Mysteries in the Mile High City
“What’s Denver’s dating profile?”
When the prolific novelist, Rachel Howzell Hall, asked me that question in a podcast interview, I was stumped.
“Is she sultry or what?” Rachel continued. “I want to know more about the city. Who is Denver?”
Rachel’s question forced me to dig deep into why I write crime novels about my hometown. While Denver doesn’t carry the mystique of the usual suspects of Los Angeles, New York or Chicago, it is the only place I’ve called home and, for me, the perfect setting for a mystery.Denver is a beautiful place to live. Blue skies and painted sunsets are the norm. While many who live outside of Colorado think of snowy blizzards blanketing the Mile High City, we locals boast that we enjoy over three hundred days of sunshine each year.
In her poem turned song, America the Beautiful, Katharine Lee Bates described what she saw traveling from Massachusetts to Colorado.
‘O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties,
Above the fruited plain.’
In Denver, the beauty Bates depicted is within easy reach. Spacious skies are a daily reality. Amber waves and fruited plains lie a short drive to the east. To the west, the Rocky Mountains are often robed with a majestic purple as they wear their crowns of snow.
After a long pause, I assembled an answer to Rachel’s question.
“If there’s a person who wears a mask and is in denial that the mask is on their face, that’s Denver,” I said. “My city is that person who looks wonderful from afar, but up close you realize that they’re wearing a lot of makeup.”
Denver is a beautiful place to live and I love the city I call home. However, in this beautiful place to live, not everyone is living beautifully. Denver is a city of contrasts ripe with possibilities for any crime and thriller writer. There are many writers who’ve looked beneath the surface of this wondrous place and found compelling conditions for their crime stories.
Here are five of my favorite books that feature the Mile High City...
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