Nicholas Guild's Blood Ties Blog Tour with a Spotlight and Guest Post

I am so excited to have Nicholas Guild here at Paranormal and Romantic Suspense Reviews with a Spotlight and Guest Post.

Thanks Nicholas and TOR Books for allowing me to join your Blood Ties Blog Tour!

Please take it away, Nicholas!

 

INFORMATION ABOUT THE BOOK/AUTHOR

In BLOOD TIES, Guild explores in true psychologically thrilling fashion, the complexity of relationships and the chilling motives of what drives someone to murder.

BLOOD TIES is an elegant and frightening thriller about a serial killer pursued by a homicide detective and the killer’s own son.

Homicide detective Ellen Ridley of the SFPD is tracking a serial killer terrorizing young women in the San Francisco Bay Area. Ridley is sure she’s cornered her most likely suspect: Stephen Tregear, a hacker and code breaker who works for U.S. naval intelligence. But Tregear is not the killer he’s the killer’s son.

Ridley and Tregear team up to look for Tregear’s father, Walter, in an elaborate game of murderous cat and mouse. As the body count rises, Ridley must race against the clock to stop Walter before he kills any more women – and Tregear must finally confront the father who has been trying to kill him for twenty years.

About the Author 

NICHOLAS GUILD was born in Belmont, California and attended Occidental College and the University of California at Berkeley. He taught at Clemson and Ohio State before turning full time to writing fiction. He has published a dozen novels, several of which were international bestsellers including The Assyrian (1998), Blood Star (1989), and Angel (1995). Guild now lives in Fredrick, Maryland.

http://www.nicholasguild.com/

Guest Post

I wanted to say a few words about the relation of father and son in my new novel Blood Ties, as they are an extreme example of a dysfunctional family. Stephen (last name invented to protect himself from his father) loved his old man up to the age of eleven, when he figured out that Walter (last name invented to protect himself from the police) had killed his mother. Then, at age twelve, he found a woman’s dead body in Walter’s van and the suspicions about his father’s use of his leisure time crystallized into certainty.

The story was generated out of a newspaper piece I read many years ago about a fellow who went around in his van picking up prostitutes and then killing them. He had a wife and children and the newspaper piece got me thinking about the burden such a person’s children must have to carry through life and what it would be like for the son, at a formative age, to discover what his father was up to.

Walter is a classic sociopath, with no capacity for either love or sympathy, tendencies hardened by his relationship with his own brutal, self-righteous father. He regards himself as essentially alone in the world. Other people are no more real to him than the villains in a computer game. This is simply the way he is wired.

Although both men have had to reinvent themselves in order to stay alive, in terms of character Stephen is his father’s polar opposite. He has inherited his father’s intelligence — serial killers are frequently highly intelligent — but he is far from being a monster. He feels a similar sense of being alone, but his isolation is imposed on him by his predicament. Stephen is the only person in the world his father is genuinely afraid of, and therefore Walter has made several attempts to kill him. Stephen knows that he can never have a normal life, can never allow himself to have ordinary human attachments, as long as his father is running around loose. Anyone he loves automatically becomes a target.

So father and son continue their strange dance through life. I hope you will enjoy listening to the music.