BASH: Love, Madness, and Murder (Author Interview)




https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09HQ2X7Q8/

BASH:Love, Madness, and Murder looks like a great thriller.  What can you tell us about Ashley?

Ashley Roper is a native son of Charleston, SC. He is a decorated veteran of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. In civilian life he becomes a writer, but the flashbacks of war lead to nightmares and alcohol. After writing a successful memoir of his experiences, he enters recovery and starts his own weekly tabloid. His ever patient wife, Sally J has stuck with him through his personal trials at some personal cost to her. He tests her again by planning to enter a nearby hospital for the criminally insane undercover as a patient. What could possibly go wrong he tells her. Read the story and find out.

 

Can you tell us a little about the plot?

Ash enters the hospital with the help of reluctant security chief Lyle Dawkins who wants to get to the bottom of the causes of mishaps, injuries, a murder, and drugs entering the hospital grounds. Unforeseen circumstances lead to Ash being stuck in the hospital as a real patient. Sally J calls on high powered Charleston attorney and former lover Roswell Chamblee to help spring Ash. Bureaucratic roadblocks, legal complications, and unresolved romantic issues complicate the process. Hard drinking, blues playing psychiatrist “Doc” Kerrigan knows the difference between a reporter and a patient but ends up in the middle of the dilemma himself. In the meantime, Hurricane Cleo heads toward the Carolina coast which catches everyone off guard.

 

Any plans for a series?

“Doc” Kerrigan may appear again as a psychiatric sleuth teaming up with Ash who knows how to dig for a story.

 

How did you come up with the story in BASH: Love, Madness, and Murder?

I am a practicing psychiatrist who in the past was chief of staff of a large facility for the criminally insane. Although BASH: Love, Madness, and Murder is fiction, my experience with the criminally insane informed the story. Also, I lived many years along the South Carolina coast which influenced the locale and color of my writing

 

Did anything stick out as particularly challenging when writing BASH: Love, Madness, and Murder?

Mentally ill people who commit crimes do bad things but they also have a human side and are deserving of compassion as well. It was important to find that balance.


What do you like to do when not writing?

I still see patients although not full time anymore. Also I like to play the piano, especially the blues, just like Doc Kerrigan, although I don’t drink as much.

 

Where can readers find out more about your work?

I have another recently published novel, Finding Lorena, which is a time travel adventure and romance. The premise is an unhappy middle aged school teacher is hit by a car in downtown Charleston and wakes up 30 years earlier as his younger self. Young again, he seeks to right the wrongs of his past and find the woman who was to be his true love but was tragically taken from him.