The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Bad Moon Rising: A Bad Axe County Novel by John Galligan

Episode Date: June 13, 2021

Bad Moon Rising: A Bad Axe County Novel by John Galligan “As unique a place in the mystery universe as you will ever find...smooth, unexpected, and memorable. This book is a diamond in the rough.” —Michael Connelly, #1 New York Times bestselling author A record heat wave suffocates remote rural Wisconsin as the local sheriff tracks down a killer hidden in the depths of the community in this atmospheric, race-to-the-finish mystery by the acclaimed author of the Bad Axe County series. Sheriff Heidi Kick has a dead body on her hands, a homeless young man last seen alive miles from the Bad Axe. Chillingly, the medical examiner confirms what Sheriff Kick has been experiencing in her own reoccurring nightmares of late: the victim was buried alive. As the relentless summer heat bears down and more bodies are discovered, Sheriff Kick also finds herself embroiled in a nasty reelection campaign. These days her detractors call her “Sheriff Mommy”—KICK HER OUT holler the opposition’s campaign signs—and as her family troubles become public, vicious rumors threaten to sway the electorate and derail her investigation. Enter Vietnam veteran Leroy Fanta, editor-in-chief of the local paper who believes Heidi’s strange case might be tied to a reclusive man writing deranged letters to the opinions section for years. With his heart and liver on their last legs, Fanta drums up his old journalistic instincts in one last effort to help Heidi find a lead in her case, or at least a good story... With simmering tension that sweats off the page, Bad Moon Rising infuses newsworthy relevance with a page-turning story of crime in America’s heartland, capturing global issues with startling immediacy while entertaining from start to finish.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Hey, we're coming to you with a great podcast.

We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Thanks for being here. To see the video version of this, go to youtube.com forward slash chrisfoss. Hit the bell notification button. Also go to goodreads.com forward slash chrisfoss. See everything we're reviewing and reading over there. Also go to our other websites, our different groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram. There's just multiple accounts everywhere.

You go follow them and get involved. And today we have a most amazing author. He's the author of a multitude of books we'll get into that his name is john galligan and his new book that's coming out bad moon rising a bad axe country novel comes out june 29th 2021 you can pre-order this time this is book three of three for a series he's doing. And this episode is brought to you by our sponsor, ifi-audio.com. And their Micro-iDSD Signature is a top-of-the-range desktop transportable DAC and headphone app that will supercharge your headphones.

It has two Brown-Burr DAC chips in it and will decode high-res audio and MQA files. We're using it in the studio right now. I've loved my experience with it so far. It just makes everything sound so much more richer and better and takes things to the next level. IFI Audio is an award-winning audio tech company with one aim in mind, to improve your music enjoyment of quality sound, eradicate noise, distortion, and hiss from your listening experience.

Check out their new incredible lineup of DACs and audio enhancement devices at ifi-audio.com. And here he is on the show for us. Welcome to the show, John. How are you? I'm fine, thanks. Thanks for having me. There you go. Thanks for coming.

This is going to be pretty exciting. We were talking pre-show about your book and all the amazing stuff you got going on. What are the plugs? Are people going to find you on the internet? Find me at johngalligan.com. J-O-H-N-G-A-L-I-G-A-N.com. There you go. That sure makes it easy. Pick up the book at your local fine booksellers. So John, tell us a little bit about you and some of your other books. You can get a plug in here for the other ones too, if you want. Okay, sure. Yeah. I'm actually the author of two series. The book that's coming out soon, Bad Axe County is the third in the Bad Axe County series. Those are crime novels that are set in a unique environment in Wisconsin, very rugged, beautiful, and scary place. Bad Axe County is

a made up county in a real place. And those books star the first ever female sheriff in Wisconsin, Sheriff Heidi Kick. And she fights the bad guys in Bad Axe County. Before that, I have a four book series that is also a crime novel series. It's a murder mystery series that's where everything is fly fishing. My protagonist is a trout bum who's crisscrossing the country in an old rv smoking bad cigars and drinking tang and vodka and trying to fish himself to death and vodka basically saves his life when he finds other dead bodies anyway yeah i'm here really today to talk about bad moon rising which comes out on on june 29th there you go bad axe county series june 29th tang and. I think I tried that once in my vodka days. That's nasty.

