Author of mysteries and psychological thrillers
How far would you go to get it? For many, the answer is not so black and white. Any time someone gets away with murder, or some other heinous crime, I'm sure we all wonder how far we might go to get the justice we seek. More than one high profile murder cases comes to mind where the perpetrators got away with it. Money, fame, whatever it was that got them off the hook...how do the families of the victims deal with their anger over the injustice? How do they ever move on when the criminal seems more protected by the legal system than the innocent victim? I can’t imagine.
We have prison overcrowding with federal prisons urged to grant early releases for inmates. How likely are they to reoffend? Who knows? Many released prisoners commit another crime.
We’ve all heard of criminal cases where justice did not prevail. Stories range from the wealthy man getting away with murder to the rapist being let out early on “good behavior”, only to rape again. Most of us proclaim our outrage, then turn off the TV news or toss the newspaper aside and return to our lives. These cases are relegated to the back of our busy minds.
The same isn’t true for the people whose lives are touched
by violent crime. They can’t turn off the TV and forget. They live with the
horror each and every day. And they know they won’t always get justice.
How far would you go
to right a wrong?
Michael Sykora, the main character in my novels No Justice, Beyond Salvation, and the upcoming Killing Instinct, asks himself that question when his fiancé
is brutally raped and murdered. He wants justice, and he doesn’t trust the system
to work. He also wants revenge.
The need for revenge sets Michael on a lifetime path of
vengeance. While the words revenge and vengeance are often used
interchangeably, there is a subtle but marked difference. Revenge is a deeply
personal act of retaliation through physical and/or psychological trauma or
murder. Revenge is less about justice and much more about getting even,
inflicting pain, and lashing out against the person or people you were hurt by.
Vengeance is an act of retribution in which a person is attempting to achieve
his/her idea of justice. The goal here is not so much to lessen your own pain
by hurting the other person, but to achieve some sort of balance in a flawed
world.
One act of violence by a career criminal shatters Michael’s
world in a way he can’t reassemble. He can no longer be that quiet, law-abiding
guy who sees good in the world. Now he sees injustice all around him, and he
makes it his mission to try to balance the scales. He gives victims and their
families peace in the only way he knows how; he eliminates the threat from
their lives. He ensures no one else will suffer at the hands of that murderer
or rapist or pedophile. The act of killing gives him no pleasure, but does give
him a vague sense of peace.
Maybe you don’t agree with his methods. Maybe you think our
flawed criminal justice system remains our best option. Or maybe, like me, you
stand somewhere in the middle. The truth is, until our own lives have been
touched by this kind of violence, we can’t honestly say how we’d react.
Hopefully, none of us will ever have to answer the question that derailed and
now defines Michael Sykora’s life.
*
Darcia Helle lives in a
fictional world with a husband who is sometimes real. Their house is ruled by
spoiled dogs and cats and the occasional dust bunny.
Suspense, random blood
splatter and mismatched socks consume Darcia’s days. She writes because the
characters trespassing through her mind leave her no alternative. Only then are
the voices free to haunt someone else’s mind.
Join Darcia in her
fictional world:
http://www.QuietFuryBooks.com/bloghttp://www.Twitter.com/darciahelle
http://www.Facebook.com/quietfurybooks
The characters await you.
