New Fiction: “A Drowning at Snow’s Cut” in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

My story “A Drowning at Snow’s Cut” appears in the May 2011 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. In it, a father and son join one another for a boat trip down the North Carolina coast. Both men are struggling with grief after the death of their wife/mother, and the younger man, a journalist, is also coming to terms with having lost his job at the paper — and then they cross paths with other boaters and the whole weekend takes a deadly turn. The story was inspired by a cruise my own father and I took a couple of years back. Fortunately, my mom is very much still with us, and our own trip featured none of the father-son conflicts found in the story. Oh, and no corpse either. — Art Taylor