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Allison Leotta, novelist, former sex-crimes prosecutor, tv critic

Author of A Good Killing, Speak of the Devil, and others.

Low Winter Sun

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Did anyone else watch the pilot episode of “Low Winter Sun” last night?  It’s a new crime drama, based in my hometown, Detroit.  My Michigan friends have been buzzing about it.

The show aims to be “The Wire” of Detroit, and it got a lot right.  Dark and gritty, last night’s story swerved with unexpected twists, and made great use of Detroit’s most post-apocalyptic scenery.

But, by the end of the episode, I wasn’t sure who I was supposed to be rooting for. The series hero, Frank Agnew, is a brooding cop who appears to be a combination of corrupt and gullible.  He’s tricked into killing another cop, then is placed in charge of the subsequent homicide investigation.  The strongest feeling I had toward Frank was the desire to see him arrested. The most likable character was the little-seen female Muslim detective. I hope we’ll see more of her – and other female characters – as the show continues.  I’ll keep watching, and I’m looking forward to seeing how the series develops.

Here’s what other people are saying about the show, compiled by Deadline Detroit.

MS-13, the real-life gang from SPEAK OF THE DEVIL

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As a D.C. sex-crimes prosecutor, I dealt with some of the city’s most chilling crimes – but few were as frightening as those involving MS-13, which National Geographic calls “America’s most dangerous gang.”

Also known as the Mara Salvatrucha, MS-13 has mushroomed from a small band of L.A. thugs into an international organization with an estimated 50,000 members and cliques in almost every major American city. They kill for fun, throw parties for the purpose of raping their female guests, and coerce their girlfriends into becoming prostitutes. The gang actively recruits middle-schoolers – and never lets members walk away. In the last decade, MS-13 has become so violent, powerful, and brutally misogynistic, the FBI created a task force solely to fight them.

As a prosecutor, I handled many cases where victims of haunting MS-13 crimes refused to testify, for fear of gang reprisals. “Speak of the devil and he will appear,” one survivor said. Often, my biggest challenge wasn’t legal maneuvering but persuading witnesses that talking about evil is necessary to defeat it.

These cases inspired me to do extensive research into MS-13 for my third novel. I spoke to police officers and federal agents, and drew on my own experience prosecuting these crimes. In SPEAK OF THE DEVIL, I try to provide an authentic glimpse into the shadowy world of the Mara Salvatrucha: what tempts so many kids to join, the bonds and secret rituals that keep them coming back, and why it’s nearly impossible to quit.

Much of my novel is drawn from elements of real MS-13 cases: Gang members pimping out fourteen-year-old girls at construction sites; a police raid on a brothel that coincided with a machete-wielding MS invasion of the same brothel – and the resulting battle; and a teenage girl murdered by her MS lover when she tried leave the gang and go into Witness Protection.

While SPEAK OF THE DEVIL is a crime story, it is also the story of a young woman coming into her own, finding her place and power in the world. Anna Curtis is a young D.C. prosecutor basking in the love of her life even as she conducts the tireless, sometimes frightening work of prosecuting MS-13. This is my third Anna Curtis book; she and I have grown and evolved with each other over the last few years. I’m so honored and gratified by how much she has resonated with readers.

Although SPEAK OF THE DEVIL deals with dark themes, I think it is ultimately a hopeful story: about how far we’ll go to protect our families, the power of redemption, and the ways that love can prevail over violence.

I hope you’ll enjoy it.

Amazon    Barnes & Noble     Books-a-Million    IndieBound     Wal-Mart

Speak of the Devil!

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My next novel comes out this Tuesday, August 6th!  I’m so excited to share it with you.  It’s my best book yet.

Although SPEAK OF THE DEVIL won’t land in stores til next week, you can get a sneak peak now.  Click here to read the first three chapters.   Or (better yet) click on one of these links to buy the book:

Amazon    Barnes & Noble     Books-a-Million    IndieBound     Wal-Mart  Speak of the Devil

Let’s Meet in Person!

I’m going on a book tour.  If you’re near any of these cities, I’d love to see you.  It’s fun to interact on the blog, but would be even better to meet you in person!  Hope to see you at one of these events:

Tues. August 6 — 7:00 pm
Books-A-Million
31150 Southfield Rd, Beverly Hills, MI
Thurs. August 8  — 7:00 pm
Politics & Prose Bookstore
5015 Connecticut Ave. NW, Washington, DC
Weds. August 14 — 6:30 pm
The Mysterious Bookshop
58 Warren Street, New York, NY
Sat. September 1 — 3:00 pm
AJC Decatur Book Festival
Panel with Marcia Clark
Downtown Decatur Square, Decatur, GA
Weds. September 18 — 6:30 pm
Enoch Pratt Free Library
400 Cathedral St., Baltimore, MD
Meanwhile, here’s me, wearing more eye makeup than usual, talking about the book.

