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Product Description
A serial killer the cops thought was long gone.
A good detective racing the clock to stop the murders.
A chilling and twisty thriller that will leave readers gasping.
A major spike in gang homicides has Boston on edge, leaving a growing body count of bangers in its wake and the city’s police and DA’s office scrambling to catch up. Even the mayor’s Street Saviors taskforce of ex-cons, devoted to steering kids out of the thug life, are working overtime to stop the bloodshed. But who will stop the even greater threat that’s about to descend when a murderous psychopath steps out of the past?
Memories of the infamous Blood Bath Killer still loom large, especially for homicide detective Angel Alves, who helped bring down the multiple-murderer whose rampage shocked the city. So when a pair of students turn up bizarrely slain, Alves fears that another serial killer is stalking Boston. A fear that becomes fact when his ex-partner, Wayne Mooney, recognizes the murders as the work of the Prom Night Killer—whose unsolved crimes have haunted Mooney for a decade. Now, with hands-on assistant DA Conrad Darget backing them, Alves and Mooney set out to stop grim history from repeating itself. But matching wits with a twisted mind is a dangerous game. Especially when there are no rules—and your allies really may be your enemies.
Mixing edgy psychological suspense, hard-boiled realism, and staccato bursts of pulse-quickening action, 2 in the Hat makes another slam-dunk winning case for Raffi Yessayan, hailed by Robin Moore, author of The French Connection, as “the best prosecutor-turned-crime-writer to hit the streets since George V. Higgins and Scott Turow.”
Amazon.com Review
Amazon Exclusive: An Essay by Raffi Yessayan
 The Challenges of Writing a Sequel When I sold my first novel, Eight in the Box, I was excited for about five minutes before I realized I had just signed a two book deal, which meant I had to write a second novel. Between work, marriage, homeownership, and life in general, the first book had taken me eight years to write. That was before edits. There was no pressure when I wrote Eight in the Box. I wrote chapters as they came to me and fit them into my story. I always knew how the book would begin and how it would end, but I pretty much learned the rest of the story along the way. In essence, I moved at my own leisurely pace. I didn’t have the same luxury of time in writing Two in the Hat. I had an agent and an editor in New York asking me for updates and looking for the finished product. A finished product they had paid me to write. As the deadline approached, I hadn’t written a single scene yet; I had notes (pages and pages of notes) written on yellow legal paper, sticky notes in my car, napkins, the back side of my business cards, whatever I had handy when I got an idea for book two. But they were just notes. Even with established characters, there was no chance of making that one year deadline. And I was right. If I was going to make my extended deadline (six extra months!), I needed to be more efficient in my writing. Some time earlier, I had seen Lee Child and Joseph Finder at the New England Crime Bake writers’ conference arguing the issue: to outline or not to outline. I had also heard Andrew Gross advocate for the importance of outlining in writing his novels. I was desperate, so I decided to give outlining a try. I started writing Two in the Hat with a chapter-by-chapter outline, plotting out the whole novel. First I mapped out the beginning and the ending (which, just as for book one, I already knew). Then I started filling in the rest of the story. Within a few weeks I had more than a hundred chapters mapped out, the entire novel from beginning to end. Yet, even with an outline, I ran into a larger problem. I learned that the biggest issue with writing a sequel is in striking the proper balance between the interests of new readers as opposed to those of loyal readers who have come back for more. I didn’t want to bore return readers by reintroducing every character (the ones who were still alive anyway) or by rehashing every event that had occurred in Eight in the Box. On the other hand, I didn’t want new readers to be confused about certain characters’ motivations that were shaped by past events. This, I was to discover, was a recurring problem throughout the process of writing a sequel. Ultimately, I decided to write Two in the Hat as if it were a stand-alone novel. I would simply assume that the reader knew everything that had happened in Eight in the Box. Then, during the editing process, my agent, editor, and writers’ group read the book with an eye toward any place where information needed to be added to prevent confusion for new readers. It turned out that very little needed to be added. The story flowed nicely. I learned the value of outlining and that every novel, even a sequel or a book in a series, needs to stand on its own. If the book is well-written, with strong characters and a good story, then it will hopefully entertain every reader. --Raffi Yessayan
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