Cynthia Harrison

Sounds like the best way to work on a novel, Cindy. I’ve often marveled at how novelists have to research so much of what goes into their books. Reading Alice Hoffman’s “Practical Magic,” for example, I realized that Hoffman must have spent A LOT of time reading about herbal lore and healing. Fascinating stuff.

I’m reminded of the so-called CSI Effect.

From Wikipedia:

The CSI effect (sometimes referred to as the CSI syndrome) is a reference to the phenomenon of popular television shows such as the CSI franchise raising crime victims’ and jury members’, even criminals’, real-world expectations of forensic science, especially crime scene investigation and DNA testing.

It makes me wonder if writers of criminal fiction have a responsibility to reflect the real procedures of policing (which readers may have no concept of) or to reflect the “CSI” Hollywood version (which readers may be familiar with, may expect to be true, even when they are not.)

I guess the best example of this that I have personally encountered was discovering some genuine footage of a prisoner shooting themselves in custody on the Snopes.com website. [You can view the article and video here, though be advised it is a bit confronting.] As they note it is so far removed from the kind of manufactured violence that we are familiar with from television and movies.

Best of luck with the book.