Author taps insights from the inside

Janet Entzel of Coon Rapids drew on her 15-year Department of Corrections career for a first novel, a mystery whose protagonist is a female prison warden.

By ERIC M. HANSON, Star Tribune

Last update: February 26, 2008 - 11:20 PM

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AKA MCGUIRE

By: Janet Clark Entzel.

Publisher: Beaver's Pond, 224 pages, $17.95.

About: Coon Rapids author Entzel's first book is a mystery about a female prison warden who meets a charming psychopath posing as a psychiatrist whom he murdered out of revenge.

Some of the men in the little cantina along the Arizona-Mexico border had a wild look about them, a feral quality you see more often in out-of-the-way places in the desert Southwest than here in the Midwest.

Tan, leathery skin. Long beards. One of them leaned over to Janet Clark Entzel and asked her what she was doing there.

I'm looking for a quiet place to do research on serial killers, she said.

"Put 'er there, sister," he said and extended his hand. "Before I left Wisconsin, they accused me of murdering my family."

They were characters, Entzel says now, recalling the people she met on a family trip to Arizona about 13 years ago.

Years later, some of those people are literally characters in Entzel's first book, a mystery novel called "Aka McGuire" that features a female prison warden, Kitt Logan, as the protagonist.

Entzel, 66, of Coon Rapids, comes to the territory of prisons naturally. For 15 years, she worked in the Minnesota Department of Corrections, first in the administrative offices and then at the Lino Lakes correctional facility.

Before that, she served five terms as a state representative for south Minneapolis.

Write what you know, indeed; Entzel has known quite a few wardens, including women.

In the book, warden Logan, a Minnesotan who has moved to Arizona, meets a charming, handsome man who she thinks is a respected psychiatrist but isn't. The warden hires him to work in the prison. Turns out, he's a psychopath who murdered a man out of revenge and has assumed his identity.

"I spent a lot of time with [the killer] in my head," Entzel said. "I read a lot of books about psychopaths and interviewed psychologists and psychiatrists, trying to get a handle on psychopaths. Being a psychopath doesn't necessarily mean you are going to kill someone. There are some who do very well, in prominent positions."

Entzel's antagonist, she said, is a man who was not driven to kill but who will kill to get what he wants. Watching him evolve as she wrote the book was one of the pleasures of doing it, she said. The warden is a composite representing herself and other women in the field.

Time will reveal whether Entzel has taken her first steps into a third career as a novelist. She'd like to write another, she said, and the people who have read the book tell her they'd like to see a sequel. But this one took four years and 13 drafts.

That's relatively common for a first-time novelist working her way through unfamiliar territory. Entzel, like a lot of people, always felt she had a book in her. But she acknowledges she needed "a fair amount of mentoring" and found it through a class with local mystery writers Ellen Hart and William Kent Krueger.

The scenes in "Aka McGuire" describing inmate behavior are "pretty much based in fact," she said, either from events she saw or heard about from other corrections staff.

"It gave me a wealth of knowledge when it comes to understanding inmate behavior -- some of the scams they try to run on people, but also the often tragic childhoods of many of the people that are incarcerated," she said.

Eric M. Hanson • 612-673-7517

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