H. Scott Butler
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I was born and grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, attending LSU like my father before me. In 1968, I entered the Duke University graduate English program. This is where I met my wife Susan. Five years later we moved to coastal Virginia, where we both taught freshman English and American literature at (the recently renamed) Virginia Peninsula Community College. I also taught fiction into film, a valuable undertaking for a would-be writer. When we retired, I started writing seriously, and so far have had three mystery novels published by High Tide Publishers: Night Journey, Voice from the Shadows, and Falcon. They follow the career of detective Cynthia Westbrook, a plainclothes sheriff's investigator in Northern Virginia. The most interesting thing about a mystery, in my view, is the detective, and so Cynthia's cases are intertwined in various ways with her non-professional life. In Voices, for example, she returns to Alabama to investigate the cold-case murder of her mother. After writing these novels, I had a desire to stretch creatively, and the result was a forthcoming collection of short novels and stories, tentatively titled Last Things, that deals with the ultimate, unsolvable mysteries of existence. But I wasn't finished with Cynthia, and am presently working on a fourth mystery about her. Several years after our retirement, Susan and I moved to Blacksburg, Virginia, in the mountainous part of the state, and I started taking early morning walks up to a meadow where the sun rises over the mountains. This view and the surrounding landscapes were so lovely that I soon began photographing them and posting a few pictures each morning on Facebook as a visual diary. If anyone is interested, these posts are no longer restricted to FB friends. To see them, simply search for H. Scott Butler on Facebook.
My Books
All of my books below are available on Amazon. If you click on the title, it'll take you to each book's page. Thank you for supporting my work and the work of the Writer's Guild.