Now back up to chapter twenty out of what I’m now planning for thirty, (slightly thinner book — Linda Howard’s run around 100,000 words, I’ve discovered), and the story is much richer.
I’m keeping linear, though. Him, her, and the killer. Light secondary story-lines only as they tie in with the next book and subsequent books in the series. This is amazingly hard work — it isn’t the way I’ve trained my brain to think at all, and I’m having to do everything in a completely different fashion to meet the form requirements of the genre. Like writing a bunch of sonnets, and suddenly getting slapped upside the head with a requirement to write a stack of villianelles. I’m hoping the next one will be easier.