Welcome! I’m Duke Southard, an author, retired educator, and lecturer.
I have published seven novels, a commissioned history, and an anthology of
award-winning short stories and essays.
Please check out my blog where I write about true crime and a wide ranging variety of literary and everyday subjects.
My Programs
My programs are offered free of charge to any schools, public libraries, and educational/community groups.
Free Book
Grab a free copy of my book, The Week from Heaven and Hell
My Books
View a list of my published books, including Tainted Justice.
Recent Posts
Happy New Year, New Book, and Surprised
Happy New Year! There have not been many posts over this busy season (One since Christmas Eve!) but one New Year's Resolution is to never allow more than three days to pass without a post from me on this blog. This post returns to a familiar topic-the Stacey Burns...
Merry Christmas
I'd like to wish all the readers and contributors to this blog a very Merry Christmas and a New Year blessed with good health, peace, and contentment. I look forward to a new year which will see a new Parker Havenot novel and possibly two anthologies of short fiction...
Who Accepts This?
"Brian Strong doesn’t enjoy lying, don’t make him. Stacey’s killer is well known to him and it’s with great disappointment that he will never be brought to justice. Leave them alone and accept it. It happens all the time (over 125 in 30 years) here in N.H. the live...
Still Waiting . . .
This will be brief: I still wonder what may have happened to the tip submitted in early May about the Stacey Burns murder case. I know that the authorities are not bound to let anyone know what happens to a tip. I get that and I live in fear that something I say or...
Writer’s Digest Review
I wanted to share this commentary from Writer's Digest with my readers/followers on this blog as it make me pretty proud of my latest novel, Cracks in the Wall. "Cracks in the Wall presents with a dramatic cover art design. . . . No issues with the...
The Two Day Rule
Following are several paragraphs from Chapter Seven-"The Exes" in the first draft of the Murder in a Small Town: The Tragic Death of Stacey Burns" book. As mentioned numerous times, this narrative is incomplete, simply because the ending of the real story has not...
Risky but Necessary
As promised in a previous blog, I am occasionally including small portions of Murder in a Small Town: The Tragic Death of Stacey Burns, which is a book waiting for the arrest/trial/conviction chapters to be written. Here is the beginning of Chapter Six. This was...
Winning Contests, Selling Books
The photo show me reading a snippet of the first place winning personal essay in the Society of Southwestern Authors 2017 Writing Competition yesterday at the award luncheon. For those looking only for Stacey Burns posts from this blog, you are excused from this one...
Memories . . .
Back to my "murder" book, I am struck by how many times I mention that this event or that conversation occurred two, or three, or more years before. Usually the reason this is mentioned is simply because the passage of time colors our perception of events. Can it be...
Hearsay and Corroboration
A perusal of the almost fifty thousand words in my unfinished narrative of the Stacey Burns murder case, Murder in a Small Town: The Tragic Death of Stacey Burns shows repeated use of the word, corroboration. In many instances, it is linked to another word, hearsay....
Saturday, May 9, 2009
Here are the first two paragraphs on page 11 of Murder in a Small Town: The Tragic Death of Stacey Burns. Since I've been told (way too often) that the investigation into Stacey's murder is active and ongoing and any steps I might take to uncover anything new might...
Oasis Journal
I'm happy to announce that two of my short pieces were selected to be published in the Oasis Journal-2017, which was just released. One of my Green Valley Writers Forum colleagues, Bonnie Papenfuss, also had a very touching and poignant poem included in this 560 page...