It's a little too good. It goes down a little too easy. I had an accident with that once myself. Man, yeah, this reminded me of some of my vodka days. I might have been, you know, if you want to base this character on someone I know, I'm just... An arcing overview of the book. You gave us a rundown. Do you want to get more in depth with some of the stories or tease out some of the parts?

I imagine the problem with novels is that we can never tell the ending, of course. Exactly. We don't want to give it away, especially because it's a crime novel and it's a whodunit. There you go. The arc of the character. My character is that there's this phenomenal young woman that I find in rural Wisconsin. This is a young woman who grows up on a farm. She can probably bench press about 200. She can drive every kind of vehicle ever made. She can shoot a gun. She can

milk a cow. She's a valedictorian of her high school class. She plays the saxophone, is on the speech team, is on the rodeo team, and is the Dairy Queen. These just phenomenally accomplished young rural women. And my character is named Heidi. She is a Dairy Queen. These just phenomenally accomplished young rural women. And my character is named Heidi. She is a Dairy Queen when she's just getting out of high school and things go badly for her and her family. And she basically is broken down and remade. And we pick her up about 15 years later as the sheriff of her local area. And in that capacity, we now have not only a younger person than has ever been sheriff before, but a woman who has never been a sheriff before. Suddenly crime looks different from this perspective. And so in the first book,

Bad Axe County, she uncovers a sex trafficking ring. Turns out that this area is on what they call the Silk Road, which is basically a supply line from big cities like Milwaukee and Chicago for drugs and women to places like the fracking fields in North Dakota. So she discovers this passing through her area and deals with that. In the second book, which is Dead Man Dancing, she discovers that there is a group somewhat similar to the Proud Boys hiding out in the coolies and training for the race war. And she has to deal with that.

In the third book, Bad Moon Rising, the one coming out currently, she's got something of a serial killer on the loose in her area that she has to find after she discovers the body of a homeless man who's been buried alive and escaped and died again. So she's got a lot on her hands. Nice. That's crazy, man. That's crazy. It goes through all the twists and travels and stuff like that. Why did you pick a woman to be the role in this? Yeah, that's a good story.

In my fly fishing series, the series of books before this, I had a character who lived on a farm with her elderly father, and that character was just some love. That character was very popular, but she was a minor character, so I always wanted to develop that further. And then when I was researching rural crime for the next series, the Bad Axe County series, I came across a really interesting study that it was a study of sex trafficking and sex crime in the rural Midwest. And it was an academic study. The authors went out and interviewed law enforcement leaders across five states in rural communities, and these were

exclusively men. And the question was, tell us about sex trafficking in your jurisdiction. And their answer was, what sex trafficking? We don't have it. The researchers then went and asked the very same questions of rape crisis centers, women's shelters, emergency rooms, social services agencies, primarily women on the front lines of caring for other women. The answer to the same question was, it's an epidemic. So that was the impetus for me to take this minor character from a different series, grow her up and put her down in a place where as a woman, she sees things that have been unseen before her time. Wow, man.

So it's great to go through all these different things with her. You have a Vietnam veteran in the story as well. What does that play into the storyline? This is a gentleman named Leroy Fanta who came back from the Vietnam War opposed to it and made himself into a newspaper journalist and has been the editor of the small town paper for 40 years. And as the story Bad Moon Rising picks him up, somebody has bought the paper, turned it into a shopper and fired him. And he's at loose ends because this is his life and his career. He turns out to be the person who helped Sheriff Kick find the bad guy because he can connect the bad guy to a series of letters to the editor that he's been receiving over the years.

