If you missed it from last year, I’m posting “How to Write a Detective Team” on ACFW, American Christian Fiction Writers, as a guest blog. Here’s the opening:

I’ll state the obvious: if you want to write a mystery, you must have a detective. But detectives come in all shapes and sizes, so you have a lot of room to develop an interesting main character. As you write, you might find your story is better if you have a duo of detectives. When I began my first novel, A Shadow on the Snow, my detective was 19-year-old Rae Riley. Since my mystery was aimed at teens, my amateur detective had to be one. But as I wrote, I realized Rae’s father, since he is the sheriff of their fictional Ohio county, had to join her in the investigation or else he’d look incompetent and lose her respect and those of my readers. So I stumbled into a mystery-solving team, and my stories are the better for it. Below are my tips on how to write a detective team.

To read more tips on how to write mysteries, click here.