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- [00:01]
Mike Papantonio
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- [00:31]
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- [01:01]
Mike Papantonio
Study and play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC and for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the unreal college deal everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and a year of Xbox Game Pass ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more@windows.com studentoffer law supplies last ends June 30th terms at aka mscollegepc. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:36]
Rebecca Buchanan
Hi, this is Rebecca Buchanan and today I'm here with Mike Papantonio to talk about his latest book, A Death in Arcadia. Mike, thanks for being here with me today.
- [01:45]
Mike Papantonio
Well, thank you for the invitation, Rebecca. I appreciate it.
- [01:48]
Rebecca Buchanan
Could you just start out by giving a synopsis about the book and what it's about?
- [01:53]
Mike Papantonio
Yes, I I will. I was interviewing Paris Hilton one time and I interview a lot of folks like that and she we started talking about the fact that she had been in a a reform school. She had been in there four times for various things and we started talking about how awful it was. I had had some experience not in reform school, but when I was growing up I lived with a lot of different families and anytime you were in between homes you were at the risk of being called, they called them Boys Ranches in florid Florida. Boys Ranch Dozier School for Boys up in North Florida. It was pretty awful process and so we started just talking, comparing notes. I had handled a case up in North Florida called Dozier that was the place was open for a hundred years. And over those years, 60 kids died and were buried without grave sites. They tried to cover it up, but it was a place, it was an awful, awful place. And so out of there came this book in the sense that now all that's happened with reform schools is they're, now they're run by corporations, they're run by Wall street, and it's even gotten worse. So this tell, that's the theme that runs through this, through this book. And it's the story of how that happened, how the media has been so dilatory and the, in paying attention to it. Politicians have been, you know, know, they're got their hands out for, for money under Citizens United. They get all this money, any source they can got regulators that, that really they're just looking for their next job, their regulator. Today somebody's going to pay them $250,000 next year if they'll, if they'll give them a break. It's a revolving door. So it's a compilation of all these events that have taken place in American culture that have created this awful, awful chance for corporations now to maximize the way they, the way they pull money out of the system. Because most of these places are state subsidized or tax subsidized. And it's at the same time ignore these kids and put them in real peril. So that's the story. It's not, it starts off, it's not a dismal book. It's a, it's an uplifting book, but it tells the story of how, how, how we've allowed that to happen in the United States. And it's a thriller. You know, I don't. Everything I write is a thriller book number seven. And they're all based on cases that I've handled over the last 30 years or so. And so I just put it into a thriller text where people can be entertained and at the same time they come away and they've learned something they didn't know. When I start talking about this book at book signings, people have no idea of how all of this works. They don't, they don't know that Wall Street's making most of the decisions with things like private prisons and private reform schools. And it's gotten away from us. It's gotten away from us. The media, I blame the media to some degree. The investigative journalism has become so dysfunctional. They don't tell these stories. And so unless I handle the case and tell the story, some of this stuff will never be told about. So that's what the book is. That's the 10,000 foot on the book.
- [05:10]
Rebecca Buchanan
So you, like you said, this is a character. And this is not the first book about sort of this lawyer and this character Deke, right?
- [05:22]
Mike Papantonio
Yeah. Nicholas Deaca Thomas. The first one was called Lawn Disorder. That was the launch book. And you know this business well enough to where if you know you're going to do a series, you have to do initial launch book and kind of set the stage of what the story is. And the story is about a law firm that takes on. They're not a 1-800-car-crash law firm. They're the kind of people that take on big cases like tobacco or the opioid. The opioid industry, human trafficking, chemical industry, pharmaceutical industry. So they're a unique firm in the sense that there's so few law firms in the United States that actually do that. Most plaintiffs firms fall to the lowest common denominator, and they want to do the easiest cases. This is a firm that does just the opposite. They take on world. They take on global giants, you know, you know, big pharmaceutical cases, the chemical manufacturers, name it. They. They're. They're not afraid to take it on. And so this is. This is one of those situations where Deke finds. This is a private. This is a very personal story for De Rebecca. This is telling. He's reliving his childhood and he's talking about what he learned coming up through the system. He's. He's giving you a story from the inside. Innocent, a little bit of a story about guilt. Guilt that he feels that as he was growing up, he had a friend that was. That was level with where he was in life. I mean, he didn't have a home and he was subject to be thrown in reform schools, and he was. And the child ended up being killed in a reform school. So, so, so Deke is reliving that experience and at the same time taking on a new case in the new iteration of what reform schools look like in the United States now. It's. It's a page turner.
