I’m currently reading a slasher to get into the slasher mood with the Carny Murders. But as soon as I finish that, I’m diving into this bad boy. The title page has a blurb. And I quote —
“Suppose you found a woman dead from drowning, with her body and clothing perfectly dry, in a locked room without water…”
I live for shit like this.
I’m doing prep work on the Carny Murders. I’ve written a couple of scenes. I don’t have a timetable. I do, however, have a blurb.
THE CARNY MURDERS
When the Calder & Raymond Traveling Carnival rolls into town, it brings with it the usual marvels: the fortune teller with her crystal globe, the tattooed lady in painted silk, the strongman who bends iron as though it were ribbon. Lanterns bloom against the dusk. The calliope chatters. Respectable citizens stroll the midway, comforted by the notion that any mystery here is part of the entertainment.
They are mistaken.
A former knife thrower returns to the lot under a cloud of rumor—whispers of a jewel robbery in Illinois—and before dawn he is found dead behind the southeast trailers, his body lying where the lantern light fails.
Under striped tents and painted banners, suspicion thickens like heat before a storm. Somewhere between the greasepaint smiles and the sawdust floor, a presence moves unseen—swift, silent, and terribly certain.
There’s a murderer on the loose. The proprietor insists the show must go on; panic, after all, is bad for business. Meanwhile, a quiet outsider lingers at the edge of the lot, asking pointed questions about missing jewels and vanished fortunes.
As the week wears on, the killings do not feel like accidents of greed, nor like the work of some passing drifter. They feel intimate. Intentional. As though the darkness between the trailers has chosen its own.
The lights still blaze. The crowds still laugh. But after midnight, when the calliope falls silent and the midway empties, something else walks the lot—something that knows every rope line, every locked door, every shadow where a man might disappear.
In The Carny Murders, the greatest terror is not what the townsfolk see beneath the big top.
It is what waits behind it.
I’ll try to read the MacDonald within the next two weeks and get a review up. And I’ll keep you up to date on the Carny Murders.
James Scott Byrnside 
I live for shit like this too — vis-a-vis Mystery at Friar’s Pardon of which I was happy to find recently in the Internet Archive (happy you found a hard copy!). I also live for this shit too — vis-a-vis all of the books and short stories you write. Looking forward to whatever you publish next.
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Which of your works do you like the most?
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It depends on the day. Overall, I’d say The Opening Night Murders. It may not have the best plot in the world, but the writing and the tone “sound” like how I think I should. Also, that’s the book that came out closest to my original intention. The humor and bitterness are exactly the way I wanted.
Obviously, these reasons are of no importance to readers. Based on reader response, The Strange Case of the Barrington Hills Vampire is my most popular book.
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