Wow. What other things can we tease out about the book to readers and stuff? I think one of the things is the environment that it's in. It takes place in a very unique place. I think when people think of the Midwest and Wisconsin, they're thinking of one particular thing. They're thinking of rolling hills and flat areas and so forth. This is an extremely rugged area because it was not glaciated. For some reason, the last glacier split and went around it. And so it's absolutely gorgeous. And it's also very raw and very rugged. And this is one of the poorest areas in the state of Wisconsin and one of the poorest areas in the Midwest. And it's a very rich area. It's full of physical beauty. It's full of interesting cultural aspects

because it's still very Norwegian and Germanic. They still celebrate Norwegian Independence Day, but it's also full of conflict and crime and poverty and so forth. So I think one of the things to look at or one of the reasons to read this series is to learn about this area and to spend time in this area, which is relatively unknown and fascinating and gorgeous. There you go. Sounds like an awesome read and stuff. Do you see the series continuing? Do you have future books on the cooker that you're working Sounds like an awesome read and stuff. Do you see the series continuing? Do you have future books on the cooker that you're working on? Oh, yeah. Yeah. We were chatting a little bit about this before. When you talk to an author about a book, the author is already a book or two downstream. And so, sure, I'm finishing up the book after

this, which is called They Shoot Horses. And it's a continuation of this series. And I hope to continue it beyond that, but it's going to go for four books at least. There you go. There you go. Four of four in a city to shoot horses. So is Bad Axe going to be in the title? Of that one? No, it's only in the title of the first one, Bad Axe County.

Second one is called Dead Man Dancing, and the third one is called Bad Moon Rising. And unless the title gets changed from between here and next summer, the fourth one will be called They Shoot Horses. Awesome. So do you guys, do you see any movie characters developed from this? Do you see an option for a movie? The first two books have been optioned by Skydance for TV series. So Bad Axe County and Dead Man Dancing are already hopefully in that process. It's a little hard to tell right now and books do get optioned and nothing comes of it, but got my fingers crossed. Skydance is a big studio. I've done a lot of great things and so I'm really hopeful. There you go. There you go. This sounds like an awesome

book and an awesome read. Anything more we can tease out in the book so that people will be interested in it? Sure. I think, like you mentioned, the newspaper, The Vietnam Veteran, I think one of the things to be interested in is I have an approach to writing crime that's holistic. I don't stick with the one character solves everything. I've got multiple point of view characters that come at the crime from different angles. And so there are other characters that you get deeply involved in. For example, a Vietnam veteran who's been a newspaper editor for 40 years, and now they're

closing down the newspaper, a character like that, or a character who's a baseball star and has been traveling the country in the minor leagues and failing to succeed and coming back home and finding his family in wreckage. Things like that, all kinds of minor characters that really play significant roles and are in point of view in the novels. There you go. So what do you like most about writing these types of novels? I like the challenge. I like the craft. Crime novels are a certain kind of, you got to put a lot of balls in the air. You got to make them all land in the right place. I like the challenge. I like the craft. Crime novels are a certain kind of, you got to put a lot of balls in the air. You got to make them all land in the right place.

I like the challenge of also making them literary. I like the challenge of making them rich with language, rich with imagery. I like the idea of making sure that they're meaningful. I don't like to write something where the evil behind the story is just one person is crazy. That doesn't appeal to me.

I like the evil in my stories to be basically things that we are all complicit in on some level that are a consequence or an outcome of a social situation that we're either all suffering from it or we're all benefiting from it or some of both. So I have a really high level of complexity that I put into these books. In fact, as I'm designing the fourth one, I have a long list of things that I'm trying to make sure are part of the book and can be woven into it. It's a challenge just to design the book. Honestly, what I enjoy best about writing is revising and editing because that means the hard work is done. The hard work really is creating

something out of thin air. Nothing exists and then you create it. And getting from page zero to page 300 the first time through is, that's hard work. When I get that far, I really start to enjoy it. There you go. There you go. It sounds like it's going to be an awesome book. And of course, you're just going to keep expanding the series. Give us your plugs where people can find you on the interweb and find out more about you. Yeah, I have just a website. And you can go to JohnGalligan.com.

You can also find me on Facebook. There you go. There you go. So, guys, check it out. Bad Moon Rising. Bad Axe Country Novel will be out June 29th, 2021. You can preorder it. And then I guess how soon will the next book be out, John? A year. Approxim approximately a year from now.

A year from now. I don't know. You book a year, it kind of comes together. Book a year program. You've got to love it. You just follow the John Gallaghan program. Thanks for spending time with us today, John. We certainly appreciate it.

Sure. Thank you. Thank you. And thanks, my honest, for tuning in. Go to YouTube.com, Forge has Chris Voss. Hit the bell notification button. You can also go to Goodreads.com for just Chris Voss and all of our groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and all those different places.

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