Extreme Justice: A Ben Kincaid Novel of Suspense

Acknowledgments

ONCE AGAIN, IT’S THANK-YOU time.

I want to thank everyone who read this book before publication: my wife, Kirsten, who talked me out of the “telltale vibrator” scene; Arlene Joplin, at the OKC U.S. Attorney’s Office, who gave me a refresher course on the Fourth Amendment; Kim Kakish, who provided much needed background information on Oklahoma street gangs; and my editor, Joe Blades, who always manages to deliver a better book to his Out box than the one that came to his In box. I also want to thank Gail Benedict for typing my virtually illegible handwritten revisions, and Vicky Hildebrandt, whose life I continue to plunder for most of my best plot twists.

Since this book is about music, it might be an appropriate time to thank my piano teacher, Julia Thomas, for a gift I’ll cherish all my life. I must also thank my friend and fellow novelist Teresa Miller, the best friend Oklahoma writers ever had.

Special thanks to our family angel, Angel Taylor, for her constant assistance and support.

I want to thank John Wooley for his incisive coverage of the Tulsa jazz scene, which I cribbed from repeatedly, and all my friends who invited me to their favorite jazz nightspots. I want to thank Gwen Gilkeson, daughter of Oklahoma jazz great Bob Gilkeson, for all her help and insight. I should also mention Dr. John’s remarkable memoir, Under a Hoodoo Moon (St. Martin’s Press), which helped me learn the lingo and formulate the backgrounds for many of the old-time jazz musicians in this book.

This book is dedicated to my boyhood hero, Harry Chapin (1941-1981), who not only wrote some incredibly moving folk music, but also managed to donate fifty percent of his concert profits to charity, to counsel young people and speak at hundreds of schools, to financially support a Long Island theater, to raise millions of dollars for organizations dedicated to preventing hunger and malnutrition, and to lobby into existence a Presidential Commission to study the causes of world hunger—all before dying in a car accident at age thirty-nine. I leave you with some of Harry’s words, the ones chosen for his epitaph:

If a man tried to take his time on earth

And prove before he died what one man’s life could be worth,

I wonder what would happen to this world.