Guest Post: Why Sacramento?

What a delight it is to welcome author James L’Etoile to Colloquium for the first time.

James is launching a new series with Face of Greed, featuring Detective Emily Hunter. He expounds on why he chose to set the series in California’s capital city, Sacramento. It’s an unusual, but logical choice, as he explains, and not just because he spent many years working in California’s correctional system which is headquartered there. Some of the city’s characteristics — Sacramento is a town not unfamiliar with violent crime — and the all-too-real crime that inspired the first installment of the series, make it an ideal setting for the story.

In Face of Greed, Detective Emily Parker and her partner, Javier Medina, are called to the scene of a brutal home invasion and murder. At first glance, it appears that crimes of opportunity went horribly wrong. But Emily soon realizes there’s more to the crime — and the dead man — than it first appeared. Her investigation uncovers a web of secrets, deceit, and corruption. While the city’s political elite want the case solved quickly, dark forces want it buried.

Torn between the high-stakes investigation and caring for her mother, who is afflicted with early onset Alzheimer’s disease, Emily struggles to find balance. She discovers the dead man blackmailed a federal prosecutor to turn over files pertaining to an investigation into organized crime. When the files disappear, a grieving widow and a prison gang vie for control of the dead man’s secrets. A deadly game of greed and deception pulls Emily deeper into the shadowy world of gang violence and retribution as she walks the razor’s edge to identify the killer . . . without becoming his/her next victim.

Why Sacramento?

by
James L’Etoile

Thanks for inviting me to be a guest here at Colloquium on the day before the official release of Face of Greed. It’s a time when you can exhale a bit because the book you and the publisher have been working on for the better part of a year is finally about to be out in the wild. But at the same time, it is a little anxiety-ridden waiting for the reviews and reactions from readers.

Face of Greed is the first book in a brand-new series, set in Sacramento. The best part of creating a series is you have a blank slate to work with. New characters, different settings, and when you pick a city like Sacramento, you’re presented with a vast pool of story problems to pull from.

Why Sacramento? I’m asked that question quite a bit when I talk about writing crime stories set in California’s capital city. It doesn’t have the pizzaz of Paris, London, Los Angeles, or New York. But a couple of factors make Sacramento a prime location for crime fiction. First, the city is a government town, meaning people come and go, anonymous, unnamed, and invisible. It’s the kind of environment where secrets breed, and backroom deals are sealed.

Rachel Howzell-Hall, the bestselling author of We Lie Here, These Toxic Things, and What Never Happened, said: “In Face of Greed, James L’Etoile gives us a Sacramento rarely seen in crime fiction. In a city without an identity, L’Etoile’s Sacramento bursts with good cops and crooked cops, skinheads and tweakers, bad men and femme fatales. This helluva pageturner has hella heart.”

The impersonal nature of the city has made it a perfect place for crime. And Sacramento has a long history with the darker edge of crime. Serial Killers have made the city their hunting grounds over the past decades. In fact, fifteen percent of the nation’s known serial killers have a connection to Sacramento. That’s a sobering number, but when you dive into the history, the invisible nature of the city is why killers like The I-5 Strangler and the Golden State Killer were able to live and hunt in Sacramento.

In Face of Greed, Detective Emily Hunter is thrown into an investigation in which the city and its anonymous powerbrokers are threatened when one of their own is murdered during a home invasion. The mayor and city leaders are quick to write off the violent attack as a random street crime. Emily finds there is much more to the crime and the victim.

The scenario behind the home invasion was drawn from real life experience. One of the first murder cases I worked on was a home invasion during which the real estate broker was killed in front of his family. Immediately after arrest, the three gang members involved quickly shifted blame to the victim, claiming that he was a drug dealer and failed to make good on his debt. The shooter claimed the victim reached for a gun in his safe and shooting him was self-defense. The façade fell apart quickly, and the jury didn’t believe them. All were convicted and sentenced to long prison terms.

Something about that crime stuck with me. And when it came time to write a fictional account of a home invasion, I thought, “What If?” there was something secretive going on in that home and the victim wasn’t who he pretended to be? The response is Face of Greed.

Meet James

James L’Etoile’s writing is influenced by his twenty-nine years “behind bars,” not as an inmate, but as the associate warden of a maximum-security prison, a hostage negotiator, and Director of the Division of Adult Parole Operations with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. His novels have been short-listed for or awarded Lefty, Anthony, Silver Falchion, and the Public Safety Writers awards. He also pens short stories and screenplays.

Dead Drop and Devil Within are the first two installments in his outstanding Detective Nathan Parker series, while Face of Greed, his latest novel, launches the Detective Emily Hunter series. Served Cold and River of Lies will be released in 2024.

Connect with James at his website, or on Goodreads, X (Twitter), Facebook, Instagram or BookBub.