By Dale Bass from Kamloops This Week

Douglas Schofield says he finds inspiration for his novels anywhere — from a case he might be working on or a stray snippet of conversation at a cocktail party.
The tiny gems roll around in his brain and, eventually, some of them start to nurture an idea that grows and leads to a storyline that becomes a book.
If the former Crown prosecutor in Kamloops had his way, he would spend every day working on those nuggets, the sentences that become paragraphs and chapters that create a book.
Between his writing hobby and his day job as a lawyer living in the Cayman Islands, his time is filled.
“Everyone thinks we live in paradise,” he said, “but I haven’t been in our pool for six months.”
A former assistant solicitor-general to the Cayman Islands government, Schofield left the government job to return to private practice, one that sees him traveling around the world. It takes up another chunk of his life, he said, “but the good thing is you get a lot of points sitting in airplanes.”
Schofield is heading back to B.C., including a trip to Kamloops, one that will see him at Chapters bookstore on Saturday, June 4, at 1 p.m., reading from and signing copies of his recent novel, Time of Departure.
It is the story of a lawyer in the felony division in a Florida city. Her colleagues resent her because of her youth, abilities and gender.
A highway project unearths a gravesite linked to cold cases of unsolved abductions and the attorney, along with a retired policeman who used to work on the cases, start investigating.
As with all good crime novels, there are twists and turns and, eventually, a startling discovery.
Booking the event also came with its own surprise, Schofield said.
In his first novel, Flight Risks, Schofield included some parts set in a Victoria restaurant, an eatery Chapters manager Peter Pagnotta once owned.
Born in Winnipeg, but raised in North Vancouver, Schofield found himself in Kamloops in the mid-1970s, articling for Peter Millward, who eventually became a Supreme Court judge.
After articling, he joined the Crown’s office at the courthouse, where he worked for a decade.
Then, he moved to Bermuda, inspired by his then-secretary who showed him a job advertisement in the Globe and Mail for a Crown counsel in the Caribbean country.
He came back to B.C. for a while and moved to the Cayman Islands to work for the government as an in-house legal counsel for the country’s police.
He’s contracted to do a book a year, Schofield said.
Recently, thanks to a two-page story outline, he agreed to turn that idea into a book by January for his publisher, St. Martin’s Press (Macmillan).

For more on this story go to: http://www.kamloopsthisweek.com/schofields-story/