- [07:08]
Rebecca Buchanan
So for you, like, was this. You talk about how this sort of came to be with. Talking with Paris Hilton and really thinking about this sort of the. They. What they call it, the troubled teen industry. Right. Is there the fancy name, you know, the name to cover it all up. But like, was this something too? When you're thinking about Deke and you're thinking about this as a character, him as a character, was this like, yes, this totally makes sense. Of something he would take on. Was this like a bat? You were like, I like this as part of the backstory. Was this all.
- [07:39]
Mike Papantonio
Yeah, well, actually. Interesting question, Rebecca. The rest of the law firm doesn't quite understand what's going on with Deke because, you know, he's. He took on the tobacco industry, took on the opioid industry, the chemical industry, all of these huge cases, and all of. Of a sudden, a mother walks in whose child has been killed in reform school. That's called a single event case. Now this. The distinction is he handles mass tort cases. He handles cases by the tens of thousands. But the single event case walked in, and they can't quite understand why he's so driven to want to take this on. But in the process, as he takes it on, he has an instinct that is bigger than the single event, and that's what he finds. It's actually epidemic throughout the country. From California, New York, this kind of things go on. But he's also driven by, I think, a lot by the guilt that he feels about what happened to his friend. And that's a big part of the story and takes you to the end, and you kind of figure out what happened. Why this guilt? What did you do or fail to do that you feel so compelled to take on this. This case?
- [08:51]
Rebecca Buchanan
So you're a lawyer, and I'd love for you to talk a little bit about being a lawyer and kind of what that means for you as an author. Right. Like, how did you. How did you decide to, like, hey, I'm going to start to write some legal thrillers. I can do that.
- [09:06]
Mike Papantonio
Yeah. Well, all the cases I just mentioned are cases I actually handled. The tobacco litigation originated with my law firm right here in Pensacola, Florida. So did the opioid litigation, human trafficking. So we've. So there's some parallels, obviously, to the. To the fiction book and. And, you know, always write about what you know. Rebecca, you've heard that again and again. So. So that. That's kind of how these books evolve. They're. They're easy to write in the sense that one day I'm in court and I'm in front of a federal judge that shouldn't be a federal judge. They. They have black robe syndrome or whatever it may be, and they're awful, and they don't care about consumers or whatever the issue may be. And I'm able to leave that courtroom and go home and write a chapter, fictionalized chapter, about what happened that day. So the book comes together almost the same way that pleadings in a lawsuit come together, right. You start off with your complaint. Somebody's done something wrong, and I'm going to show how they've done something wrong. And that's how the book evolves. The book I'm working on right now, or actually the next one coming out, is Skyhorses is going to publish the next one and I think comes out 20, 20, 27. It's a real case I'm handling. Not me, but one of our lawyers, in fact, my daughter is handling this case. It's a. It's a case where mothers don't even realize this, but preemie babies are dying from formula that they're given. And, and it's true case, it's actually happening. And you've got thousands of deaths taking place all over the world from this formula. So as that's developing, as that was developing in the early time, in the beginning of that case, I was able to follow that case and create the book around what's actually happening. So in book I'm working on right now, Depra Provera. It's a product that gives women brain tumors. They're taking injections for birth control and it's giving women brain tumors that are dying from it. So but that's actually happening day to day. So I think it's a little easier for me because I'm kind of on the inside. I have the actual documents in my hand. I see what they were thinking. I see their interior culpability. I see the mania that flies around when they think they can make billions of dollars by killing people. And so that manifests itself in these books. And they're true stories. They're true stories. Now, the murders may not be true. Strangulations or the assassins that show that that may not be true, but the rest of the book is true. The rest of the story is true. And so people are able to read that and you know, Google, did this really happen? And they're always amazed. Yes, it really happened. You know, the tobacco industry, for example, really did have documents saying we can calculate how much we're going to make every year based bet based against what we're going to have to pay out every year. So we're going to keep killing people because it's a business expense that we just have. We're able to write off.
