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The location for Fabricated Lies came about because I had traveled to Chicago annually for well over a decade, probably closer to two, for an osteopathic medical meeting every summer. Most every year, the weather was wonderful with the highs in the seventies to eighties. Everyone wore shorts and sunshades, parks were full, boats out in the lake, gulls drifting in the air—a great time to visit a great city.

In 2010, Hollywood invaded Chicago with the movie Transformers 3. Our meeting was remarkably close to the Michigan Street bridge, and there were burned-out cars, trash, bricks and mortar spread across the entire Magnificent Mile. The bridge was elevated, and the entire area was cleared of the public. It took a lot of perfect timing, precision explosives, and meticulous effort to make the random mayhem look real. Only at certain times could the public walk around the set. I doubt I will ever have flying robots in my novels, but I am saving chaos and confusion to be written somewhere in a future novel.

I had a few extra meetings in March with still nice but cooler weather. A man with large chest and arm muscles strolled down a street in a skintight t-shirt and jeans while everyone else was bundled in coats and sweaters. Well, as expected, that scene is in my novel.

Then I went to Chicago in January. Do you know how cold it gets in Chicago during the first week of the year? Dozens of pigeons hovered around the open fire pit at the Daley Plaza. Double digits in wind speed and single digits in the temperature. After being outside, you could jump into your refrigerator to warm up.
As with most, if not all cities, there are safe zones and areas a visitor should never visit. Back before Uber and Lyft, I took taxis on rides around town. Sometimes I would tell the driver I wanted to see what a specific part of town looked like. As expected, several said sure, threw the stick shift into drive, and off we went. Many drivers knew the areas quite well and spoke like announcers on tour guides. You can learn a tremendous amount about a city from local drivers talking about the city they love. I asked one driver to take me to K-town. He said no and swung his hand at me to leave his cab, so obviously, that went into the novel.

Downtown Chicago has beautiful buildings, Carbide and Carbon, Regal Theater, Railway Exchange, and others, but the government buildings are nice too. The Leighton Criminal Court building is massive, and the Daley Plaza is rich. Walking around inside police stations and federal buildings was reasonably straightforward, up to a point. No one could go past closed doors without permission. But with most professional people, if you ask nicely, they are happy to give a limited tour of what they have. While inside the courthouse, asking questions about work, life, break times, and the weekly number of miles walked inside seemed to help loosen the impromptu discussions.

Let’s not forget about outside the city of Chicago. Even though Fabricated Lies is set there, I toured my local police station and other small-town buildings. After expanding my fiction-driven mind, I developed a compact police building in my novel.

I rode motorcycles as a teenager in all weather. If that is your only transportation, then that is what you used to see friends and go to school and work. In central Texas, the days of shorts and tennis shoes outnumbered the thermal underwear, two sweaters, my thickest jeans, and a leather jacket.
So, I threw in a mix of weather in the novel except no ice on the roads, but there is snow, giving Remo Wolf a little extra duty riding his Indian motorcycle.