Books
Red Sneaker Books
Creating Character: Bringing Your Story to Life
All fiction is character-driven, according to William Bernhardt, despite what you might have heard elsewhere. If your characters don't interest readers, even the most exciting plots will fail. "Action is character," Aristotle wrote, but what does that mean, and how can you use that fundamental principle to create dynamic fiction that will captivate readers? This book explains the relationship between character and plot, and how the perfect melding of the two produces a mesmerizing story.
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Story Structure: The Key to Successful Fiction
"Writing is structure," William Goldman said, but too often aspiring writers plunge into their work without grasping this fundamental principle. Story structure is one of the most important concepts for a writer to understand—and ironically, one of the least frequently taught. In this book, New York Times-bestselling author William Bernhardt explains the elements that make stories work, using examples spanning from Gilgamesh to The Hunger Games. In each chapter, he introduces essential concepts in a direct and easily comprehended manner. Most importantly, Bernhardt demonstrates how you can apply these ideas to improve your own writing.
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Featured Novels
Capitol Betrayal
William Bernhardt's bestselling novels explore politics, power, ambition, crime, and the law. Now he scales new heights of suspense as, in one harrowing day, lawyer and former senator Ben Kincaid enters the eye of an international storm, a crisis with consequences beyond calculation. Kincaid is in a meeting with the president in the Oval Office when Washington suddenly explodes into chaos.
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Capitol Offense
In Capital Offense, attorney Ben Kincaid stands amid the chaos of a violent collision between vengeance and death–and it's up to him to discover where the truth lies.
Capitol Offense was released September 29, 2009.
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Nemesis
In his bestselling legal thrillers, William Bernhardt has explored the dark side of contemporary politics, power, and the law. Now Bernhardt turns back the clock to the city of Cleveland, Ohio, in the fall of 1935. Based on true events and new discoveries about Eliot Ness, Nemesis is a brilliantly told story featuring this legendary lawman's fateful duel with a terrifyingly new kind of criminal: America's first serial killer.
The paperback version of Nemesis hits bookstores September 29, 2009.
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Ben Kincaid Series
William Bernhardt's bestselling novels featuring Oklahoma defense attorney Ben Kincaid capture the bare-knuckles reality of high-stakes criminal defense, as lofty ideals of justice clash with power, corruption, and wealth.
With seventeen titles in the series to date and millions of copies sold, William Bernhardt's Ben Kincaid series is a collection staple.
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Read the chronological order of the Ben Kincaid novels.
Other Novels, Anthologies, and Children's Books
Strip Search
She likes the sudden seconds of sheer terror. The neon dreams fit perfectly with the dreams that wake her up at night: about the man she loved and lost, about the constant temptations in her life, and about the odds that inevitably she'll be in the right place at the right time to look naked, human madness in the eye.
Dark Eye
Sometimes her eyes seduce. Sometimes they stare straight at the kind of sights most people turn away from. But in the blazing neon and searing sun of Las Vegas, she can't see the man who is watching her and thinking to himself: She is the one.
Aside from his well-known Ben Kincaid series and other thrillers, William Bernhardt has also published several anthologies, children's books, and novels.