Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Murder at Mile Marker 36 - Thriller Novel

Murder at Mile Marker 36 - Another thriller novel based on the Garden State Parkway murders of Memorial Day weekend 1969.

This one is a conspiracy thriller, with a campaign strategy developed for a candidate for governor to blame the murders on Ted Bundy in order to get the law and order vote and win the election.

Can you stand it?

http://www.milemarker36.com/index.html

Vulnerability on the critical law and order issue is the main obstacle in the way of silver-tongued Matt Moran's quest to become governor of New Jersey. His campaign team attempts to solve the problem by blaming the infamous 1969 Coed murders on Ted Bundy.

Pursuit of closure and clues connecting Ted Bundy to the 32-year old cold case are chilling. A love affair involving protagonist Sebstian Kenyon, an ex-journalist, and hotshot political consultant Geena Fallon seasons the story without removing focus from the ghost of the notorious serial killer.

"Murder at Mile Marker 36," set mainly along the Jersey shore, including the famed Pine Barrens, and takes the reader to Wyoming, Arizona, Harrisburg, Newark and Alexandria, Virginia. It runs roughly 240 pages.

In addition to Bundy's ghostly presence, major characters include dashing Matt Moran; Matt's wife Maggie, using the family fortune to finance the gubernatorial campaign; Lucious Harvey, a New Jersey State Trooper on leave to help his friend and confidante with the election so he can become the first "real" African-American to lead the state police: Nick Mastricola, old school Atlantic City pol and Moran campaign advisor, and savvy pollster Jack Remington.

Also, Yocontalie Wolf, a sensual Native-American psychiatrist who heard the serial killer's confession years earlier; Melvin "Catfish" Sadler, burned-out black trooper who helps Kenyon connect the dots; Sandra Steele, now 42, kid sister of one of the 1969 murder victims; George Butler, greedy former FBI agent who helped pioneer the concept of criminal profiling, and Reyneso "Popo" Vasquez, the mysterious Miami detective who taped details of the killer's horrific confession of the Coed murders.

And of course, Kenyon and Geena and their black lab retriever "Killer".

Ken Shuttleworth is an award-winning journalist with several newspapers including the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Cherry Hill based Courier Post, the leading newspaper in South Jersey. He has also been a street reporter for top ranked KYW News Radio in Philadelphia. He made a career switch from journalism in 1989 and became a political/public policy media tactician. He played a key role in shapiung the Camden County Democratic Committee into one of the best political organizaitons of its kind in the nation.

A life-long fan of mysteries, Ken Shuttleworth finally sat down to begin writing his first novel, "Murder at Mile Marker 36", at age 50. The native Philadelphian and 1965 graduate of Temple University has lived in New Jersey since 1971 and currently resides in Haddon Heights.

Ken Shuttleworth's work typiflies what critic/editor George Plimpton meant when he told a New York Times reporter that powerful forces cohere in New Jersey Literary history, adding: "Its habitues are so extraordnary - more than any other state in the East. The mob, great prizefighters, the prisons, the world of Far Hills, the gamblers, the shore, the corridor between Philadelphia and New York - there is the extraordinary framework that the state's writers have had throughout American history."