Ken Baysinger:  

Ken Baysinger, Novelist - 2023 Update: My next novel is currently in the design & composition process, while simultaneously undergoing editing and proofreading. It takes place in Spokane in 1960. The title is Lilac City - The Death of Innocence. It features a TV repairman/private investigator, looking into the disappearance of two Central Valley girls who went to the 1960 state basketball tournament and never made it home. And I'm still getting great reviews for "Identities." What happens when doctors have one patient who is mentally sharp, but dying of old age, and another patient who is 20 years old and brain-dead but otherwise healthy? This isn't really science fiction, but rather fictionalized science, rolled into a murder mystery. (2022) "Confluence" takes place in Riggins Idaho, where the town marshal is investigating an accidental drowning in the Salmon River, and finds himself in the middle of an international terrorist plot to destroy dams in the Northwest and replicate the great floods of the ice age. Mixing history with fiction, this fifty-year drama unfolds in spectacular fashion. (2019) "El Camino" is the first novel in my Corrigan Mystery Series. A Chevrolet El Camino pulled from Oregon's Willamette River holds the answer to a decades-old mystery. (2014) "Deadly Gold" is the second Corrigan novel. Human remains found in the river starts an investigation that takes Corrigan back in Oregon history to 1887, when a gang of rustlers gunned-down 34 gold miners in Hells Canyon. History knows who did it, but nobody knows what became of 20 pounds of gold stolen after the massacre. (2016) "Missing and Exploited" is the third Corrigan mystery.. Children have been going missing around the Portland area for two decades. Corrigan gets into a deep investigation that crosses five states and becomes very personal. (2018) Coming Soon: Set in 1960, "Lilac City" features a TV Repairman/Private Investigator looking into Spokane's greatest mysteries, real and fictional. Expected release, Summer 2023. Everyone who knew me in high school wants to know how a goof-off like me ever managed to get through college, let alone have a successful career and become an acclaimed novelist. The answer: Damned if I know. It has been a lot of years since the English teachers at Central Valley High School attempted to teach me grammar and composition, but if any of them remember me, it is likely in the context of the least motivated, most undisciplined and unteachable students they ever encountered. For me, a C grade was more than adequate, and the fact that a once earned a B was purely accidental. So if any of those teachers are still around to see my name on the cover of a novel, it will undoubtedly strike them as a fluke. Surely someone else has the same name. But no, while there may be someone else with the same name, I offer my absolute assurance that I am indeed the individual who coasted lazily through Mr. Wilson's class in my senior year, though I'm sure he would be reassured to know that I actually remember the meaning of verisimilitude. And somehow during those years, I learned how to write, even though I didn't recognize that fact until half a dozen years later. The revelation came to me when a teaching assistant in a second-year expository writing class at Washington State University asked me, after reading my first submission, what I was doing in her class. I explained to her that I'd just finished three years in the US Navy, where the use of words containing more than two syllables is cause for suspicion and distrust by fellow sailors, so I had enrolled in the class to determine if I was still literate. Then she dropped the bomb. She said, "I can't teach you anything." My dumb blank look told her that I didn't understand, and she quickly added, "Your writing is better than mine." That ultimately led me to change my major to communication, and it was there that I earned my degree in 1972. As to the question of where I learned to write, I have to give all of the credit to my parents, who spoke genuine English in the age before texting language or sitcom-speak. A childhood of exposure did more than sixteen years of school--well, that and a God-given talent that I'm sure I did nothing to earn. My career as a professional writer started in the retail advertising department at a weekly newspaper in...Expand for more