Seeing Characters Come Alive

Last Friday night, my co-author, Deputy Chief Joe Loughlin, organized a big launch party for his Portland friends at the Regency Hotel. Around seven p.m., when the party was well underway, Joe announced that we were going to be doing a press conference, and a few minutes later, there were people with TV cameras and Joe was standing at the podium, speaking into the mic.

This was not the sort of book party I was used to. Mine are generally populated by my neighbors, the friends who have supported me through the long process of writing a book, and lots of other writers.

Joe spoke about the process of writing the book, and his goals for writing the book--to immortalize Amy St. Laurent's spirit, celebrating all that she had done in her twenty-five years of life; to warn other young women about the existence of predators, how ready they are to prey on an unwary or trusting moment, and how often they don't look predatory but may be extremely glib and charming; to take readers inside the investigation so they can have a realistic glimpse of the police officer's daily reality, and see how dedicated and hard-working the case detectives were; and last, but by no means least, to make people aware of the Amy St. Laurent foundation, begun by Amy's mother just months after her daughter's death, and to promote the foundations goals of funding projects such as R.A.D. courses, to help make other vulnerable women and children safer.

Then came what was for me an amazing moment. One by one, Joe called forward all of the people I'd striven so hard for the past two years to bring to life. The primary detectives, Danny Young from the Portland Police Department and Scott Harakles from the Maine State Police. Sgt. Bruce Coffin, the other Portland detective who'd worked on the case. The detective's supervising sergeants, Sgt. Tommy Joyce, from Portland, and Sgt. Matt Stewart, from the State Police. Then came the wardens, my wonderful telephone pals, who had generously spent so much time explaining their part in the search for Amy's body: Lt. Pat Dorian, who had made that first, tentative phone call offering help, and Sgt. Kevin Adam, the mapping and GPS expert. They were joined by the two prosecutors who'd tried the case, Deputy Attorney General Bill Stokes and Assistant Attorney General Fern LaRochelle.

Then Amy's family joined the line. Her mother, Diane Jenkins, her father, Dennis St. Laurent, her sister Julie, her stepmother, Kathy Tuttle, her ex-boyfriend, Richard Sparrow, and Diane's good friend, Lucille Holt.

Suddenly, lined up across the back of a hotel function room were many of the major characters from the book. When Diane stepped up to the podium, and spoke of how the book would be worth it if it saved just one young woman from what had happened to her daughter, most of us were in tears. And it brought home again, as had so many other moments during the writing of this book, how this isn't just a story. This is a real book about real people. Real dedication. Real heroes. Real suffering and real loss.

And once again, as has happened so many times during the writing of Finding Amy, I felt the huge responsibility of trying to tell Amy's story, and hoped I'd done it well.

Here are some comments from our readers:


I loved how you made the real life of police officers and their work
come alive. I was literally in tears about 4 or 5 times. It was
fascinating...you must write more! Really, though, the heart and soul you put into that project shines through on every page. Congratulations.

Lisa Beecher
Chief of Police
University of Southern Maine


Just finished your book. The most emotional, gripping book I've ever read. When you finally found her, I bawled like a baby. Was sitting at my kitchen counter reading the book, and when I came to the page when you'd finally determined it was Amy, I put the book down and just cried. Hard.

Cried again like a baby when the verdict came in.

Christ I knew the outcome and I was STILL on the edge of my seat. I'll never look at you and Tommy Joyce the same again. Thank God you had the guts and courage to put this in writing.

Bob Cott

The 3:00 a.m. Club

I'm only a part-time member of the 3:00 a.m. club, those restless sleepers who find themselves awake, brains buzzing with anxiety, ideas, or lists in the darkest hours of the night, but last night I was up and writing and wondering what the other members of the club were doing out in their dark and private spaces. It's strange to sit alone at the keyboard, imagining other writers doing the same while the world around us is sleeping.

This is supposed to be the honeymoon time--those lovely moments when the book is finally written and beginning to appear in stores and the writer can sit back and enjoy a sense of accomplishment before reviews start coming out--some inevitably unkind--and the pleasure becomes bittersweet. But the experience is different from that of bringing out my seven works of fiction. This story is real and everywhere I go, I seem to meet someone who has a connection to the book.

I find myself holding my breath when the phone rings, uneasy when I log on to check my e-mail. What will people be saying? How will they react to the book?

Writing Finding Amy was a huge challenge for me. As a fiction writer, I'm used to being almost entirely in control of character and story (although, like most writers, I do have characters to take on lives of their own). It isn't like that with writing the real. I'm tied to what actually happened in the case--people, places, timelines and facts--yet still challenged to find a way to organize the material and write about it that will make it interesting reading. In this case, the facts themselves and the way the evidence and characters emerged allowed me to create a natural tension and story-line as dramatic as any fiction.

Because increasingly publishers are pushing the job of promotion onto writers, lately I've spent a lot of the time I'd like to use to create new stories sitting at my desk, trying to imagine what I could write or say that might get someone to pick up the book and read it. One day I was heading into Cambridge, Ma to meet my husband and my son for dinner. On the drive in, an idea hit me. The instant I was inside Legal Sea Foods, I pulled out the notebook we writers always carry and jotted this down:

Imagine a mother so close to her twenty-five year old daughter that they talk on the phone almost daily, and then one day...the phone stops ringing.

Imagine a homicide detective getting a phone call at home, telling him that a 25-year-old woman named Amy is missing and asking if he can help, when at the time, his own daughter is 25, and named Amy....

Imagine eight weeks of searching by police and her family, tromping through woodlands, walking beaches, looking under piers and wharves, searching dumpters and abandoned buildings, railroad rights of way, culverts and storm drains, with winter coming on.

Then imagine...Finding Amy