Books · Crime

A personalized crime novel, written for you.

A crime novel is about what solving the case costs the person who solves it. Tell StoryStepper the crime, the investigator and how it should end. The book is planned in full before writing: who did it, how, and what it takes to prove.

Below is a real crime novel written with StoryStepper: the brief it started from, and the book that came back.

The brief

Shape: Crime
Ending: Let it hurt
Feel: somber, intimate, steadily unsettling
Language: English
Who and what it is about: A pharmacist is found dead inside a locked neighborhood shop, and the only missing item is a bottle of pills with no recorded prescription. The detective assigned to the case recognizes the medicine from her mother’s final days, but the old records have vanished. She wants to solve the murder without turning grief into evidence, while the killer works to make the whole block look guilty.

The book that came back

The Dispensary Deadbolt

Delivered in 46 minutes
17,910 words
16 chapters

Contents

The Cold Keyway
The Merchant Ledger
Wax and Iron
The Hollow Balance
The Linoleum Cut
Tumblers and Slag
Zinc and Slag
The Crushed Hem
The Darkened Flat
Chamois and Brass
The Measured Burden
The Threshold Ratchet
The Chemical Slide
The Broken Docket
The Deadbolt Drop
Epilogue

From chapter one

The deadbolt was an old Corbin double cylinder, solid brass, set into a three-inch slab of white oak that had swollen against its jamb since the first freeze of November. Denise Pruitt touched the faceplate with her bare forefinger. The metal took the heat out of her skin instantly. There were no scratches along the keyway lip, no brass shavings on the stone threshold, and the interior thumbturn she could see through the frosted transom was thrown flat to the horizontal position, seated all the way into the box strike.

Behind the counter, Edwin Kline lay face down between two bins of Epsom salt and an overturned wooden stool. His right arm was flung out toward the bottom shelf of the narcotics cabinet, where five-grain aspirin bottles sat in neat rows behind wire mesh. The back of his gray flannel collar was soaked brown from a tipped ceramic mug that had drained into the yellowed grout of the floor tiles.

"Delivery boy found him at seven," Keith Connelly said. He had his heavy overcoat open, both hands shoved deep into his trousers pockets, his elbows jutting out like broken struts. "Boy comes up the alley with two crates of skim milk, sees the light burning through the transom, taps the glass with his hook. Nothing. Comes around front, looks through the mail slot, sees the old man's shoes. Door locked. Inside, outside, both sides tight."

Connelly was fifty-three, nine years older than Denise, and smelled of the clove lozenges he sucked to mask stale Chesterfields. He had not taken his hat off. The brim cast a triangular shadow down his long nose, ending right at the cleft of his chin.

"Who forced the back latch?" Denise asked.

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