Deseret News

Published: Sunday, July 11, 2010 10:18 p.m. MDT

SANDY — From the Cottonwood Canyons to Harmons grocery store, Jordan High School and Primary Children’s Medical Center, Jake Barkley is looking for a killer.

And the fictional action thrills in “The Murder Gene” takes readers all over the Salt Lake Valley.

Retired Sandy police officer Mark Nosack wrote the book, loosely based on his experiences working in the south valley force for three decades.

“I really do write about the people who were in my cases,” Nosack said. “I have no imagination, so I base my fiction on real life. The vast majority of people I write about were real human beings with real experiences.”

Nosack officially retired in 2004 and now works as a private investigator. But his great love is writing.

He put a lot of himself into protagonist Jake Barkley, a detective for the Sandy Police Department. Barkley watches his wife contract breast cancer, a painful experience Nosack dealt with when his wife, Sandy, battled non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

“My books are real life,” he said. “It’s the real life I know. There’s a lot of sadness, a lot of death. That’s the world I come from.”

Nosack even had an old cop friend e-mail him after reading the book, remarking that he recognized who Nosack based Barkley’s captain on because of the similar mannerisms.

“The Murder Gene” is the first in a planned trilogy about Jake Barkley, a name Nosack hopes people will come to know just as well as Jack Ryan from the Tom Clancy series.

Nosack wrote “The Murder Gene” in the action style he loves as a reader. The first five chapters in particular are nonstop action, while weaving through a tale full of family drama and even psychotic twins.

“The dynamics become interesting,” he said.

“The Murder Gene” is Nosack’s second book. “The Re-Killing of Greyeyes” was his first, a true cold case of the 1979 murder of Marilyn Greyeyes in Sandy. Both are published by PublishAmerica, a publish-on-demand distributor that sells the books through its site and Amazon.com.

e-mail: astowell@desnews.com

Order The Murder Gene for your Kindle & iPad

Sometimes the life of a detective sucks. Kidnaping and murder tend to frighten the community to the core. In The Murder Gene: You Always Kill the Ones You Love, the burden lies heavily on the shoulders of Detective Jake Barkley when he responds to the murder scene of fifty six year old Gladys Parra. Jake quickly decides he knows who the murderer is when he finds the victim’s son, Enrique, sitting in a crowd in front of the home with scratches all over his face. Don’t count your chickens too soon Jake.

Enrique (Ricky) has an identical twin sister named Teresa (Terry). Can twins who are male and female be identical?

Jake, an identical twin himself who’s twin brother Jack had died from a methamphetamine overdose, struggles knowing the eerie connection that exists between identical twins. As the investigation unfolds, the plot builds with more murder, mayhem, action, and mystery than Jake ever wanted. Why can’t you people just be nice?

Ricky, an obsessive compulsive almost neurotic little prick, has Jake running in every direction and Detective Jake Barkley is running out of time. As an old detective, I’ve always said that time is on your side when investigating a fresh murder. The problem is, when people are dropping like flies, you need to take action and quick. Detective Jake Barkley shows his metal in a world made of flakes.

I’m a crusty old cop who has experienced evil at its worst. I’ve seen a world that would make even the hardiest horror movie fan shudder. I’ve stuck my head into hell and spit. The Murder Gene is fun with cop humor and cop action and cop failures. Many of the scenes in the book are scenes out of my life. I try to paint those scenes with the color of truth.