The nature of the beast

Poway writer Brian Lebeau explores the dark side of humanity in his debut novel about a serial killer and the troubled agent on the case

Brian Lebeau is a natural storyteller, albeit one who’s highly distractible. Case in point: Ask a simple question about the memories that inspired his debut crime thriller,

“A Disturbing Nature,” and the

Poway-based writer will wax poetic about everything from vintage baseball cards to systemic racism.

Still, as tangential as he may be at times, Lebeau always manages to circle back to the story he’s trying to tell: the one where, a little over four years ago, he woke up in a cold sweat, his mind flooded with disturbing memories from his childhood in Fall River, Mass. One of those early memories — “the critical one that set things in motion,” as he puts it — was of an older, intellectually challenged friend Lebeau had when he was in middle school in Massachusetts. He recalled how his father would never let young Brian meet alone with the man, who at the time was in his early 20s and had a baseball card collection that Brian envied, despite his living right across the street.

“I woke up from this dream wondering why that was,” Lebeau says, adding that the dream forced him to rethink how people often view those who are different. “Sure, you could think it was because he was twice my age or because he was intellectually handicapped, but then I began to think, was it because he was Black? It really hit me, and they became major themes in the book.”

Race and discrimination, and what Lebeau calls “the heredity of prejudice, the hypocrisy of privilege,” are at the heart of “A Disturbing Nature.” Set mostly in New England in the mid-’70s, it centers on the hunt for a serial killer dubbed the Pastoral Predator and is told from the dual perspectives of an FBI investigator (Francis Palmer) tasked with tracking him down and the intellectually challenged man (Maurice “Mo” Lumen) who is unfairly seen as the prime suspect.

“In the process, I realized I’d been writing the book from the perspective of my innocent, 11year-old self and everyone was a reflection of other pieces of me, or at least the way I see the world as a cynical, middle-aged man,” says Lebeau, who originally planned to write the novel entirely from the perspective of Mo. “Mo is a reflection of that childhood innocence we all want to retain as we get older. On Palmer’s side, he has all these stains in his life. They represent cracks, all the guilt from his past that he’s accumulated and created. The guilt that he’s inherited. That’s what the book is all about: who will pay for the guilt of their forefathers, and who’s going to pay for their own guilt.”

Lebeau says that nightmare forced him to take a hard look at his own past, just as the character of agent Palmer has to face his own formative years while working the case in his Massachusetts hometown. Writing the book itself also served as a means of self-examination for the author.

“One of the things I’ve accumulated in this process — that I’m not proud of, that maybe I’ve kept down over the years — is how I’ve not acknowledged a person for who they were but perhaps tried to keep them down,” says Lebeau. “In business, when I didn’t do what I should have done to promote someone or help someone move forward because I had a personal dislike for them because our personalities were different.”

Lebeau began “A Disturbing Nature” in 2018 while still working at Tangent Inspired Stories, the Ramona-based company he cofounded. He says he sold his half of the company two years ago and has been entirely focused on his literary career since, which he admits has cost him “a fortune.” The fact that he knows he’ll lose money on this new venture is a testament to how much he believes he’s onto something with agent Palmer, who uses his own type of psychosis (which he calls “the Beast”) to assist in his investigation.

“I think it’s just as creepy when people attempt to think how these people think,” says Lebeau, referring to people who try to understand the minds of serial killers and mass murderers. “The idea of, ‘what would it take for us to become a monster? What really would get us over that line?’ We all carry hate, discontent and jealousy and vanity. We all have it. We all harbor these demons, but we rarely try to get to know them. Palmer has had to take the time, just like I had to in writing this book, to understand what those demons really were.”

While a protagonist wrestling with their own demons is a common trope in mysteries and thrillers, Lebeau doesn’t rely on gratuitous violence or gore. He also bypasses much of the genre clichés by making Palmer unlikable at times, delving into what the author calls “the thin line between hero and villain, man and monster.”

“He knows that he has these demons, this beast, that can communicate with these monsters,” Lebeau explains. “He doesn’t want to give that up or get help for it, because he believes it’s an altruistic thing. He’s doing good with it, but he also knows he has to let that beast roam periodically so that he can manage it.”

Lebeau plans on bringing back Palmer, as well as most of the characters from “A Disturbing Nature,” in three more books. He admits that the first quarter of “A Disturbing Nature” can be a bit slow-moving, rich in exposition and character studies, but says subsequent books will work more as stand-alone novels where the reader can jump right into a new adventure. Still, he describes the series as something like the “four corners of a jigsaw puzzle.” He expects to release the second novel, “An Anxious Resolution,” in 2023.

“There’s less resolved at the end of ‘A Disturbing Nature’ than people might think,” Lebeau admits. “It’s really twisted, and it gets crazy in books two and three.”

“Palmer’s going to go nuts,” he continues. “You’re going to watch this guy descend to where people are going to think, ‘This isn’t a trope anymore.’ There’s never been an FBI agent character like Palmer, I guarantee it. When people finish the second book, they’ll think they’ve never seen a guy like this before.”

“A Disturbing Nature” by Brian Lebeau (Books Fluent, 2022; 496 pages)

COURTESY PHOTO Race and discrimination, and what Brian Lebeau calls “the heredity of prejudice, the hypocrisy of privilege,” are at the heart of his new novel “A Disturbing Nature.”