Streets
of Glass
by
Michelle D Argyle
Genre:
Suspense, Thriller, Contemporary
Eighteen
year-old Starry is destined to take over her father’s powerful drug
syndicate. But when she finds out he has kept her only sister a
secret from her, she can’t trust him anymore. Furious, Starry vows
to find Emma, even though she knows her defiance could lead to losing
the position she’s worked so hard to inherit.
But
Emma isn’t quite the sister Starry hoped for. She’s a
straight-laced good girl who wants nothing more than to take down the
syndicate that destroyed her family. Starry, willing to do anything
to secure her place in the syndicate, accepts her father’s
ultimatum to kill Emma and everyone helping her. But the more Starry
gets to know Emma, and the more secrets she uncovers, the more she
questions whether the price of saving the syndicate is too high—even
for someone as cold-blooded and vicious as Starry.
Michelle
lives and writes in Utah, surrounded by the Rocky Mountains. She's a
foodie and also adores anything Star Wars related. She loves to read
and write books in the time she grabs between her sword-wielding
husband and energetic daughter. She believes a simple life is the
best life. Michelle mainly writes contemporary Young Adult and New
Adult fiction, but occasionally branches into other genres.
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I WROTE A BOOK ABOUT A DRUG SYNDICATE . . . AND I’VE NEVER DONE DRUGS
A lot of people have asked me how I managed to write an entire novel about a drug syndicate if I’ve never had any firsthand experience with drugs or dealing drugs. My answer: a lot of imagination and a good deal of research. I think one of the most interesting things I found in my research was an entire forum centered around dealing drugs through the mail. From this, I found an pivotal plot point for my novel. My secondary main character, Emma, ends up delivering a package of her father’s to an antiques store, not knowing the antique eggs she’s delivering are filled with meth. She has no idea her dad is a drug dealer, but she figures out pretty fast after she finds another package of antique owls. One of them breaks open and the rest is history.
There’s a lot to be said about imagination, as well. The things we watch on television and in movies shape everyone’s perceptions of reality. I have to admit it was a lot of fun to create my own drug syndicate, so to speak, based on a lot of things I’ve read and seen over the years. How would it be organized? How would it work on a large scale and small scale in comparison to how drug cartels and syndicates work in our real world?
But there’s a lot to be said about research, as well. It’s always good to speak with people who have real-world experience. I gained a lot of insight and details by asking a good friend of mine to get information from her husband, who happens to be the Chief of Police in a nearby city. He helped a lot with my questions about police protocol when it came to specific scenes I wanted to write in my book.
The thing about fiction is that you can never make something completely 100% accurate, and why would we want to? Fiction is an escape, and more often than not, I’ve found reality is often a lot stranger than fiction. Sometimes I’ll see things happening in my own life and think to myself, “If I put that in a novel, nobody would believe it.”
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