Here he meets a basketball playing nun whose sharp insights push Buchanan down the road to find his fiancee's killer. The unlikely team returns in Try Darkness for another compelling legal thriller.

In the second book, we find Buchanan is living on the peaceful grounds of St. Monica's, far away from the glamorous life he led as a rising trial lawyer for a big L.A. firm. A mysterious woman with a six-year-old daughter comes to him for help. She's being illegally evicted from a downtown transient hotel, an interest represented by his old law firm and former best friend, Al Bradshaw. Buchanan won't back down. He's going to fight for the woman's rights.

But then she ends up dead, and the case moves from the courtroom to the streets. Determined to find the killer and protect the little girl, who has no last name and no other family, Buchanan finds he must depend on skills he never needed in the employ of a civil law firm.

"These Ty Buchanan books are a chance for me to explore fiction that follows my favorite kind of story-noir. Especially from the 40s and 50," he said.  "So I'm trying to recapture that kind of writing."

A native of Los Angeles, Bell loves the city and surrounding countryside. While he was in college, the writing bug bit. His work earned him a spot to study with Raymond Carver, one of America's most honored writers.

Bell also pursued a script-writing interest. As a college senior he won his first award for an original screenplay. Though he's definitely a West Coast guy, after college graduation he moved to New York to write for the theatre and ended up cast in a small role in an Off Broadway production of Othello.

He worked off Broadway and did several TV pilots and commercials. While in New York, he fell in love with an actress and decided to find more stable employment. So he returned to California and began law school.

Bell graduated from the University of Southern California Law School with top honors and went on to "high rise" litigation for a year before he followed in his father's footsteps and opened his own law office.

Bell enjoyed practicing law and his writing and acting experiences proved helpful. "Trial lawyers stand up and weave a story and tell it in a compelling way," he noted. "A trial lawyer is a director, writer, and producer."  

A fluke decision to go to the movies with his wife led to a career change. The movie Moonstruck inspired him to return to writing. He began work on screenplays and then shifted to novels.

"I sold a couple of movie options and worked on a couple of assignments and had a very good agent, too. It's difficult to get something up on the screen, so in frustration, I went to novels," Bell explained. "In screen writing, you have to think visually, write crisp dialogue, and get into scenes quickly--those things worked to my advantage in shifting to novels. It was a good transition. In contrast, those who are long time novelists often have a difficult time changing to screenwriting."

Bell began his book career writing inspirational legal suspense novels. He has fifteen titles to his credit and will continue to write in that genre. He has also penned two of the most popular Writers Digest books on writing: Plot & Structure and Revision & Self-Editing.

"For a long time I wrote the fiction column for Writer's Digest magazine," he said. "It was an amazing honor because, when I was learning to write, I read that column every month. Lawrence Block was the author. He was my first mentor."

And Bell has become a teacher in his own right. Along with the Writer's Digest books, he's an adjunct professor at Pepperdine University. His willingness and desire to help others become better writers comes out of his own quest to learn.

"I was told when I first started writing that no one could learn to write or learn to plot. I couldn't plot. So I gave up my writing dream for ten years to act and go to law school. Eventually I decided that I would learn to write or die trying. I began to devour books on writing. I studied novels by writers I admired, and I found out that you can learn. By reading and paying attention, you can learn a lot about writing."

His passion for the art of writing and his willingness to help others informs his books.
.
Bell has been called a master plotter by reviewers and critiques. Library Journal has called him "a master of suspense." Booklist has compared him to John Lescroart and Phillip Margolin and adds, "Bell is very good at keeping secrets."

In the Ty Buchanan series, Bell enjoys the best of many worlds--the law, which he knows and loves; the city that has shaped him; and the kind of story that he loves to read. "My favorite fiction deals with an urban landscape and a search for justice in this dark world. That's always what interested me as a lawyer, a person, and a writer."

The Ty Buchanan series has given Bell the perfect opportunity to pursue those interests. Try Darkness will be released July 30 by Center Street. His website is www.jamesscottbell.com     
    
Contributing editor Carolyn Haines is the author of the Sarah Booth Delaney Mississippi Delta mystery series. Wishbones, the 8th novel in the series, was released in June by St. Martin's Minotaur.