Continued from Part One, this is the second part of my interview with novelist George Shuman.

In the first part of this interview I talked about what a pleasant surprise George Shuman's new book, Last Breath, is. I didn’t think I would like the book because it’s essentially about Sherry Moore, a blind psychic who solves crimes because she can touch someone dead and “see” the last 18 seconds of his or her life. The concept struck me as too contrived and new-agey.

But Shuman, a retired Maryland police officer, makes it work. I was curious what others in law enforcement thought of his premise, one he admits he would have trouble accepting himself if he had to deal with it on a case he was investigating. There was a personal reason for my interest too. He lives near me and sets some of the story’s events near me as well. I decided to take advantage of the opportunity to ask questions about these and other issues.

Scott Butki: What has the response to your books been from the law enforcement field? 

George Shuman: I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback from cops and federal agents that I’ve worked with in Washington D.C. over the years, and from law enforcement retirees who are on their second careers as professional security consultants around the world, such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Consensus is that I’m spot on procedurally and that I’ve really nailed the characters we’ve all encountered in one dark place or another. 

For most of us from law enforcement, even after all these years of retirement, we still have the “cop dreams,” about jammed guns and dark alley chases and we remember all to well the things said and done when the heart was pumping and we were not highly trained fighting machines, but young men and women making split second decisions that were sometimes right and sometimes wrong.

Thrillers are a great recreational release for many of us still, but we are particularly hard critics when it comes to our own genre, critical as to whether or not an author or screenwriter gets the procedural aspects right, which I will grant can be gleaned through research, but to hear authors and especially screenwriters attempt “cop talk” can be like nails on a chalkboard when it doesn’t ring true. 

Were you describing real places in this book? What do you consider the benefits and consequences of using real places? 

You know I was just talking about this subject last week with a local woman who had read 18 Seconds and tells me that she knows not only the doctor that I was writing about in the first chapter but she was pretty sure that she knew the property that I was describing -- with two stone pillars in front -- on Route 711 in Westmoreland County.  I drive up and down Route 711 quite a bit now that I live near it, but at the time that I wrote 18 Seconds, I was drawing from my memory of one trip when I was a kid.  I’ve been told that I got the character of Sewickly, Pennsylvania exactly right, and I’ve never been there.