she knows nothing about because her family has cut her off for years. But apparently there are strangers in this town that know more about her family than she does.

KATHERINE

Including the fact that they know her father, who has been missing for five years, and she doesn't have any sense of - he grew up there. He's a person of influence and lots of people know him, but she has no clue who these people are and what they know about him, and how that - and whether or not he's even a dangerous figure in her life because she's, she begins to be afraid for her child, who's there with her, but she's left in the care of a of a tutor and a babysitter, and now wondering, oh my God, you know, is there going to be some danger to her? So, she also has to grapple with that family legacy of the things this family has done to other people and how that really impacts who she is and the kinds of things she's chosen to do in a way that she didn't actually anticipate or know about, and she has to come to terms with that.

JOHN

So, this would not be a conversation with Katherine Ramsland if we did not discuss matters having to do with the occult, the otherworldly, the potentially otherworldly, the uncanny. And of course, Annie, throughout these books, has had occasion to say several times that, while skeptical, she remains open on all these fronts, partly because, as a good investigator, she wants to pick up any signal that she can, and it would be a bad career move to actually shut down one side. Say, oh, that never happens, and then have it happen and ignore it, and not solve the case because of it. So, she is skeptical but open, and in the meantime a lot of uncanny stuff is happening. And it did remind me of Hawthorne a little bit in that the uncanny is everywhere. It's swirling around what people do, and it's definitely a fact in that world. If we look at, oh, I don't know, The Scarlet Letter or Young Goodman Brown, there's this, this notion of, well, black magic, white magic, there's this notion of things that are happening that we cannot understand. And whether or not these get, you know, completely explained - for example, one great example that you talked about was William James and his experiments with psychics in which he had the exact same attitude going in. And what I remember reading that stuff, and coming to the end and realizing that what he was trying to tell us in his way is, well, a lot of these people were frauds. But, you know, we didn't actually explain everything. There's a lot that sort of exceeded our capacity to find evidence and really make a judgment. And I think some of that is true in this book.

KATHERINE

Well, and that's the value of Merrick, her great, great grandfather or however many greats. And again, a big surprise, he crossed paths with Hawthorne's son, who goes into all this mysticism. Exactly what I needed for this book!  And, like me, she is open, but finds many of the wishful thinking kinds of things that go on with paranormalists and ghost hunters of today, you know, can easily being knocked down. But taking it seriously, the William James angle, he had a whole movement, with people testing all these mediums and they found one woman that they that they tested in Boston over and over and over and could never get figure out, how does she know these things?  How is she able to do automatic writing, which Annie’s father is all into. And, you know, some amazing cases. So that's why it's called Nutcrackers, the hard nuts to crack are those cases that have these elements that are often dismissed or overlooked, which she is willing to at least entertain, as I am. And that's pretty much the theme of this this whole series. It doesn't accept that the paranormal definitely exists, but it recognizes there are things out there that are not easily explained. And the value of Ayden, in some cases is, he he's always, “Oh, what about that curse? It seems like everybody really had some bad luck.”

JOHN

That was very funny when he says that. Says man, that curse.

DON

Ayden is the private investigator that works with her. And there's two things - he keeps talking about the curse, and, every once in a while, he looks up, because her grandfather is dying and she's been named in the in the will, and so he keeps saying, you're going to come into some money? You're going to get some money? He says that about five times.

JOHN

He’s only standing in for the readership. Yeah, the audience. They really want to know, you know?

KATHERINE

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then, because he's a freelancer, he's not on, you know, paying staff. He's a freelancer. He's also a jack of all trades. He fixes up houses in the Outer Banks. He's on search and rescue. He's all kinds of things. And he's kind of a loosey-goosey in terms of income. But he does need income. So yeah. And he's curious. He just goes ahead and says things. And he also has a competition with Annie, who's gonna be the first one to see a ghost? He's that kind of character who's kind of pushing it. He's not necessarily a believer, but he's on board. If there is some kind of spooky thing happening, he'll go with it. As would I, by the way. If somebody said that to me, I'm all in.