Hope you’re having a great summer, and hope you enjoy SPEAK OF THE DEVIL!

Avoiding Every Woman’s Worst Nightmare

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In May, three women escaped from a house in Cleveland, where they had been held for years.  Horrific details of their experience have since emerged:  a man named Ariel Castro kidnapped each woman at separate times, chained them up in his house, repeatedly raped them, and fathered a child (now six years old) with one.  Today, Castro pled guilty and is facing life in prison “plus 1000 years.”

Many women have asked me what they can do to protect themselves from such danger. Based on my experience handling hundreds of sex-offense prosecutions and talking to investigators and women’s self-defense experts, here are my top tips.

GENERALLY

Trust your instincts. We all have built-in alarm systems. You know that hair-standing-up-on-the-back-of-your-neck feeling. Listen to it. Get out of a situation where you feel something is off – even if you can’t articulate why. Your unconscious mind takes in much more information than your conscious mind does, and it uses those neck hairs to send you the message. When you get that vague feeling, hit the road. You can figure out what exactly made you feel that way later – when you’re safe.

Don’t be afraid to be rude. As women, we’re taught from an early age to be polite and conversational. Predators use this to their advantage. “My car just broke down, can I use your phone?” is a classic way they get into your home. Same with, “Can I help you bring in your groceries?” Often these guys seem nice at first. Resist the urge to be sweet and polite – at least to strange men offering or asking for help.

YOUR HOME

Lock your doors and windows. This seems so elementary, but we forget it all the time. The East Coast Rapist  would scope out apartment complexes, looking for openings. Out of a fifty-unit complex, he would attack the one woman who’d left her window or sliding-glass door open. Get a good deadbolt and use it.

Lower the blinds when it’s dark outside.  Some predators look into windows to find places that are empty or where only a woman is home.

Keep the exterior well-lit. Turn on the lights outside your house. Motion-sensor lights are also helpful. Predators are looking for an easy hit. Make your home a hard target.

Watch your back when you unlock your front door.  This is a vulnerable time, when an attacker may push into your home.

Get a dog. This is the number one piece of casual advice police officers give about home safety. Predators and thieves just don’t want to deal with dogs. Alarm systems have also been shown to be a deterrent.

WALKING OUTSIDE

Be alert. Notice what’s going on around you.

Don’t wear headphones. We use only two senses to alert us to this kind of danger: sight and sound. Don’t deprive yourself of one of them.

Walk with confidence. Predators are looking for an easy target. Your gait can communicate that you’re physically capable and athletic (even if you’re not). Walk quickly, stand straight, and swing your arms a little.

Don’t take rides from strangers.  Each of Castro’s victims accepted a ride from him, which is how he kidnapped them.

No shortcuts. Avoid alleyways, woods, and the like.  I can’t tell you how many sexual assaults start in the neighborhood “cut.” Walk on well-lit, busy streets.

Walk in groups whenever possible. This doesn’t guarantee safety – one of the East Coast Rapist’s last attacks involved three teenagers out trick-or-treating – he threatened them with a weapon and sexually assaulted two of them before the third girl texted for help. A few years ago, a gang of young men attacked couples taking romantic walks on the National Mall. So, it’s not a 100% guarantee – but you are much less likely to be attacked if you’re with other people.

If attacked, run and scream. A woman who both runs and screams has a good chance of getting away from a potential assailant.  On the other hand, if a mugger just demands your purse, give it up.  You can throw it on the ground and run in the other direction.  Don’t fight over things you can replace.  Everything in your purse is replaceable.  You are not.

Never get in the car. If someone tries to force you into a car, fight like hell to get away. Your chances of surviving the encounter plummet once you get in. The reason he wants you in the car is to take you somewhere no one can see what he’s going to do. If someone had a gun pointed at my head and told me to get into his car, I’d run. He probably wouldn’t shoot me on the street, and even if he did, I’d rather take my chances with his aim then trust his goodwill once he has me in a secluded spot.

IN BARS

Go with friends. Look out for each other.

