Author Michael Carrier talks with the U.P. Notable Books Book Club about his award winning book Murder on Sugar Island. MICHAEL CARRIER has published fourteen books of fiction, all centered on his main character, Jack Handler, a retired Chicago homicide detective. His books have been featured throughout the Midwest, mainly centering in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Michael Carrier never had a doubt that he would become a writer of fiction. When, as a journalism student in college, his professor asked him what he would like to do with his life, he told him that when he turned fifty years of age he would begin writing fiction. The professor was not pleased that Michael wanted to delay his career, and so challenged the rationale. Michael simply told him that he would not start writing novels until he had accumulated an appropriate inventory of life experiences. However, his professor, who happened to be the editor of a national weekly magazine, gave Michael a job writing for him. At various times in his life, Michael has driven truck throughout the US, hustled pool and gambled poker from Texas to Montana, traveled the country hitchhiking, spent five years in New York’s East Greenwich Village, delivered diamonds for a New York wholesaler (he disguised himself as a down-and-outer), tended bar at a New York nightclub, climbed dozens of water towers throughout the US, panned gold, skydived, and worked for over nearly three decades in private security.