- [12:09]
Rebecca Buchanan
Yeah. So how does that for you? Like, do you see then your writing and the work that you're doing as sort of an extension of sort of social justice work then, and really wanting people, you know, like making People aware of what is going on in larger corporate America.
- [12:29]
Mike Papantonio
Absolutely. Rebecca somebody. You know, I'm a trial lawyer. That's. That's all. I'm not an office lawyer. I don't do pleadings and I try cases. And so somebody asks me a couple days ago, they said, well, by being a trial or don't you accomplish a lot of good? Well, you do, but you can't stop and just say, I tried a case. I got a result. A jury awarded $20 million. It doesn't mean anything after 48 hours. So what you have to do is in order to keep that story alive, you. You have to do books, you have to do documentaries, you have to write articles. You have to keep that word out there about what's going on. PFAS is the best example I can give you. I tried five PFAS cases up in Ohio, and one, every one of them. And we discovered something that basically everybody in this country has a forever chemical in their body that potentially is killing them. Okay? And it came from two sources. It came from. From 3M and it came from Dupont, and it's in drinking water. It's in every. It's. It's ubiquitous. So, so obviously write a book about that, you know, and tell the story. And so. But I guess I could have tried the cases and gotten big verdicts and said, okay, my job's over. But it's not. It's not. You have to continue that story. You have. Out of that, out of those five tries, five cases came a movie. It was called Dark Waters. It's about the lawyer who brought me the cases to try. It's a very compelling, very compelling movie. Three documentaries. And so the story continues to be told that way. So as a trial lawyer that does these kinds of cases, you have responsibility to say, yeah, I got a verdict. Everything went well. That jury said, the jury agreed with me. But that doesn't mean anything a month later unless you're keeping the story alive. These books do that.
- [14:29]
Rebecca Buchanan
Yeah. So you had mentioned. I want to talk more about this, but before I forget, when you were talking, you mentioned, like, your daughter is trying one of these cases. So is there a little bit of family in there? Right? Like, Deke has a daughter. Deke's daughter works for the law firm.
- [14:44]
Mike Papantonio
There is Kara in the book is. My daughter's name is Sarah. And I've watched her come up as a trial lawyer. And she just happens to have huge talent. You know, I was. God blessed me with that. And so. So, yeah, I put these characters in the book. It's fun. Matter of fact, I don't think there's a week that goes by where somebody doesn't say path. Can you put me in your next book? Just so matter of fact, it's. Funny story. I was just writing a chapter on a book I'm working on right now, and friend of mine, John Peacock, he said, you know, you've been telling me you're going to put me in a. In a book for years. And so I just put him in the book. And I had. He was thrilled. I said, john, it's not going to be. It's going to be a while before the book comes out. But you're Johnny Peacock. And he was thrilled. You know, people love that kind of association.
- [15:31]
Rebecca Buchanan
I think that's awesome. So is she okay? So she's like, all right, dad, it's fine. Or she's like, really, dad?
- [15:37]
Mike Papantonio
Rebecca, the next book, I hope you'll read it. I think you'll love it. It's called. Well, it comes out. It's called Secret in Sudan, and that's the title that they have today. You know, when you publish in a book, a lot of times when they get involved, they'll change your title and change some stuff around. But it's called Secret in Sudan. And she's the major character in that book. And I didn't have to reach very far to write the book because I'm seeing this happen. I'm watching her handle these extraordinary, complex cases. So it gives me a lot of material to work from.