JOHN

I love it. Well, one thing you could definitely say about the uncanny is, whether it gestures to things that really exist or not, it's a fact for people. It's in their lives and they do things because of it that brings it right center stage sometimes. And that's really present in this book, that sense that well, no matter what the uncanny is, whether it's factitious or not, people think it's real and that's making them do stuff.

KATHERINE

And really, the centerpiece of this book, besides Dacretown, they the property, the cursed property is Sleepy Hollow cemetery. Because that is right in the heart Concord, and in it - it's not the Headless Horseman one, which is in New York, it's the first one - and it's this massive cemetery of all these really old, crumbly graves. And then they have a hill that's that like, where all the authors are buried. But, wow is that ever spooky - these settings, especially in winter, with the snow on it, and I mean, I just, I had to use that. And it was so great when I asked some of the caretakers, ‘cause I needed a certain plot thing to happen. I knew the police were in there at night, you know, would drive around. But in snow they close it! And that was perfect! And that was a caretaker who told me. Oh, yeah, here's our policy. That works.

DON

Fits right in. Yeah. And yeah, the other thing is, I don't know how to put this without giving away anything in the novel, so I'll just say it's kind of weird that that area had so many successful authors, successful and thoughtful authors, starting with Hawthorne, but also Thoreau....

KATHERINE

Thor-ow. That's what they said.

DON

There we go. OK. And Alcott. Louisa May Alcott is in there too.

KATHERINE

Yeah. Alcott. Alcott and her father were part of the transcendental movement.

JOHN

Emerson.

KATHERINE

Emerson!

DON

So again, that area produced a lot of authors. Something in the water maybe?

KATHERINE

And then lived in each other's houses. That was the weird part. Hawthorne had two houses. Alcott had two houses. They  all, you know, knew each other. And now Thoreau was out in the woods. Sort of. When you really go see his cabin retreat, it's silly, because he could have walked into town anytime. And his mother brought his lunch, and he wasn't good at that wilderness thing. She did his laundry, stuff like that.

JOHN

Yeah, some hermit, right?

DON

Hermit of convenience.

KATHERINE

But yeah, I mean, and you're right, and it was this enclave of these romantic, transcendental thinkers, that they believed that they should - it was almost like people having subscriptions today, fans who give them money to support them, they believed that they were pretty much entitled to that. Also, Hawthorne knew one of the presidents, and they traveled together a bit. It was so weird that there's a lot of connections and interconnections, and also between Concord and Boston, because they were pretty close.

JOHN

Well, Katherine Ramsland, we could go on forever as per usual. Your latest novel, not your latest - well, not your latest book. Your latest book, as you tell us, is Sunny Says: Horse Sense from the Horse's Mouth, which although it sounds like a kids’ book, Don and I will be consulting it right after this show is over.

DON

OK.

KATHERINE

There are actually philosophers in it, his ancestors, like Sun-crates.

JOHN

Oh no.

KATHERINE

Sunna-clitis.

JOHN

Oh my God. Who's the, who's the Chinese guy, who does the art of war?

KATHERINE

Sun Tzu! He is Sonny's ancestor.

JOHN

Sun-fucius must be in there.

KATHERINE

Yes, Sun-fucius is in there!

JOHN

Sun fucius! There you go!

DON

Marrying Katherine's love of horses with John's love of puns.

JOHN

But the book we've been talking about this entire session is Dead Handed, the third in The Nutcracker Investigation series. I thought it was a ripsnorter and really carried me away, not to be too punny about it, and you really should give it a read and it'll give you a chill. And Katherine, I hope you come back soon to regale us with more of all the stuff you do, which is there's so much of it. So, thank you for coming back on.

KATHERINE

Always. Oh, thanks for having me. It was a blast. You guys have great, great questions.