The Art of Slow Burn Suspense: Letting Crime Unfold in Small-Town Stories

Not every story needs a car chase or a gun drawn on page one. In fact, the best ones don’t.

Especially not in Southern noir, where danger doesn’t always walk in with a snarl and a pistol—it seeps in slow. Like creek water under a porch, or a lie whispered over tea at the church social.

Slow-burn suspense isn’t just a stylistic choice. It’s a natural product of the world I write in—tight-knit towns with long memories, grudges passed down like heirlooms, and crimes that don’t always start with a bang. Sometimes they start with a rumor. A glance. A phone call in the middle of the night that nobody admits to making.

In small towns, you don’t outrun the past. It waits for you in the produce aisle. And the tension? It doesn’t need a ticking time bomb. It needs a quiet kitchen, two people pretending they don’t know what the other did last summer—and a third watching from across the street with binoculars and a notebook.

When I write, I let things simmer. I don’t rush the reveals. I want readers leaning forward, feeling that itch at the back of their necks, wondering why the preacher’s wife flinched when someone mentioned the old sheriff. Because in these stories, the pacing is part of the puzzle. The silence matters just as much as the screaming.

For me, it’s not only the destination—where the bad guy gets his comeuppance in the end (or doesn’t)—it’s the journey of how the characters get to the proverbial “there.” It’s not that nothing’s happening—it’s that everything is happening, just under the surface. All while the characters go about their normal lives. They’re caught in something they didn’t ask for—or maybe they did. Either way, they have to deal with the hand they’re dealt.

I love writing that way. And I love reading stories where you don’t see the twist coming because you were too busy watching the wrong character smile too wide.

That’s the magic of slow-burn suspense. It gives your story room to breathe, your characters room to lie, and your reader just enough rope to hang themselves trying to figure it out.

So no, you won’t find neon-lit shootouts or rooftop chases in my books. But you will find old family secrets, buried bodies, and someone who knows exactly where the bones are—because they were the one who put them there.