Novelist with ties to Nevada releases new thriller

Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Retired Cottey professor Al Fenske gets Attica Locke, his daughter-in-law, to personalize some copies of her novel, Black Water Rising. Fenske took a trip to Chicago to be there for the debut of her first novel. --submitted photo

The author of a new urban thriller has ties to Nevada. Attica Locke wrote the newly released suspense novel, "Black Water Rising."

Locke is the wife of Karl Fenske, who graduated from Nevada High School in 1989 according to his father, Al Fenske, who seemed a little wobbly on details.

"I'm not real sure," Fenske said. "I'm probably going to get into some hot water here but I really can't remember for sure when he graduated, 1989, 1990 or so."

Locke is currently a screenwriter and has written movie scripts for Paramount, Warner Bros., Disney, Twentieth Century Fox and Jerry Bruckheimer films, as well as television pilots for HBO, Dreamworks and Silver Pictures. She was a fellow at the Sundance Institute's Feature Filmmaker's Lab and most recently completed an adaptation of Stephen Carter's The Emperor of Ocean Park.

While Fenske was unsure about details of his son's schooling, he was sure of one thing - his pride in his daughter-in-laws accomplishment.

"I went to a book-signing in Chicago and it was very nice," Fenske said. "She was very well received and I enjoyed myself very much."

Locke was more exact about dates than Fenske and she provided a little more detail.

" We were married in 1998, and we have a two year-old daughter named Clara," Locke said. "Karl graduated from Pepperdine Law School in 2001. He's a deputy public defender with Los Angeles County (and a great dad!)."

The novel Locke wrote is based on an actual event from her youth but the novel has been heavily fictionalized.

"When I was maybe 10 or 11 years old, my father threw a birthday party for my stepmother," Locke writes on her Web site. "He was a young(ish) lawyer with his own practice and not a lot of money, and a boat ride on Buffalo Bayou in Houston, Texas, was all he could afford ... It was on a stretch of the bayou just like this when my family heard a woman screaming for help. The music stopped. We all crowded onto the deck. In the darkness, none of us could see her, nor did we know who or what the woman needed help from. And then... we heard gunshots. A debate immediately broke out on the boat's deck. There were those who felt we should stop the boat, and those, like my father, who felt that would be a grave mistake ... He had his wife on the boat to think of, and his daughter.

"Forced to choose between the safety of his family and that of a stranger we could not even see in the thick of brush along the bayou, he chose us."

Locke uses the events from her childhood to build a framework for the novel which supposes the protaganist, Jay Porter, saves a woman from drowning and the story develops from there. Since it is similar to an actual event Locke was at pains to make clear the protaganist is not her father.

"And to him, the book's success is my success," Locke said. "He's been very sweet about the whole thing. My dad knows himself well enough to know he's not Jay."

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