- [16:08]
Rebecca Buchanan
So one of the things I often ask authors, and I'd love for you to talk a little bit about, is the research you do. Like, so you have to do research as a lawyer, right? Like sometimes, you know, I have lots of students who are like, I want to be a lawyer. And I'm like, you know what that means?
- [16:22]
Mike Papantonio
Well, here's the good news. You're already doing the research for the case that you're handling. I already have. Before I even bring a lawsuit, I know more than most people know about the case. So I already have that. It's not like I have to go digging for, you know, legal concepts or what does this mean? What would happen in a real trial at this level? What is the complexity? How do I describe the complexity? What's the. What's the science behind this issue? What. All that is already in a pretty good package for me. And I have. Look, I'm the first to admit I have advantages that a lot of. A lot of writers don't have. And it looks, it is easier. I mean, I will tell you anytime I get out of my, what I call my safe space. I mean, I have to really work. I mean, I really have to say, okay, I'm making a transition, for example, I'm making a transition now into mental health care. And so I don't know that field, you know, I know, I know enough. I've had cases where I've worked with people who do that, but I have to really understand what's going on there. So somebody who writes about mental health, writes books about mental health, has that same advantage. So it's a big advantage for me to do what I do. I see authors take shots at trying to write legal thrillers all the time and they, they fail miserably. I mean, if somebody's really in the business and they understand what lawyers really do and they read a chapter and you just go, no, no. It's entertaining. I think as a general public doesn't know how far off they are in what they're describing. But you know, I have a huge, huge audience of lawyers that read these books and so I kind of have to get it right.
- [18:08]
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- [19:28]
Rebecca Buchanan
No, I have to laugh because I think the same thing often about teaching and you know, like when people talk, right? Being a teacher, right? Or like, like sometimes there's television. I'm like, and I've talked to people who like firefighters and you know, like, like when you, you see these shows and they're like, they're horror.
- [19:45]
Mike Papantonio
Isn't that awful? I don't know what it's a, it's a turn off to me, Rebecca. I'm reading and I'm going, God, I mean, come on, take a minute, man. Go talk to somebody, let them read it. If I'm writing something out of my comfort zone, I will always have somebody in that area say, can you check off on this? What could I do better here? What, what more realism can I bring to this? You see? So I think that's a very important point. If somebody, if somebody has to say, fab, you got to do a book on teaching, I mean, I'd be lost. But you always write about what you know and you're always going to get a better product. And so that's where you begin anyway. And I'm not saying that that's the only way you can write, obviously, but I think it's a big advantage Takeru for you.
- [20:31]
Rebecca Buchanan
And so like, you have been, like you said, this is book number seven. So can you talk a little bit about, for you as kind of, you know, when you're writing a series, how you think about your character sort of evolving in the series and for you as a writer, like, thinking about like, what is that like for you? Having to be like, okay, now where do I, you know, where do I want this character to go? Or where are we at in his life right now?
- [20:57]
Mike Papantonio
Yeah, I'm always thinking about that because it goes after years. I mean, at this point, you got deke in his 70s. You know, he's just turned 70. And so he started, he started much younger. You know, what I try to do is I love James Lee Burke. To me, one of the finest writers in the business. And I watch how he evolves. Cleat or Robichau, how they've evolved over the years. And he doesn't put everything out there all at one time. You discover little parts and pieces about him. And it's almost like, it's almost like that person who decides, I'm going to put this piece of art right out here in the middle of my living room. So when people walk in, they're going to see that piece of art. Well, James Lee Burke doesn't do that. James Lee Burke takes that piece of art and puts it in a cabinet, maybe with glass on the cabinet. And you have to, you look at it and you discover and you open the door, and you go, wow, wow, I just discovered something. I think that's the same way that you. On that, you know, take the layers off a person, a character in your book. And that's what I've done with all of my people. This one that I'm writing right now is going to be heavily on a character named Michael Carey, who is in the last book. He's remarkably interesting young man. He was a pararescue man who was injured, but he was a special ops pararescue man. He worked Afghanistan, Iran. And it's based on somebody I know. And so as I watch that person, whether I'm having a drink with them or whatever it is, I'm going to be learning something about him, and I'm going to develop that. So, Michael, this is. This is Michael Carey's book to develop, the one I'm working on right now. And it's so much fun. You know, it's not like you're inventing something new. What you're doing is you're noticing something that you hadn't noticed before in small parts. So character development is so important. It's easier in a series, right? Huh? I mean, if you're writing a standalone book and you have to develop a character, you got to do it right. Then here you've got. I've got seven books, and Deke has evolved, and, you know, Carol Moore and Gina Romano, all of them have developed over this series of time. Over this time.
