I’m thrilled and excited to have my first release with Berkley Prime Crime
hitting the market. KINGDOM
COME is a murder mystery set in Amish community in Lancaster County,
Pennsylvania.
Holding the paperback book in my hands is the culmination of a long journey.
This is a story that wouldn’t die, and one that struggled to find its proper
form like a morphing shapeshifter.
Besides writing books, I also design computer games under the name Jane Jensen.
KINGDOM COME, with a
female detective, was first conceived of as an adventure game. I wanted to do a
mystery/thriller that had a strong romantic element to it. You would play the
role of the female detective trying to uncover who dunnit. Romance is something
I don’t feel we see enough of in games, so the romantic aspect of the story was
critical. The game proposal was for a live action game in order to best
represent the romantic/erotic elements of the story. But it was a risky project,
and an expensive one, and we didn’t find funding for it.
Here’s the front of that original pitch.
The proposal sat on my hard drive for a year or so, like so many other game
proposals. Those who pitch film scripts or game concepts know that many of them
will never get made. However, KINGDOM COME would not let
me forget it. I had developed most of the plot while working on the game pitch,
and the story haunted me.
You see, I live in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania myself, having moved back here
after twenty years on the west coast. This was a story I wanted to tell, a story
about how I feel about this little area of land, the charm and pull of it, the
old and the new, the good and bad. I have a love/hate relationship with the
conservativism of the area, and while I admire the simplicity of the Amish
lifestyle, as a modern woman (who loves modern tech and speaking my mind), I
could never go there mysefl. To sum, I had feels about this story that kept
prodding me in the arse like a bad spring in a car seat.
So I sat down and wrote the story out as a novel. Initially, though, I decided
to change it so that the main detective character was a man and the romantic
subplot was a gay romance. You see, I also write gay romance under the nom de
plume Eli Easton, and
I already had a publisher that would take the story. All I had to do was write
it and it would be released fairly quickly.
But when the first draft of the novel was done, I still wasn’t at peace.
Although I liked the tension of having a mature, gay Amish man who had been
trying to live his life by the rules, and a brash male detective who was openly
gay (Should I still write that story? Maybe I should!), the original bones of
the story didn’t sit quite right in that guise. I had first developed my
detective as a female character, and, holy crap, she was not happy to be
usurped. There was also a certain level of sympathy and understanding that she
had to the victims as a female, right or wrong, that was missing from the male
detective. The gay aspect was interesting, but it seemed to struggle with the
murder mystery for dominance instead of being mutually enhancing.
So I sat down and in one week rewrote the protagonist back to Elizabeth Harris.
This, this was the story. I was pretty sure of it now! J But the bad news was, I
no longer had a publisher. It was not an "Eli Easton" book. It also
was way more of a murder mystery by now and less of a romance. So the search
began with the help of my agent. A year later, the manuscript found a home at
Berkley Prime Crime, and as of January 2016 it is finally published!
I don’t know if you’ll be able to see the bones of the previous versions in this
book, but I feel like the changes the story went through made it a much stronger
piece than it would have been otherwise. The various iterations, shelving, and
picking back up, made me really focus on the important elements at its core. I
have since written a sequel to KINGDOM COME, another
Elizabeth Harris mystery, that will be coming out in August 2016. I hope you
like the series. Please do drop me a note
and let me know!
All the best,
Jane Jensen
Jane Jensen is a novelist and game designer. Best known for her
computer game series Gabriel Knight and her novel Dante's Equation,
she has published seventeen games and four thrillers. She also writes romance as
Eli Easton.
Amish country in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, has always been a place
of quiet beauty—until a shocking murder shatters the peace, and leaves a
troubled detective picking up the pieces
After her husband is
murdered, Detective Elizabeth Harris turns in her NYPD badge and moves back
home, hoping that a quiet life in remote Pennsylvania Dutch country will help
her overcome the dark memories of her ten years in New York. But when a
beautiful, scantily clad “English” girl is found dead in the barn of a prominent
Amish family, Elizabeth knows that she’s uncovered an evil that could shake the
community to its core.
Elizabeth’s boss is convinced this was the work of
an “English,” as outsiders are called in Lancaster County. But Elizabeth isn’t
so sure. All she’s missing is an actual lead—until another body is found: this
time, a missing Amish girl. Now Elizabeth must track down a killer with deep
ties to a community that always protects its own—no matter how deadly the cost…
Oooh! An Amish murder mystery! Sounds thrilling! Thank you for the chance to win.
(Kathleen Gardiner 11:39am January 20, 2016)
I found your blog very interesting. This sounds like a book I would enjoy reading. I'll have to remember to look for books written under the name of Jane Jensen.
(Anna Speed 11:45am January 20, 2016)
Love the Amish and admire their way of life. I have visited Lancaster several
times and plan to visit again.
(Diane McMahon 6:09pm January 20, 2016)
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