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James M. Jackson
ALLi Author Member
Location: United States of America (the)
Genres: Thriller, Crime, Mystery, Advice & How To
Skills: Reading/Literary Event, Self-publishing Workshop/Training, Speaking Engagement/Lecture, Writing Workshop
If I were a house, I’d be called Mid-century Modern, a style of architecture that “emphasized creating structures with ample windows and open floor plans, with the intention of opening up interior spaces and bringing the outdoors in." If I can’t be outside enjoying nature, I want to be able to see outside.
My earliest years were spent in Rochester, New York. I spent second and third grade in Blacksburg, Virginia where I temporarily acquired a southern accent and was first exposed to segregation. Returning north, this time to Greece, New York, I quickly ditched the southern accent and reacquired the pinched-nasal twang of Upstate New York.
After graduating from Greece Arcadia High School, I attended Lafayette College before deciding I wanted to teach high school math and transferred to the State University of New York at Albany. In a bit of insanity, I graduated a semester early, earning a B.S. in Mathematics with minors in Education and Psychology. The only way to score a high school teaching job in January was to replace someone who died or became disabled (which at the time most frequently meant when a pregnant woman “showed”!) No such circumstances presented themselves, and so I had to search for another job.
Luck appeared in the form of an actuarial trainee position at a consulting firm in New Jersey. I spent the next thirty years as a consulting actuary and earned an MBA from Boston University along the way. During the first ten years as an actuary, I helped large corporations, governments and not-for-profits design and implement retirement plans and post-retirement medical plans to benefit their employees. The second ten years found me helping to make those plans efficient and assure they had adequate funding to provide promised benefits. The last ten years, as corporate America swung away from long-term worker commitments and toward short-term profit maximization, I began to tear those programs down.
Deciding to buck the trend of profit maximization, I retired early (eliminating that source of guaranteed income!) and turned my efforts to writing. The income is modest, but the job satisfaction is considerably greater. While looking for representation for the Seamus McCree series, I wrote and sold to Masterpoint Press a nonfiction book on bridge for intermediate players, One Trick at a Time: How to start winning at bridge.
The Seamus McCree series soon found a publisher as well and to date consists of seven novels (Ant Farm, Bad Policy, Cabin Fever, Doubtful Relations, Empty Promses, False Bottom, and Granite Oath), two novella "Furthermore" and “Low Tide at Tybee”, and several short stories.
When not writing, I have subjected those around me to a series of passions, picking up one, dropping it, and possibly returning to it years later. I lettered in soccer in both high school and college and even played semi-pro for a time. I was a serious (but ineffectual) golfer for years, but when I retired and I had time for it, I gave it up. When younger, I hiked and camped. Now I ramble and birdwatch. I’ve participated in tournament chess and bridge and been beaten by world champions in both. I enjoy traveling; a day at a national wildlife refuge with binocs and a camera is just about as good as it gets. I often post my photographs on Facebook.
Over the course of my actuarial career, I lived in northern New Jersey, the Boston area of Massachusetts, fifty miles north of Manhattan (in New York), fifty miles west of Manhattan (back in New Jersey), and finished my career in Cincinnati, Ohio. We now split our time between the deep woods of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and Madison, Wisconsin. I claim it’s to enjoy the woods and city delights. Others suggest that I wear out my welcome after six months and am forced to leave in the dead of night.
The Seamus McCree series are suspense/thrillers with a financial crime twist. I enjoy reading stories set in real places, and I follow that preference in my own writing. Those who know my houses will notice similarities with Seamus’s abodes. And while Seamus shares a few peculiarities with me (we both like applesauce on our pizza, for example), all my characters are fictional—unless you’ve really ticked me off, in which case you may show up dead on page two. Just kidding! Maybe.
James M. Jackson's books
Ant Farm (Seamus McCree #1)
Meet Seamus McCree, a single dad, amateur sleuth, champion of the little guy against those who abuse their power. In this page-turner, police can’t figure out why someone murdered thirty-eight retirees at a Labor Day picnic. They enlist Seamus, a financial crimes consultant, to follow the money, taking him from behind his computer to the front lines to help investigators ask the right questions.
As Seamus untangles a web of financial chicanery, those threatened hire a hit man who calls himself the Happy Reaper to take out Seamus. He'll risk his own life to bring justice, but Seamus must overcome his deepest fears when his actions endanger his son.
A protagonist written in the tradition of Robert B. Parker, John Sandford, and William Kent Krueger: Seamus is a good guy willing to pay a price to bring justice to the world.
Download your copy and join Seamus in his fight to save lives, including his own.
Bad Policy (Seamus McCree #2)
When private financial investigator Seamus McCree returns to Cincinnati after a routine business trip, he discovers that his home has become a crime scene for a brutal murder. The victim in his basement is an acquaintance from a previous investigation. He’d endured bullets to both of his ankles, knees and elbows before the final blast to his head put him out of his misery.
No one has seen an “IRA six pack” victim since The Troubles in Northern Ireland in the 1970s.
