Devil Strip

Amazon : Barnes & Noble : iTunes : Kobo

Excerpt:

“I’m a linguist.”

“We know.”

“No, I’m a really good linguist.”

“Good like if Daniel Jackson was real, good?” Jessie asked.

Livy swallowed. “Remember that little boy from Denver who was kidnapped two years ago?”

They both nodded. To not know would have required living in a sensory deprivation tank for six months. Twenty-four hour news channels were clogged with every tidbit about Baby Marcus. It was the biggest job she could talk about.

“I broke the case. I worked with the profiler and thanks to a weird dialectic tic in the ransom calls, we narrowed the field of suspects to a few dozen men who had lived in a small section of Ohio. From that the police identified the kidnapper and arrested him and his partner.”

 

This is based on a real thing. There was a kidnapping in Arizona, I believe, that was unraveled when the FBI called in a forensic linguist to analyze the note. The kidnapper had used the term devil strip in reference to the little bit of land between the street and the sidewalk and there’s only one place in the country that uses that odd terminology, Northeast Ohio. Law enforcement was able to narrow down the list of suspects to the guy who had grown up in Northest Ohio and catch him. Daniel Jackson is the archeologist from Stargate.

Reserve your copy of the complete Strangers In a Strange Land while it’s on sale. 99¢ until release day.