Scott Thornley Books In Order

Publication Order of MacNeice Books

Scott Thornley is a popular author of suspense and mystery from Canada who is best known for creating MacNeice, a homicide detective with a sophisticated taste in music who solves mysteries and murders.

+Biography
People who have tried searching for Scott Thornley on the internet have no doubt been bombarded with results featuring Ian Thornley. Ian is Scott’s son and he is a famous musician.

Some people tend to dismiss Scott Thornley as little more than Ian Thornley’s father until they realize that Scott is actually a successful creative mind with numerous achievements under his belt.

Scott comes from Hamilton in Ontario. That is where he grew up. In fact, many of the stories he eventually wrote were set in locations inspired by Hamilton. Before going into the publishing game, Scott was a marketing professional.

He came to some prominence when he created Scott Thornley + Company, a strategic creative firm that he ran both as creative director and president. The firm worked with both private and government clients not only in Canada but also Britain and the United States.

Scott was always a creative mind. He had a love for art and design which he used to drive his company to prosperity. Over time, though, it became clear that Scott was just as passionate about storytelling.

For a time, he found some satisfaction in deploying that particular talent for his clients’ purposes, using his storytelling abilities to sell their products and services. But eventually, Scott Thornley grew restless.

Developing branding and marketing campaigns for consumers couldn’t scratch the creative itch in the back of his mind. So the author delved into drawing and photography, two activities that eventually drew him into writing and publishing.

+Literary Career
People who have never heard of Scott Thornley are almost immediately enthralled when they come across a copy of ‘Erasing Memory’, Scott’s debut novel. The book introduces readers to a senior police detective in Ontario who is summoned to a disturbingly alluring murder scene.

While the story has many an obsessed fan, people are primarily drawn to ‘Erasing Memory’ because of its cover which features a curvaceous nude woman whose private parts have been strategically veiled by a violin.

Readers and critics alike have commended Scott for the arresting imagery used on the cover of his debut novel. And they commend the author in particular because he designed the cover himself.

Pulling the cover art together wasn’t easy. Scott Thornley only had forty-eight hours to get the job done, but he succeeded where others might have stumbled. Most debut authors would have preferred to leave the cover designs and any other marketing tasks to their chosen publishers’ personnel.

But Scott’s publishers were fortunate to sign an author with extensive experience in the business of marketing and design. Scott hasn’t necessarily been writing all his life but he has always been a storyteller.

At the beginning of his career, the author used images to tell his stories. To succeed in the advertising business, Scott had to understand the stories his clients wanted to tell about their products and services in order to accurately represent them to consumers.

And Scott did his job splendidly. Regardless of whether he was creating a logo or crafting a tagline, Scott endeavored to find the story behind his subject so as to sell it appropriately. When the author began to write novels, he realized that his marketing and design skills were easily applicable to the literary arena.

Scott found that writing novels was a simple matter of collecting large quantities of information—settings, stories, characters—and condensing them into a specific number of pages.

So that is what the author did. Of course, the actual process of writing his debut novel brought with it a multitude of challenges. Not many people believe Scott Thornley when he tells them that ‘Erasing Memory’ began as a series of dreams.

Scott had these dreams over a period of several months. After a while, he began to record them in a notebook he kept beside his bed. After accumulating a significant number of scenes, Scott began toying with the idea of turning them into a cohesive story.

With his busy schedule, Scott could only write in the evenings after work and on the weekends. The first thirty pages were very difficult work. Each paragraph took a lot of effort to construct and, after a while, Scott hit a brick wall, one that he tried and failed to overcome.

Just when things were starting to look dire, it occurred to Scott that he was only struggling to pull his novel together because he was trying too hard, spending too much time attempting to write his story the right way.

Once he stopped trying and learned to go with the flow, everything fell into place. The author stopped following the notes and outlines he had extracted from his dreams and instead allowed his story to take over. Before long, ‘Erasing Memory’ was ready for publication.

+Erasing Memory
After all the years he has spent on the police force in Southern Ontario, MacNeice thinks he has seen everything. The homicide detective’s confidence is shaken when he is called to a crime scene. A murdered woman has been beautifully posed.

She has a mark that suggests she might have been a dedicated violinist. There is both ingenuity and horror in the crime scene and MacNeice knows that it will take an especially unorthodox approach to catch the killer.

+The Ambitious city
The Mayor of Dundurn is desperate to see an ambitious waterfront project succeed. However, things are looking grim. The dredgers have found a number of bodies at the site of their operations.

Some seem pretty ancient. But others are definitely new. The mayor believes that the project will breathe new life into their city. So he cannot afford to deal with the distractions. In calling upon MacNeice, the mayor hopes that the detective can kill all the hullaballoo by either shutting down talk of serial killers or finding any murderous madman that might actually be on the loose.

However, MacNeice’s job won’t be easy. There seems to be some sort of local biker war in play. Between the bikers and the killer, MacNeice has his work cut out for him.