Author Spotlight: Stephen B. King

I left Perth, Australia, to go East and find fame and fortune in the music business as a long-haired rock guitarist. I wrote poems and music, and my band used to open for some pretty big groups in my wild days. I gave it all up for love and got married (as you do when the right one comes along). Then, real life took over, children came along, and I threatened to write a book for so many years my long-suffering wife eventually pushed me into it by buying me a laptop and saying, “No more excuses, do it.” And so began this amazing journey. Since then, I’ve published twenty-one books, and I would like to think that, thanks to the amazing editors I’ve worked with, my storytelling ability has improved over time and with practice because I left school far too early to learn the finer points of good grammar. My first book was published by a UK publisher thirteen years ago, so I achieved my lifelong ambition late in life.�

A Love To Die/Kill For by Stephen B. King

This is Author Stephen B. King’s writing and publication journey in his own words…

Inspiration to start writing…

The inspiration for my first book, called Forever Night, came from a line in a song by Leonard Cohen, titled “Nevermind.” The line was: ‘I live among you well disguised.’ The line resonated with me so deeply that I took a few days off from work, went and stayed in a place called Eagle Bay for four days, and wrote 40,000 words. That was the beginning. Once finished, my lovely daughter, Tania, did some preliminary edits, and one of the first publishing houses I submitted to agreed to publish it. My first love of genre for writing in is most definitely psychological thrillers, and I love sharing what goes on in a serial killer’s mind to make them do what they do. My most successful series to date is The Deadly Glimpses Series,now five books, which started life as a trilogy. The first book in the Series is called Glimpse, Memoir of a Serial Killer.While the police procedural/ serial killer hunt genre is closest to my heart, I have also written romantic thrillers, such as Winter at the Light, as well as time travel (end-of-the-world) thrillers like Thirty-Three Days. Inspiration can come at odd times, and leads me to write where that idea takes me.

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A Love to Die/Kill For Blurb:

When Susan is diagnosed with a fatal skin disorder, her world collapses. Wracked with despair, she sits on the ledge of a Manhattan building, waiting to jump. Police negotiator Dave, driven by his own trauma, saves her life.

Pledging to help one another, Susan offers advice about Dave’s marriage, which is in shambles due to Lynne’s suspected infidelity. Dave helps Susan, who has always been beautiful, to understand that her life isn’t over while there is hope.

Dave discovers his wife is the victim of a controlling, obsessive, and insane man. Lynne, Dave, and Susan become close. But Dave and Lynne’s children are abducted, and Dave must confront a man who terrorizes innocent people to further his own obsession, including murder.

Stephen’s favourite scene from A Love to Die/Kill For

Dave slowly leaned out of the window, turned his head to the right, and saw her. He was stunned by the view so much he couldn’t speak for a moment. In profile, she was so achingly beautiful he felt like someone had thudded him in the chest with a hammer. She sat with her long, lithe legs, covered in a long business skirt, dangling into the void. The evening breeze gently blew her impossibly thin shoulder-length blonde hair around her face. Her skin was pale, her nose perfectly shaped to suit her face, her lips were ruby red, and he could tell she was curved in all the right places by the way her matching jacket clung to her upper body. As she gazed at the approaching sunset, it dawned on Dave that he was looking at one of the most beautiful, if not the most beautiful, women he had ever seen. He guessed her age to be around thirty, and he was sure that if he could make her smile, her face would light up a room.

“Hi,” he said softly, not wanting to make her jump in fright. “Do you mind if I join you?”

She turned to him, her face showing the abject misery she must be feeling to have decided that her life was no longer worth living. Dave smiled his best; I’m not here to talk you out of this, smile. Without waiting for a reply, he hoisted his body onto the window ledge and crawled through, breaking one of the golden rules in the suicide negotiator’s handbook: not to put himself in danger. It was a fact that sometimes, when a jumper changed their mind and came to their senses, they panicked and grabbed hold of the person trying to save them, and they both fell into the next world.

“Please don’t,” she said with a note of urgency in her trembling voice. “Please, just leave me alone.”