The name of my new book is Shock Point.If you would like to send me a message, and your profile is set to private, MySpaces makes it so that I cannot answer you. So friend me as well as send me a note.Haben Sie "Breakout" gelesen? Befreunden Sie mich, bitte! Ich spreche ein bisschen Deutsch.I blog a lot about writing and publishing, if that's something that interests you. And there's the occasional random topic thrown in for fun.I'm a writer. I write mysteries and thrillers. I'm also probably the oldest non-creepy person on MySpace.com.I was raised in Medford, Oregon, which used to be pretty small, and still is. When I was in grade school, I wrote really bad rhyming poetry and a couple of stories. I sent one about a six-foot tall frog who loved peanut butter to Roald Dahl, the guy who wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I still have the postcard he sent to me after he read it. He even showed it to the editor of a children's magazine. She wrote and asked if she could publish it. For no money, which probably should have been a good indication about the pubishing world.After that, I slowly stopped writing. I didn't know anyone who had ever been published. I figured people who wrote books must be a lot smarter than me and had probably gone to Harvard. When I got a job in a hospital helping people check in, a lot of them seemed pretty close to checking out. It was a weird job, where it was slow one minute, and then the next someone who was dying or having an emergency would show up. (Look - I shot myself with a nail gun!) I worked swing shift, and they didn't care what I did when it was slow. Most of the other girls read the magazines in the hospital gift shop. I brought a notebook and stared to write. And finally I wrote a book about that job.That book didn't get published, and neither did the next one. The one after that got me an agent. And my fourth book sold to a publisher in three days. It was like an overnight success that took years to happen.After writing five mysteries and thrillers (Circles of Confusion, Square in the Face, Heart-Shaped Box, Buried Diamonds and Learning to Fly), I published a young adult called Shock Point.It's about Cassie, a 16-year-old girl who figures out her psychiatrist stepfather is hiding some bad outcomes for a drug he is testing on his teenage patients. When she tries to go the newspaper with what she has found, he plants meth in her room and ships her off to a boot camp for troubled teens.What do tasers, Timexes, overseas schools for troubled teens, falsified pharmaceutical research, and the ethics of giving behavior modification drugs to kids have in common? They are all subjects I researched in the course of writing Shock Point. Cassie's stepfather Rick has convinced Cassies mom that she needs helpand that a school called Peaceful Cove will give it to her.But Cassie knows why Rick wants her gone. Shes discovered that Rick, a child psychiatrist, has been prescribing an experimental drug called Socom. Hell make lots of money if it's approved by the FDA. But Cassie has also learned three of Ricks patients have died. How can Cassie escape Peaceful Cove and tell the world what she knows?There are many schools like Peaceful Cove. They sell themselves as being able to turn your kid around at a bargain price in a third-world country. What they don't point out is that the only regulation these schools have come from the countries where they are located. In the past decade, at least eight of these schools have closed or been shut down after abuses have come to light.The editor made me tone down some of the worst abuse in my story. But in real life, for example, one student was locked in a dog cage for a week, hog-tied for three days, had his thumb twisted by a staff member until it broke, and had his teeth knocked through his lips by a staffer who smashed his face in the ground repeatedly.It's also true that several doctors have lied about their drug trials (one doctor even kept a pitcher full of his secretary's clean urine in the office fridge so he could turn it in for patients he knew wouldn't qualify otherwise).I'll have a new book out in spring 2009 called Torched. Again, the main character is a 16-year-old girl, Ellie. She ends up going undercover in a group a lot like the Environmental Liberation Front.In April 2009, you can also look for the first in a new mystery series for adults coauthored by me and Fox News legal correspondent Lis Wiehl.You can contact me at me at my Web site, aprilhenrymysteries.com, or
[email protected]. I also blog every day at aprilhenry.livejournal.com.
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