Erotica Harem

Title:

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Author: Jon Michaelsen...

Plot:

Master Sergeant Kendall Parker arrives on the scene of the body in the drainage ditch. He is soon joined by his partner Timothy Brooks. Parker gives the body a quick cursory search before the M.E. gets there.

No gaps or holes in the plot. There was a section of inconsistency near the end. See my line-by-line below for my comments.

Style & Voice:

Told in third person from Sgt. Kendall Parker’s point of view. I didn’t notice any head-hops or changes in pov except that one area that I mentioned above. There is a potential change of pov there.

Scene/Setting:

Good descriptions of Atlanta and its areas like Piedmont Park.

Characters:

Master Sergeant Kendall Parker is a new character. He has a sense of sadness each time he views a murder victim as in this chapter. This gives him a very human element, which should connect with readers. He’s vulnerable underneath his gruff exterior.

Timothy Brooks is his new partner, recently assigned to the unit. He seems to be overzealous, which may turn readers off but you always have to have someone for the readers to not like. He should do nicely.

Just My Personal Opinion:

I like this chapter, Jon, but the problems with it kinda took away the pleasure. I’m still in love with Parker, of course. LOL

Alex

Grammar:

See my line-by-line below:

The homicide call squawked through the detective’s portable (?) during Parker’s regular morning coffee run to the Dunk ‘n Dine. [Is there a word missing here?] Moments later, he slapped a blue bubble light on the roof and drove his silver-blue cruiser through Morningside, an overpriced in-town section at the northern fringes of the city. He turned off Cheshire Bridge to Piedmont Road and punched the accelerator after maneuvering around freaked-out drivers. The traffic proved thicker than he expected this morning, forcing him to jockey along Piedmont Avenue zigzagging through the southbound lanes. The call directed him toward Piedmont Park, a popular one-hundred and sixty-eight acre triangle of impregnable [If the land is impregnable, how do people get to it? ] land located in the heart of Midtown, originally named for its milieu connecting downtown and the tawny Buckhead community lying north of the city. [Since we’ve already been introduced to Piedmont Park in an earlier chapter, it seems a little anti-climatic to give us this description now. Think about moving it to the first time Piedmont Park is mentioned. ]

Turning east on Monroe, he spotted a pair of blue and whites angled on 10th Street across the Grady High School new football and track field. Early rising joggers sprinkled the gravel running track circling the perimeter of the field, several stopping to gawk at the flashing lights invading the area. [Ewwww! What are they sprinkling it with? LOL]


Parker killed the car with two wheels over the curb, extricated his linebacker frame from the vehicle and strode across the grassy plane.

“Anyone touched the body,[Question mark needed here.]” he asked and stuck out his badge again.

“No sir,” the man called as he shielded his eyes from the sun with an upraised arm. He stood to meet the sergeant. “Ain’t let nobody down there, sir”, he said, jutting out his chin toward the corpse below. “Waitin’ for the MPO.” His eyes followed Parker, becoming alarmed when he didn’t stop. “You can’t go down there, sir!” [What is the MPO?]

The sergeant reached the precipice of the concrete gully. He saw the body tangled in a web of branches and debris, face up in a flow of shallow water. The stiff was wrapped in some type of overcoat, a raincoat or dark canvass outerwear. A sweet odor sometimes associated with a bloated corpse drifted past in the breeze. [Is there really a sweet odor with a bloated corpse? I would think that there would be the stench of decay.] He squatted, angled his six-foot-four inch frame to make the steep trek into the ditch and walked the edge of water before reaching the cadaver, careful not to contaminate any evidence.

The officer’s faced glowed red and he bounded off in a fit, perching himself in a spot [This seems contradictory. I think that the officer bounds off but not very far? Consider splitting this into two sentences.] above the basin jotting the detective’s name and badge number in his spiral notepad and awaiting his supervisor.

