Murder and Redemption in Honduras - Guest Post by José H. Bográn

José Bográn is an award-winning author of novels, short stories, and scripts for television and film. He was born in Honduras and he writes in both English and his native Spanish.  Although he’s the son of a journalist, he ironically prefers to write fiction rather than facts. Being an honest man, he tells us that he never tells lies, he only writes them. His genre of choice is crime fiction, but he likes to add a dash of others to the mix.

José is a member of Crime Writers of Color, Sisters in Crime, Mystery Writers of America, the Short Mystery Fiction Society, and the International Thriller Writers. He is also an assistant editor of the ITW emagazine The Big Thrill.

Please welcome José to Murder Is Everywhere as he takes us to Honduras and the exciting first novel in his successful series featuring Sebastian Martin.

I was born and raised in Honduras, Central America. My native language is Spanish, but I fell in love with thriller novels through the works of Ken Follett, Robert Ludlum, and Clive Cussler among others that I happened to read in English. I reckon my subconscious thought that was the language to tell stories of high stakes, thrillers and adventure. That is a convoluted way of explaining why I write in my second language. My first few novels emulated those of my writing heroes with the settings in far and distant countries, all across the romantic spots in Europe, like Paris or London, or across the Atlantic in the world’s capital that is New York, a city I wrote about ten years before I had the opportunity to first visit.

Then I wrote FIREFALL.

Here’s a short paragraph describing the plot of my third novel (originally published in 2013):

The problem with being reborn from the ashes is, you have to die first. After losing his wife and son in an air crash, former NYC firefighter Sebastian Martin is spiraling downward into alcoholic oblivion. Then his brother sets him up with a last-chance job investigating insurance fraud, but his new profession takes a deadly turn while investigating a missing person case in Honduras where he crosses path with an international ring of car thieves. Sebastian ends up strapped to a chair facing torture at the hands of a former KGB trainee who enjoys playing with fire on his victims to get answers.

Some reviewers have described the book as “smart and engrossing,” or “a painful path through the suffering and redemption,” but my favorite description is “Set against authentic and exotic backgrounds, FIREFALL is a pacy thriller.”

That’s right, somebody described my neck of woods as exotic. Eye of the beholder anybody?

For the most part of the 20^th Century, Honduras major export were bananas. O’Henry’s famously coined the term Banana Republic in a short story where he depicted a country like Honduras. He had enjoyed a prolonged stay in the area. The banana companies occupied large territories, and one of the two major exporters had its headquarters in the town of Tela, working under the deceiving name of Tela Railroad Company, because the company had built a railroad system to transfer the fruit from the plantations to the port.

The inspiration for my novel came one time as I drove through Tela and came across a sign that said “Rio Highland Creek.” Like that, in English. I marveled at the fact that a Spanish speaking country had named a few places in English due to the American company that did business there. Almost a century later, a Honduran novelist was writing in English…

Karma, revenge, serendipity? Take your pick.

For this novel, I incorporated bits from two cultures as I have two main characters, who must learn to work together, not unlike an odd couple of sorts.

The action of FIREFALL starts in Dallas, where Sebastian Martin works, but he soon travels to San Pedro Sula where he meets a local investigator, Gustavo Fonseca. Later their search takes them to the city of Tela where the climax occurs in the same spot where the story had its genesis, Highland Creek.

I had fun visiting Tela on several occasions as part of research. Some of those times I even took the family along as the city is an important tourist destination nowadays. The luxury resorts feature beaches with fine white sand, swinging palm trees, picture perfect sunsets.

Since its publication, the novel has garnered rave reviews, it became my first audiobook, and it has become a sort of author-guided tour of Honduras. Back in 2023, the then-president of Rotary International, Jennifer Jones, visited the city of San Pedro Sula, and I had the chance to give her a signed copy of FIREFALL, with the idea that she could know more about the country she had only spent a few hours in. 

But wait, don’t think that I forgot Spanish.

I’d never do that. If you check my website, you’d find that I have several projects—screenplays, flash fiction, and novels—that are in Spanish. My next novel will be out in 2025 and it will be in Spanish.

Nowadays I write in both languages, hoping that they complement each other instead of running parallel, or worse, running interference.

 

You can find out more about José and his work at:

Website: www.jhbogran.com

Facebook author page: https://www.facebook.com/JHBogran0

Twitter: https://twitter.com/JHBogran

Amazon author page: https://www.amazon.com/author/jhbogran

Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/c/j.-h.-bogran

Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4307673.J_H_Bogran

Newletter: http://eepurl.com/NwCHb