- [23:17]
Rebecca Buchanan
So do you feel like sometimes the character like Deke will surprise you?
- [23:22]
Mike Papantonio
You were like, oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely. That's where it should be, shouldn't it? I mean, when you're writing, there's nothing more exciting than you write a paragraph and you go, God, I. I want to know what happens next. You're almost asking yourself, what would Deke do here? And you're really kind of ruminating on that. You're trying to say, okay, what? Wonder what he'd do? And you may have four options, and you invent according to which option you fits in the best. So, yeah, you're discovering some discovery every time. Now, if you do an outline that's too tight, you know, a lot of people. A lot of people believe that the only way they can write. And I'm not down on this. There's. There's planners and there's plotters, you know, and there's people that. That say, I got to have such a tight outline that describes this character, and it doesn't let that character breathe sometimes. And there's A whole bunch of writers these days, myself included, you have a notion, you have a general direction, but you don't, you don't trap yourself so much that you can't have a character evolve or even a storyline evolve as you're writing because you'll write something. Oh God, I, you know, my outline, I can't move from my outline. I can't move it away from this. But you want to. And sometimes you don't have the freedom to do that because your outline is so tied to a sequence. And so the same way with character invention, you know, that's how, that's the way character invention works for me.
- [24:50]
Rebecca Buchanan
Yeah. So, you know, you are trying these cases, you're doing this. So for you sometimes. Do you use your books too as a way to do things that like, that you didn't write like, you're like, okay, I really wish this would have been the outcome or I really wish I would have said, absolutely.
- [25:08]
Mike Papantonio
I love, sometimes I'm writing, I'm writing a, I might be writing a chapter where a deposition's taken place and the deposition. To keep a reader involved, you've really got to go at it. Nobody's going to read a deposition. But if you read events and shifts that take place in that deposition, they go, wow, does that really happen? Well, yeah, A, it really happens. And sometimes I'll be writing depots. I'll be writing. I said, God, that would, that would have been perfect in this case. I wish I had done it looking back. And so, yeah, you, you're inventing even after the case is over and I'm
- [25:46]
Rebecca Buchanan
guessing too, then you can get back at some people who like, maybe ruled against you or ruled against something.
- [25:51]
Mike Papantonio
Yes. Oh, I'm, I'm not kind to judges. I am not kind to judges. I mean, full disclosure, I, I don't really care. I mean, I want to tell this story as it has to be told. And if a judge is awful, by the time you finish the book, you're going to have a pretty good idea who that might be. And you're going to know something certainly if you're a lawyer. But even if you're a general public, you're going to know about rulings that were made that had front page quality about it. So, yeah, I'm not, I'm not all that kind. I don't go out of my way to pander to judges or other lawyers for that matter.
- [26:26]
Rebecca Buchanan
So one of the things that I saw in this book, and I'd love for you to talk a little bit about is the corruption. Right. Like there's corruption throughout it. Like, you know, thinking about people in power and people kind of using their money and using their influence to basically buy, buy, buy the legal system. Right. And can you talk a little bit about that too? Like how sort of corruption and silence allows some of these things to continue to happen. Because I think sometimes people think about this in this sort of these big, you know, ways, but like that this is an everyday thing that is going on as well.
