Writing the Scene of the Crime … Fiction

Let your imagination flourish among every day settings as you write the perfect scene of the crime. Or place of romance if that’s your genre.

Los Angeles’ landscape fascinates me. Sharp ridges, canyons and twisting roads separate Los Angeles from the San Fernando Valley and more mountains separate the Los Angeles basin from the High Desert. So many great places for mayhem. Isn’t Los Angeles great?

Excerpt from Tom Stone: One Shot, One Kill

A wide, trodden path ran like a finger along the spine of the hills. Others veered from it like tributaries of a stream, including a fire road that wound down into West Hollywood. This was the eastern edge of the Santa Monica Mountains, leading to the Hollywood Bowl with spectacular views of downtown Los Angeles, the CNN building on Sunset Boulevard to the west, and the urban sprawl extending to the Pacific Ocean.

Stone surveyed the entire area where a trail zig-zagged down a ravine on the north-facing slope, toward the San Fernando Valley. “Do you see it?” He squinted at the properties below as Jake narrowed in using binoculars.

“Yeah.” Jake stood off the trail, about knee-high in a patch of brown, wavy grass. He lowered the binoculars. “The crime scene in all its glory. But we have to move east a little more. Man, it’s hard to walk around in this brush. No wonder forensics didn’t find anything last night.”