Watch your drink. Date rape drugs are a problem. Some taste salty or bitter, so if a drink tastes weird, stop drinking it. But some are tasteless. You could be taking a risk if you go back to a drink you’ve left unattended, or accept an open drink from a stranger. If you do start to feel woozy, have a trusted friend get you home ASAP.

Get tested. If you think you’ve been a victim of a date rape drug, go to a hospital and ask to be screened as soon as possible. These drugs are metabolized by the body quickly. Time is crucial.

IF YOU ARE SEXUALLY ASSAULTED

Call the police immediately. Don’t bathe, brush your teeth or wash yourself in any way – this can destroy critical evidence against the attacker. The police will arrange for a sexual assault nurse examination, which will collect evidence which may be able to prove that the assault happened and identify the rapist. They will also give you medicine to protect against sexually transmitted disease and pregnancy. Most jurisdictions will also set you up with an advocate, who can help you with the emotional healing.

Note: these tips are for avoiding sexual assaults by a stranger. Most violence against women is perpetrated by someone the woman knows, often intimately. That’s a different issue. Click here for advice on acquaintance rape or domestic violence.

 

SVU’s Season 14 Finale: “Her Negotiation”

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The good news: Law & Order: SVU will be back this autumn for a 15th season. The bad news: they ended their 14th with one of the silliest episodes of the year.

Recap: A guy burns off his own fingerprints on a hot stove, then ambles to Central Park and uses his newfound anonymity to flash some pretty Scandinavian tourists. The entire SVU squad foregoes their day off to process the flasher.

At first, our detectives have a hard time ID’ing the fingerprintless guy, but he tells them the halfway house where he’s staying, and they soon have a copy of his drivers license. He’s Louis Williams, who has no prior record of sexual assaults.

Louis is released from jail and promptly goes to the home of a grandmotherly witness to the flashing. He holds a gun to Gramma’s head, ties her to the bed, and repeatedly rapes her. He heats up keys and metal hangers and brands her. He beats her up. He leaves his semen and saliva all over her and her apartment, then leaves her alive and tied to the bed. (Because the criminal mastermind who’s brilliant and committed enough to burn off his own fingerprints is going to leave his DNA all over the apartment, and the witness around to ID him. Sure.)

Gramma’s neighbor finds her and calls the police. As soon as they arrive, a bloodied Gramma exclaims from the stretcher she’s being carried out on, “It was Louis Williams! The guy from the park! He raped me!”

Olivia and Nick interrogate Louis, who gives a “hypothetical” but totally damning statement in which he lists all the intimate details only the rapist would know. “What do you want to hear?” he asks Olivia. “How I put out my cigarettes on her, how I branded her private parts with keys and hot hangers?”

He goes on and on, in a detailed monologue about raping Gramma that was so disturbing I may need years of therapy to recover from it. [Read more…]

SVU Episode #14-23: Brief Interlude

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What’s more dangerous: cheating on your husband or giving a sandwich to a homeless guy? SVU says: the sandwich.

Recap:

A pretty blond parties at a throbbing nightclub and grinds between a man and a woman with a suspiciously large Adam’s apple. Her battered body is found by a jogger the next day; she’s lying in a rowboat bobbing on the river behind the mayor’s mansion. The victim is in a coma, and has no ID.

First interview: the too-nervous jogger, still clutching her jogging stroller. “You were far from home. Were you going to meet your lover – with your baby?” Amanda asks, in a tone conveying that this would be pretty despicable, even by SVU standards.

But it turns out the jogger was going to buy Adderall from the two teens who were rifling through the victim’s pockets. The pimply teens are considered, then quickly dismissed as the rapists, but not before they turn over a hotel key card they found in the victim’s pockets.

The Medical Examiner makes a special guest appearance to declare: (1) the victim has scars from a hernia operation done by a surgeon who wasn’t American, (2) DNA on the victim’s body is from three different men, and (3) it would be more convenient if the victim were dead, because then we could better estimate when she’d been assaulted.

(Yikes. Many ME’s have a dark perspective, but, wow, Dr. Warner, that was cold.)

[Read more…]

BREAKING BAD and the Deeper Game — By Thomas Kaufman

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I’m delighted to welcome my friend, the talented writer Thomas Kaufman, to the Prime-Time Crime Review to talk about one of our favorite TV shows.  Check out Tom’s terrific new collection of short stories, ERASED.  And enjoy his guest post!  — Allison

If you watch the series BREAKING BAD, you know it’s terrific. Series creator Vince Gilligan has assembled a lot of talent, both in front of and behind the camera, to make one of the best shows on TV. If you break the series down, it’s not that different from dozens of other shows — BREAKING BAD has its share of murders, chases, gun fights, and explosions. So what makes it so good?