- [27:02]
Mike Papantonio
Yeah, we, there's a protective mechanism that we all have, Rebecca, and it is that we want to believe the best. Right. Anytime I, and the best way I can answer your question is to say anytime I start a trial, I know that I have to overcome something with the jury. Even when I'm the vinayer, when the void dire with the vinayer of people that are sitting out there, I have to overcome this notion that's a protective mechanism, that, gee, corporations can't be that bad. There's no way a corporation can make an intentional decision to make money at the cost of human life. And you know that that's happened. But that protective mechanism sometimes is very difficult to overcome. So you always have to be aware of that. You always have to, you always have to push that idea. You have to sell that idea from day one to forget about what you believe that A, capitalism honestly is probably the best system in the world. I mean, when we make comparisons. But B, capitalism can go bad, really bad sometime. And there's times when, and this may sound like an overstatement, but it's not. There's times when I'm sitting across the table in a trial or in a deposition with a pure sociopath. Now, they don't look like a sociopath, but you know, they're Harvard educated, they, they got a Rolex watch on, you know, they drove up in a Bentley, got an MBA from Yale or wherever. And so. But they don't, they don't have a hoodie on, right? They don't have a hoodie on. They're not on the corner selling 10 ounces of marijuana. So we treat them different in the way we look at them. But when I'm looking at them, I'm looking at a sociopath most of the time. And I, I mean that sincerely. I mean, if you take a DSM 5, for example, where diagnostic, diagnostic DSM for, for psychological overlay, you're going to find check, check, check, check. As a narcissist is a sociopath, whatever you, however you want to categorize Those are the people I work against day to day. So I see that every single day. And the frustration is. And sometimes in the books, you'll even see the frustration that I have where people are so slow to accept that because they don't want to. You know, they want to have a system that's clean, that works for them every day in a real positive way. And most of the time it does. Rebecca, these people are outliers. There's this. And it's not every day, you know, the people that made the decisions on tobacco, they're sociopaths, Opioids, absolutely. Probably psychopaths. But we don't look at them like that because we have a two, three tier system of justice in the United States. We're indoctrinated certain ways. Coming up, this is what a criminal looks like. Here's how a criminal talks. But these are criminals at the highest level that are causing death by the thousands that should be prosecuted. They should be in jail. And all, at best I'm able to do is take money away from them.
- [30:04]
Rebecca Buchanan
Yeah, I would love to talk a little bit more about the sort of the teen industry and what is happening with teens institutionally because I think, like, people hear this idea of the privatization of prisons and that kind of thing, but don't really understand exactly what that means. So. Yeah. Can you talk a little bit?
- [30:23]
Mike Papantonio
Yeah. What it is, It's a shame shifting of. Well, it, it's where you externalize all your risk and you internalize all your profits. That's what's happening with it. That's the, that's the best description I can give you. Because they get the state involved. For example, state's going to subsidize a prison here. So. And so. So the mistakes that are made in the prison, no matter how bad the conduct, they have some protection from the state, immunity issues. They're able to pull in as much money as they can minimize, especially these reform schools, minimize the coverage, minimize what they're doing for these kids. There's no counseling. You know, this is. They, they're not there to rehabilitate. They're there to keep them locked up. And these are kids. Let me just tell you something. In the, the case that I handled in North Florida, the Dozier case, these are kids that were in there for stealing hubcaps. Okay? Now, there were some bad kids there, of course, but it didn't make any difference. They mix them all together, but there was no risk. The, the little city where this happened, Marianna, Florida, money was flowing from the State and federal and all these subsidized programs and the institution was externalizing all their risks and internalizing all their profits. And so anytime you have a setting like that, bad things happen. That's what happens. When corporate America gets involved in something like this. There's certain things they should not be involved in where we have to demand that if they are involved that they have a responsibility. How about what, what's going on with social media right now? Do you realize they have a 230 protection to where they're, they're able to, you know, look, a friend of mine just tried the case out in California. Mark, Mark Lanier, dear friend of mine and had had a set of a month long trial where they're fighting him all the way saying we're, we have immunity, we have immunity, we have immunity that was given to them for no good reason. And so sometimes we have to understand it's government that allows corporate America to do a lot, a lot of what they do. Case I handled, it's book is called A Suspicious Activity Where I caught banks in the UK they were, they were washing money for drug cartels and terrorists, $100 billion worth of money and the DOJ made him sign a document, pay a million dollars and nobody was prosecuted. And I think my takeaway after writing these and trying law for so many, so many years, unless you perp walk these people, you're never going to have a cultural shift. It's always going to be doing business as usual. And so I don't know if that answers the question. I hope, I hope I got to the heart of your question.
