May 22, 2024
As the son of a U.S. State Department Foreign Service Officer,
J. David Bethel
hopscotched around the world, from one of his father’s embassy
postings to another, finding
himself, in 1959, in Cuba, sitting in a hotel room with Fidel
Castro, just one week after Castro
had come to power.
Today, Bethel is an award-winning author, mining his memories
from his globetrotting
youth as the son of an embassy press attache for his political and
psychological thrillers that
explore the violence always simmering in the dark recesses of human
nature. As Bethel says,
“My childhood was fertile training ground for a fiction
writer.”
His latest novel, Mapping the Night (2024), follows a pair of
investigators – one for the
FBI, the other for the NYPD -- whose probe into a New York City
serial killer is being hampered
by a person – or persons – in government. The question is
why?
As with Bethel’s other books, Mapping the Night is fast-paced,
intricately plotted, with
compelling characters in the kinds of glamorous, high-stakes worlds
in which Bethel grew up
and later worked.
Not surprisingly, many of his novels lean into politics. Evil
Town (2015, Tell-Tale
Publishing Group) tracks an FBI investigation into the murder of
the wife of popular Florida
congressman that takes the story from the Pentagon to small-town
Florida. No Immaculate Conceptions (2018, Two Dog Publishing)
follows a frantic young presidential speechwriter who is
pursued by a psychopath.
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