Everything’s Better with a Zombie in it

Back in the proverbial day I was a news reporter and I covered a lot of cops and courts.
Those cases continue to color my fiction … from people I interviewed, events I wrote about, and
incidents I dogged to the end that landed me on the front page above the fold.
In The Love-Haight Case Files #1 the honorable Vernon Vaughan presides at a trial, and
he’s mentioned in Love-Haight #2. He’s based on a trial judge I watched in Henderson,
Kentucky, when I ran a news bureau for Scripps Howard. The judge looked like a bulldog, was
gruff, and yet had a sense of humor. I liked listening to him.
Though I covered murder trials, arsons, and other heinous acts that the newspaper gave a
lot of ink to, my favorite day before the judge was when a group of Henderson residents filed a
complaint against a man living in their neighborhood. He had chickens, and they didn’t like it. I
started by interviewing the chicken-keeper. He was delightful, friendly, knew a helluva lot about
chickens, and he took good care of his collection. They weren’t run-of-the-farmyard chickens
(this was, after all, a residential neighborhood), they were fancy … gorgeous … rarer breeds that
you enter contests with. And he had a couple of roosters. One was sort of nasty, and so I stayed
away from him. The other rooster, which was born with one leg, was friendly, and hopped right
up on my arm like a parrot might. I have a parrot, and so I know they do that. Somewhere around
the house I have a picture of me with the rooster perched on my arm. I could not find it to
include with this guest blog post. Truthfully, it was the roosters that caused the man’s problems.
The neighbors detested them crowing early every morning. If he’d had only chickens, I think the
other folks on the block might have let him slide.

The chicken-keeper ended up in court, railing against his neighbors’ attempts to divest
him of his flock. It was a heated back-and-forth between the attorneys, witnesses, and I had a
marvelous time spending the day in the courtroom without a murder to cover. When the final
gavel sounded, the judge ruled for the neighbors, as the city regulations did not allow for keeping
chickens. I think the chicken-keeper should have asked for a jury trial; he might have fared
better.
At the end of the proceedings, when the neighbors cheered and applauded (really, it was
loud), one gentleman stood up in the back of the courtroom, and hollered: “What about the
geese?”
The chicken-keeper had a few of those, too.
The judge smiled, banged his gavel for order, and said: “You’ll have to file a separate
complaint for the geese.”
And so the Honorable Vernon Vaughan in Love-Haight was born.
Some of the cops I used to call for comments on stories, attorneys, too, serve as the
inspiration for other characters. And some of the incidents I reported on surface as plot points
even now in my stories. My writing has often been colored by cops, courts, and crime. Years
back, I even had the pleasure of writing a true crime novel with noted attorney F. Lee Bailey …
When The Husband is The Suspect. Grisly cases, good stuff.
Now I’m thinking I need to do a Love-Haight case file involving chickens in San
Francisco … or maybe zombie chickens. I think urban fantasy tales are well-served if you throw
in a couple of zombies. Ghouls are okay, too. There are plenty of zombies in Love-Haight #2.
Everything’s better with a zombie in it.

About the Book:

Supernatural beings are willing to fight for their legal rights!

Since the Summer of Love, the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco has been known for attracting weird and unconventional souls, but things got even stranger when the monsters moved in. 

Magic has returned to the world and with it a host of supernatural creatures—not just vampires and ghosts, but sentient gargoyles, ghouls, sprites, faeries, and more. The frightened citizenry, holier-than-thou bigots, headline-seeking reporters, and harried police refer to them as OTs (Other-Than-Humans), but Thomas Brock and Evelyn Love believe even supernatural creatures have legal rights. 

Delve into their case files for a genre-bending mix of mystery, horror, suspense, thrills, courtroom drama, and romance. The city’s OT element is sometimes malevolent, sometimes misunderstood, and often discriminated against. Brock and Love represent them all, dead, undead, or alive—whatever the case, whatever the species. 

**Winner of three prestigious Silver Falchion Awards ** for mysteries, thrillers, and suspense novels: Best Fantasy, Best Urban Fantasy, and Best Multi-Genre Novel.

Buy Links:

Amazon: http://mybook.to/LoveHaightBk2   
Get the Series: http://mybook.to/LoveHaightSeries 

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About the Authors:

Jean Rabe:

USA Today best-seller, Jean Rabe’s impressive writing career spans decades, starting as a newspaper reporter and bureau chief.

From there she went on to become the director of RPGA, a co-editor with Martin H. Greenberg for DAW books, and, most notably, Rabe is an award-winning author of more than forty science fiction/fantasy and murder mystery thrillers.

She writes mysteries and fantasies, because life is too short to be limited to one genre–and she does it with dogs tangled at her feet, because life is too short not to be covered in fur.

Find out more about her at www.jeanrabe.com, on social media, or sign-up for her newsletter here: https://jeanrabe.com/sign-up-for-my-newsletter/

Donald J. Bingle

Donald J. Bingle is the author of eight books and more than sixty shorter works in the horror, thriller, science fiction, mystery, fantasy, steampunk, romance, comedy, and memoir genres, including the Dick Thornby Thriller series (Net Impact; Wet Work; Flash Drive), Frame Shop, a murder mystery set in a suburban writers’ group, Forced Conversion, a near future scifi thriller, GREENSWORD, a darkly comedic eco-thriller and (with Jean Rabe) The Love-Haight Case Files, Books 1 & 2, a paranormal urban fantasy series about two lawyers who represent the legal rights of supernatural creatures in a magic-filled San Francisco. He also edited Familiar Spirits, an anthology of ghost stories. More on Don and his writing can be found at www.donaldjbingle.com and on social media. Sign-up for his newsletter here: https://www.donaldjbingle.com/newsletter-sign-up