Michael P. King

Hard at work on the next Travelers book, tentatively titled The Casino Switcheroo. Finally done with researching the various details (I’ve shared some of my findings in previous emails).

Research. Research. Research. How does it affect the writing of a Travelers crime thriller?

The Freeport Robbery: The Travelers Book 4 makes a good example of where research led to the premise for a book.

From a The Economist magazine article, I learned about freeports. (I’d never heard of them before!)

Freeports were originally areas at ports where cargo could be moved from one ship to another without going through customs. Quick and easy. No entry into the country. No extra paperwork. But freeports evolved to include vaults, much like bank vaults, where valuable can be stored indefinitely. Nowadays, freeports could be located at airports as well as ship ports.

So if you have diamonds, or art, or gold bars, or anything else that you don’t want to declare and pay taxes on, you could store them in a freeport vault, which isn’t, technically, in any country. It’s between countries. Which got me thinking . . .

What if a bad actor stored a stolen object in a freeport?

And what if an insurance company hired a consultant to get the object back so that they wouldn’t have to pay off the insurance claim?

And what if the consultant had an ulterior motive for helping the insurance company?

And how would our con artists get involved in this scheme? What would be in it for them?

From these ideas we end up with insurance investigator Aaron Rickover, FBI agent Grace Mosley, millionaire James Denison and a cross-country chase for the Cellini casket.

You can check it out here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071NHN3VZ

Happy reading!

P.S. If you’d like to see what a million dollars in hundreds would look like, click here: http://www.cockeyed.com/inside/million/million_dollars.html