Suspense transforms a crime novel into a page-turner.

As I started writing my second novel, OVERTURNED, I wanted to do something that I didn't feel that I had done with my first novel. I wanted to evoke as many emotions in my reader as possible. Much to my delight, the feedback that I am getting suggests that I have succeeded far beyond my expectations. A number of people have told me that they cried when a character that they had grown to like was killed. They're still asking me "WHY?" "WHY did you kill ____?" One young lady said that she was almost compelled to call and tell somebody that a friend had died. LOL. Speaking of laughing, I also wanted to have some laugh-out-loud moments. I think that I accomplished this small feat on the first page. Everyone that I've witnessed reading the first page have surrendered, at least, an audible chuckle. Laughing and crying are great, but the thing that transformed this book, and all crime fiction novels for that matter, into a page-turner was the suspense. The willingness on the part of the writer to hold back, coupled with the willingness on the part of the reader to bunker down, and dig a little deeper creates a fixation between the book and the reader that sets it apart from the others. One young lady told me that she fell in love with Overturned, while another woman told me that she fell in love with Denard Blake. One person even told me that OVERTURNED was "the best book that I have ever read in my life!" I found that HARD to believe, but hey, it's an extremely high compliment and I'll take it. So, if you, like I once did, aspire to write crime fiction novels, remember that the key to going from novel to page-turner is SUSPENSE.