Jackie McMahon

speaker

185 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 9 Jul

Jackie McMahon’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The Shit No One Tells You About Writing · The First Guest on Books With Hooks is Publishing! & The Protagonist as an Outsider · 9 Jul 2026 podcast

because then you are able to have the character discover that location, all the other characters, along with your reader.

They are coming at it with a fresh perspective, just like your reader is.

I wanted readers to be able to understand the characters and the inner workings of the Cloak and Dagger Club, so that when the murder occurs, they really understand the

politics and dynamics of all the members and then Horace who is the president of the club and it says on the back he's the one who gets murdered he is someone who everybody in the club has an opinion about him and he has ruffled a lot of feathers so you really get to understand

all the reasons that all of these characters would potentially want him to die.

The way that he rules the group like a despot.

I also think that having a mystery novel where the events are coming quickly one after another does really heighten the tension because it gives it that sense of urgency if you're writing a mystery that takes place over a shorter time period.

In other genres, you can easily write a story that takes place over months or even years.

But when somebody has been murdered and you need to find out who is responsible, there is that sense of immediacy.

A murder mystery has some of the highest stakes of any genre because this is literally a matter of life and death.

Somebody has been killed.

Is the person who killed them somebody who is at risk of potentially hurting more people?

Are more bodies going to fall?

And also, if we don't catch the real killer, who is the one that is going to have to take the blame for this?

So I think developing...

Yeah, I think it sort of depends.

So Death on the Nile, which is one of her most famous mysteries, nobody dies in that book until it's 50% of the way over.

And then the last 50%, you know, the bodies start dropping throughout that.

I think it does maybe take place somewhere around 25%, which is about where my murder takes place in my book.

She doesn't typically start with a body on the first page.

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