- [33:08]
Rebecca Buchanan
No, I think it did. And I think like I, I appreciate what you're talking about too is that, that we don't, we have this system and you can prosecute but there's not, they're not going to end up in jail. They're not going to end up with right in with the ramifications that somebody like me, you know, like somebody who does not have multimillion dollars and the government backing them has right.
- [33:34]
Mike Papantonio
These people that are, that are doing all these awful things in reform school will never walk. A lot of them know what they're doing. A lot of them have psychological problems that promote what they're doing. They'll never be prosecuted. Do you realize when I handled the opioid case, 150 people a day died every single day from opioid exposure, abuse, drug overdoses. Do you know how many people were prosecuted? Zero. Okay. Because they didn't look like criminals. You know, they, they just let them go because they had affluence and influence and impact politically and legislatively. And, and the media. They owned, the. The damn media wouldn't. Wouldn't do any stories on them because they were paying so many dollars in advertising. So these books cut to the heart of that, and each book handles some part of that in its own special way to try to educate and try to entertain at the same time. But if you don't have an OMG moment when you're reading some of this stuff, something's wrong with you. I mean, you know, you're just disconnected from what's going on around you.
- [34:45]
Rebecca Buchanan
Yeah. Like, so, you know, you've talked a bit about some of the ones that, some things that you're working on. Are there any other sort of cases that you have come up? Like, what else are you thinking you want to kind of tackle or what or in the future, do you see, like, we really need. I need to write something about this or
- [35:03]
Mike Papantonio
I'm already. Right now two ahead. It's so, you know, I'm always trying to see what's. The next one is going to be social media. It's going to be the addiction problem with social media. It's going to be how Roblox takes kids and entices them to do awful things. Everything from being trafficked to suicide. And, you know, look, this is just the reality. And we, we don't want to. We don't spend much time. We're busy, aren't we? We go. We go to work, we go home. We have to take care of our family. We don't have the time to explore these things in the same depth of thriller like this might do. But I think the next one is going to be social media. And we're already handling those cases all over the country, whether it's, you know, whether it's Meta or whatever. Facebook, TikTok, YouTube. Yeah, TikTok. They're all doing the same thing and they've mastered the algorithm that addicts kids to do bad things.
- [36:05]
Rebecca Buchanan
Yeah. So I, you know, we've been talking a while and you've talked about some of your books, but I'll ask, you know, my final question is always like, self promotion. So you have like A Death of Arcadia is out now. Anything else that's coming out soon or with A Death in Arcadia that you want, what do you want people to know?
- [36:21]
Mike Papantonio
A Death in Arcadia. I want people to read. It's a reality check. And it's a reality check not just as to the reform school areas. It's reality check to what's happening around them socially. There's bigger questions than that narrow part of the reform schools. That's bad enough, but when you put together all the parts of our society that allows that to happen, it's got to be somewhat of a wake up call. I promise you, Rebecca, they'll be hugely entertained. They'll love Midas, who is an assassin at the book. That is just such a bizarre character who I'm going to bring back because readers really like this psychopath. But, but at the same time, they're going to come and say, God, I, I, I got to think about this. I gotta, I gotta think, is this really happening? And if they take a second, just a minute to Google any part of that book, they're gonna see it's true.
- [37:14]
Rebecca Buchanan
Well, Mike, thank you so much for talking with me on New Books Network again. Mike Papantonio, who wrote A Death in ar, Other Things.
- [37:22]
Mike Papantonio
Yeah, well, thank you, Rebecca. I appreciate it.
- [37:24]
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