The detective pushed dark shades over his head of thick, dark curls and withdrew a pocket notepad as much a part of him as the badge he clipped on his belt.[Has he been wearing the sunglasses since the beginning of the chapter?]

“Got the call about 6:42 a.m.,” Timothy Brooks, an overzealous rookie detective recently assigned to the Squad a voice called out from behind the sergeant.

Parker scowled, and glanced over his shoulder, recognizing Timothy Brooks, an overzealous rookie detective recently assigned to the Squad.


“Watch it!” Parker snapped. “You’ll fuck the scene!” [That would hurt! How about “You’ll fuck up the scene!” instead. ]

Brooks obliged, retracing his steps double-time and shuffling the objecting officer back up the embankment. The cop shouted expletives indecipherable to his ears as he Parker turned his attention back to the cadaver. Brooks had to learn his preference for spending a few minutes alone at a fresh crime scene, so best start now. He Parker viewed the precious time alone a ritual of sorts, a rite of passage earned by years of long hours spent investigating the deaths of others. Chastising by the commanding officer would no doubt follow later.[It gets confusing when you have more than one person of the same sex in a paragraph. The pronouns will kill you!]


A cool breeze drifted through the basin and eased the queasiness in his gut. He popped a handful of Rolaids in his mouth and slipped a pair of latex gloves on before kneeling over the sun-baked cadaver. Clicking on the handheld recorder that he carried in his pocket, he described the body in detail. “Male, Caucasian, early twenties, about 5’10, probably a hundred-seventy to eighty pounds. Brown hair cut close and no obvious signs of trauma to the head. [If this is the body from Chapter 3, Red hit him in the skull with the baseball bat. If this is a different body, great red herring! ] Clothes appear expensive and not threadbare, not the mark of a vagrant or a street kid,” he surmised. He swallowed a build-up of phlegm at the back of his throat. The stale, decaying odor skimming the surface of the tricking of water in the gully was stifling. He continued moving his eyes in a grid pattern over the discovery.

The smell of raw sewage tickled the hairs in his nostrils as he studied the body. Despite the scripts churned out of Hollywood, cops never got used to seeing such gore, the sweet(?) scent of rotting flesh, vicious crimes against another human being. The carnage worked to further harden the heart from life’s other assaults and question the existence of faith, forcing the soul into tolerance and acceptance. Parker displayed impenetrable tolerance, but acceptance? Never. It came with the territory.

The rookie detective bounded down the slope on queue cue.


“So where the fuck are they is he (or she)?”

“The victim’s cell phone. Everyone has a cell phone these days and it’s not on the body.”


He ripped off the latex gloves and stuffed them in the pocket of his coat. [He’s been handling the corpse’s clothes. Would he put them back into his own clothes or would he bag them for hazardous disposal?]


“Don’t touch the body until the M.E. arrives,” he barked, walking away from them. [The M.E. still hasn’t arrived? ]

Morning joggers of all shapes appeared and trekked along the pathway that looped the edge of the park oblivious to the goings-on, uncaring as long as the fuss didn’t interfere with their workout. The trail disappeared hundred yards beyond a patch of giant oak trees. The sergeant began walking in the general direction when a Channel 2 Action News van bumped against the curb with a jolt. He turned and scowled at the scum before picking up his pace join his partner of three years.

Brooks caught up with him on the asphalt track that circled the murky lake. “It’s gonna be awhile for the body snatchers, Sergeant,” he said as frustration pinched his forehead. “Popular morning for the morgue with the full moon last night,” he added, matter-of-fact.

Parker waved him off. He was in no mood for the rookie’s joviality today, especially with all the overtime he’d been pulling of late to make up for his time away. [This section is very confusing. ‘The sergeant began walking…’ This is obviously Parker but then he picks up his pace to join his partner of 3 years? Who is that? Brooks has only recently been assigned. Which brings me to the second point. “Brooks caught up with him…” Parker is the one who picks up his pace, not Brooks. If you meant it to be Brooks, then you have a head-hop from Parker to Brooks and back to Parker]




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