Monday, June 13, 2022

Peter Colt

Peter Colt was born in Boston, MA in 1973 and moved to Nantucket Island shortly thereafter. He is a 1996 graduate of the University of Rhode Island and a 24-year veteran of the Army Reserve with deployments to Kosovo and Iraq. He is a police officer in a New England city and the married father of two boys.

Colt's new Andy Roark mystery is Death at Fort Devens.

Recently I asked the author about what he was reading. Colt's reply:
Right now, I am reading a lot of different things at once. Right now, piled up on the bedside table there are a bunch of books about History/Military history. I tend to do a lot of research for my books and so there is a lot of stuff about Vietnam along the lines of John Stryker Meyer’s excellent Across the Fence, Lynne M. Black’s Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, and Nick Brokhausen’s Whispers in the Tall Grass and We Few. All three authors were Army Special Forces soldiers in Vietnam, in the Studies and Observation Group (SOG). Their firsthand accounts of their very secret, very deadly war are riveting. There is nothing in fiction that compares to their real stories from Vietnam.

My protagonist, Andy Roark, as part of his backstory was in SOG. There are many SOG veterans who are still alive. It is challenging writing a character who comes from such an elite group. Their books, and others, are a huge help in trying to keep the character and his adventures realistic. I would hate for one of the surviving SOG soldiers to read my book and think: “Wow, he just got it all wrong.”

When I am not reading history or military history, I read a lot of cookbooks. Currently I am reading The Nero Wolfe Cookbook by Rex Stout. This is a fascinating collection of recipes from the Nero Wolfe books which proves to be a nice way of marrying my love of cooking and mysteries. Many of the recipes are obscure but well worth looking at. As an added bonus the cookbook itself is chock full of quotes from the series and it is an excellent companion to the novels. It is best not to read it while hungry.
Visit Peter Colt's website.

Q&A with Peter Colt.

The Page 69 Test: Death at Fort Devens.

My Book, The Movie: Death at Fort Devens.

--Marshal Zeringue