Guest Post: There’s Something About Bim by Michael Jasper

My latest novel, Finders, Inc., is the first book in what I hope will be a long series of mystery novels (with a hint of the paranormal) set in the small town of Boone, North Carolina tucked away in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

The name of the series is “The Finder Team,” and the team is made up of an eclectic group of forty-somethings, all of whom bring a powerful set of skills to the table. They use these skills — from intuitive people skills to sharp-as-a-knife deduction skills to not-really-legal hacking abilities — to help the local police solve crimes.

And the main focus of the Finder Team, not surprisingly, is finding missing people.

In Finders, Inc., the team has to deal with a strange outbreak of missing elderly people — all of them former professors — along with an outbreak of crystal meth in their sleeping little mountain town.

But enough about the plot; I want to tell you about Bim Mayer, one of the co-founders of theFinder Team, and how he first appeared in my head.
You see, I tend to squirrel away ideas and save them for much later. Bim Mayer is the result of over five years of squirreling. He’s a “plus-size” character (modeled quite a bit on Jorge Garcia, who played Hurley on “Lost”), a type of person I’ve always wanted to use as a protagonist, not as a secondary “stock” character.

I got the idea for a big character like Bim from a billboard, actually, as we were driving to North Myrtle Beach for a summer vacation. The billboard boasted an ad for a T-shirt place, and the ad claimed it had shirts from “Sizes XS to 6X.” As an XL guy myself (well, sometimes a 2X if it’s a “petite” cut), I started wondering just how big you’d have to be to be a 6X. Or 7X…
So Bim Mayer, my amateur detective with other special skills was born, and he’s one of the two main characters of The Finder Team. And it’s not all about Bim eating a lot! His size is just a secondary trait, like eye or hair color. He’s not the comic relief or the sidekick, but the guy with the most to lose on this first outing with the Finder Team.
Oh, and just what are those “other special skills” of Bim’s? I could tell you that about Bim, but that would spoil the fun…

If you haven’t picked a copy of Finders, Inc  you can do so on Amazon today, also check out my review here.

Thanks Michael!