For starters, the show is like an extraordinary chess match, particularly the last two seasons, when the protagonist, high school chemistry teacher and meth cooker Walter White, gets involved with a drug lord named Gustavo Fring. At one point, Walter tells Fring, “I think your game goes deeper than that.” And the game they play in BREAKINGBAD is deep indeed.

Then there’s the suspense. One of the techniques Gilligan and his writers use is uncertainty – often the audience, along with Walter, is in the dark as to what dangers may be lurking. In fact, when Walter has to adopt an alias, he calls himself Heisenberg, a reference to Werner Heisenberg, a physicist whose uncertainty principal won him the Nobel Prize. This uncertainty helps make the show suspenseful. Imagine plying a chess game where you cannot see your opponent’s moves. That’s what it’s like to watch BREAKING BAD.

Another part of the joy of BREAKING BAD is the dialogue. Now, when people talk, they might mean what they say, but they also have a deeper meaning, a subtext to their words. Actors need subtext to make their work believable. And one of the best actors on the show is Anna Gunn, who plays Walter’s wife, Skyler.

Skyler knows Walter is in a battle of wits with Fring. She is of course worried, for Walter, and for their family. But she’s also worried about Walter – he is changing in ways that confuse and frighten her. Vince Gilligan said he wanted to take Mr Chips and turn him into Scarface. This transformation is clear to Skyler.

At one point during Walter’s conflict with Fring there’s an explosion and three people die. Skyler speaks with Walter on the phone and nearly whispers, “What happened?” On the first level she’s referring to the explosion, but on a deeper level she’s asking Walter, what happened to you? How did you become this way? That’s why BREAKING BAD is so damn good.

When I was growing up, crime shows were always from the point of view of the police. Shows like BREAKINGBAD or THE WIRE would’ve been unthinkable back then. Today, as we explore the dark side of a Walter White or a Stringer Bell, we see ourselves. Granted, we would not do the things they do, but through the writing, directing, acting, cinematography, editing, and sound, we identify with these “heroes.” Walter’s problems become our problems because the writers allow us to understand Walter. And because we understand him, we identify with him, even as he grows more violent and more proficient as playing the game.

Because, believe it or not, BREAKING BAD is a game and we all know the rules — there aren’t any.

Check out ERASED, A new collection of mystery and suspense from PWA/St Martin’s Press Competition winner Thomas Kaufman.

Thanks to years behind the camera, Thomas’s work as a cinematographer informs his writing of ERASED and Other Stories. Filming interviews with Holocaust survivors, cops, PI’s, con men, and killers, Thomas has kept his eyes — and his ears — open.  He has shot multiple projects with Academy award winners Charles Guggenheim, Barbara Kopple, and Mark Harris.  Plus, his time directing and shooting TV crime shows gives his work the feel of what’s real.

‘Kaufman is a welcome new voice in DC crime fiction.” – George Pelecanos, author of WHAT IT WAS
‘Fast and funny, with a huge heart. Kaufman is clearly a writer worth keeping an eye on.’ ­ Steve Hamilton, author of THE LOCK ARTIST

SVU Episode #14-22: Poisoned Motive

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Prisoners fathering children with prison workers; rogue cops going on killing sprees targeting other cops: Tonight’s episode took several real cases of official misconduct and turned them into a fairly unrealistic but fast-moving story about mental illness, rage, and revenge.

Recap:

As Amanda leads a human trafficker on a perp-walk from police headquarters, she’s shot in the shoulder by a sniper hiding on a nearby rooftop! Finn rushes her to the hospital, where she recovers in a slurry morphine stupor. Finn promises to find the bad guy who hurt his partner.

Our detectives cycle through the requisite colorful suspects, including: (1) the “dragon lady” trafficker who was being perp-walked, (2) a hippie druggie friend of Amanda’s no-good sister who had a beef with Amanda for shooting the sister’s no-good boyfriend, and (3) “Escobar,” a notorious drug dealer who tried to kill Finn fifteen years earlier, but failed when Finn’s beloved partner, Luis (who we’ve never heard of before tonight), took the bullet.

Escobar fathered a child with a foxy prison nurse named Anna, who subsequently became an ex-prison-nurse. For a minute, we suspect that she’s helping Escobar plan the attacks. [Read more…]