Now the primary “person of interest” in the murder, Seamus must use his talent for logic and hard work to prove his innocence. Soon he uncovers a trail that leads back to his Boston roots - and a poisonous family feud dating from the divorce of Boston's Irish mafia and the Provisional IRA in the 1970s.
Driven by the chilling realization that there was more behind the death of his policeman father than he ever knew, Seamus ignores warnings from the police, friends and enemies and continues to dig for the truth.
As the body count climbs, all trails seem to lead back to him, and Seamus is forced to go underground to find out who is framing him - and why - before he becomes the next victim.
Cabin Fever (Seamus McCree #3)
Financial crimes investigator Seamus McCree returns in this thrilling sequel to Bad Policy. With his house in Cincinnati in ruins, Seamus retreats to the family cabin for some well-earned rest and relaxation. But his plans for a quiet, contemplative winter in the wilds of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula are thrown out the window when he discovers a naked woman on his porch during a blizzard. The mystery woman is suffering from hypothermia, frostbite, high fevers, amnesia—and rope burns on her wrists and ankles.
Snowbound at the cabin, without transportation or phone coverage, Seamus struggles to keep the woman alive and find a way to get an SOS message out. What he doesn’t know is that a domestic paramilitary organization is hunting for an escaped female prisoner—and closing in on his isolated refuge.
Doubtful Relations (Seamus McCree #4)
Financial crimes investigator Seamus McCree has wife problems, and Lizzie's not even his wife anymore. Her current husband disappeared on a business trip to Savannah. Was he kidnapped? Dispatched by his hedge fund partners? Or did he run off with another woman? Police assume he's AWOL, and Lizzie turns to Seamus for help.
Seamus has no desire to be sucked into Lizzie's drama again, but her angst is also affecting their son, Paddy. Seamus agrees to help discover the truth, a quest that soon involves the entire extended family. Long buried secrets surface and each member must confront the question, "How far can you trust your family?"
Equal parts road trip, who done what, and domestic thriller, book four in the Seamus McCree series takes psychological suspense to a new level. Seamus McCree fans and newcomers alike will delight in this fast-paced novel that leaves no one in the family unchanged and keeps you guessing until the very end.
Empty Promises (Seamus McCree #5)
If you love the suspense and plot twists of domestic thrillers, this page-turner will be for you. Seamus McCree’s first assignment hiding a witness goes from bad to worse. His client disappears. His granddog finds a buried human bone. Police find a fresh human body.
His client is to testify in a Chicago money laundering trial. He’s paranoid that with a price on his head, if the police know where he’s staying, the information will leak. Seamus promised his business partner and lover, Abigail Hancock, that he’d keep the witness safe at the McCree family camp located deep in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan’s woods.
Abigail is furious at his incompetence and their relationship flounders. Even his often-helpful son, Paddy, must put family safety ahead of helping his father. Seamus risks his own safety and freedom to turn amateur sleuth in hopes he can solve the crimes, fulfill his promise of protection, and win back Abigail. Wit and grit are on his side, but the clock is ticking . . . and the hit man is on his way.
False Bottom (Seamus McCree #6)
Seamus McCree returns to his native Boston to bury his Uncle Mike, a retired Boston police captain, who has been murdered. Seamus has been named executor of the estate, which is easy enough for him to settle. But he soon learns Uncle Mike has left a second, secret legacy - and that triggers an earthquake's worth of problems. Added to his troubles is the discovery that Uncle Mike's killer is now gunning for Seamus and his family.
Seamus must find a path through a labyrinth of lies and secrets stemming from his father's death more than forty years earlier and resolve all of Uncle Mike's legacies before the killer can strike again.
Furthermore (A Seamus McCree Novella)
This short read is packed with twists and turns.
With hidden money and connections to reach past his prison walls, The Happy Reaper threatens to avenge his capture and eliminate the entire McCree clan. Seamus must neutralize him, but how?
DNA can answer the question of who’s included in the McCree clan. Every family has secrets. Who has the right to know?
Low Tide at Tybee (A Seamus McCree Novella)
A FUN NOVELLA
James M. Jackson brings three of his Seamus McCree series characters (Seamus, his darts-throwing mother, and his now six-year-old granddaughter, Megan) to Tybee Island, Georgia to vacation and escape winter up north.
Megan spots a thief going through their beach bags, after which their vacation unravels with a series of twists and turns that will leave you guessing until the end, trying to figure out who done what.
Granite Oath (Seamus McCree #7)
On a Thursday afternoon, Kat Serrano leaves work early, briefly returns to her remote trailer deep in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula woods, and drives off with no explanation to her family. Two days later someone ransacks the trailer.
Kat is a Dreamer, and her mother won’t talk to the police for fear she’ll be deported and lose her 8-year-old granddaughter, Valeria.
Valeria is devastated by the events. She and her best friend from summer camp, Megan McCree, employ a “Pinky-swear” to get Megan’s grandfather Seamus McCree to learn what happened.
Seamus uncovers a tangled web of drugs, prostitution, and dummy corporations, and soon finds himself the target of killers. Anyone sane would wash his hands of the mess or turn it over to the police.
But Seamus has given his word, his granite oath, to learn the truth . . . even if it kills him.