Camas author Corbin produces 12th novelSubscriber Exclusive

Police detective Valorie Dawes is on undercover assignment when she makes a deep, difficult confession.

“I’ve hated my body since I was 12 years old,” she tells a self-help therapy group that’s focused on body image.

It’s a tense and layered scene in Camas novelist Gary Corbin’s latest police-procedural thriller, “The Image of Valor,” because Dawes is not only divulging a genuine truth about her hardest feelings and her history of trauma — she’s also trying to bait a possible murderer into unmasking himself by coming after her.

The killer in “The Image of Valor” has big, world-changing ideas about improving the human gene pool by eliminating what he considers its flaws and weaknesses, which belong to women whose bodies don’t match his idea of perfection.

Just in case anybody misses his point, the murderer likes cutting into his victims’ bodies with clues about his scientific education as well as the gene sequences that offend him. Corbin does a skillful job letting readers witness that twisted thought process up close while concealing the thinker’s name — and by complicating his plot with sufficient red herrings and misdirections to keep any murder-mystery lover guessing until the very end.

“I always let my characters drive their own stories — both the good and bad characters,” Corbin said.

“The Image of Valor” is Corbin’s 12th novel, and his seventh starring detective Valorie Dawes. (Corbin self-publishes through Double Diamond Publishing. The book is available at local bookstores, online sellers and Corbin’s own website, garycorbinwriting.com.)

Delving deeply into the personality, experiences and secrets of a young, female police officer has been a lot of fun, Corbin said — as well as a challenge that he takes seriously.

Corbin said he grew up in the 1960s and 1970s with all the usual societal training about proper masculine and feminine behaviors. But, he added, he also grew up with six sisters — five older and one younger — who added dimension to that understanding.

“They were quite willing to beat those false impressions out of me,” he said with a chuckle. “Most of them have very strong personalities, and they asserted their authority. I learned from them that things are not so black and white.”

That education has continued throughout his life, he said: He’s gotten feedback from smart women in writing groups and in interviews with women who’ve experienced everything from judgments and microaggressions — a universal experience, he noted — to violations and violence of the kind that Valorie Dawes, detective and survivor, is intent on fighting.

“It’s more the exception than the rule if a woman doesn’t experience these things, whether they’re microaggressions or outright crimes,” he said.

Valorous Valorie

Corbin grew up in New England and moved to the Pacific Northwest in the 1990s. He already was launched on his career as a thriller novelist when his father provided him the outline for his first Valorie Dawes novel.

“He had the whole structure in his head. This from a guy who never graduated high school. We worked on it together,” Corbin said. Along the way, he said, he visited his parents for a memory lane tour of Hartford, Conn., which is the model for his fictional town of Clayton.

“I got a feel for what I wanted Clayton to look like, and I did some interviews with Hartford police, including a woman police sergeant,” he said. “I got a lot of perspective on what it’s like to be a policewoman in a gritty East Coast town.”

But the project was put on the back burner for a while after Corbin’s father died. Corbin wrote other crime novels and series, then returned to the talented yet traumatized detective.

“Every one of the Valorie books has dealt with some social issue affecting women,” he said.

Every title in the series plays off of Valorie’s name. In series launch “A Woman of Valor,” the focus is sexism and police brutality. In “Mother of Valor,” it’s right-wing extremism and family secrets. Now, in “Image of Valor,” the seventh novel in the series, the underlying theme is body image and self-esteem.

“There’s an active conversation going on in society right now about what it means to be positive about your body,” Corbin said. “Women have expectations thrown upon them more than men do: ‘This is what it means to be attractive, beautiful — even just acceptable.’ Women have to put up with quite a bit more than men do. That mostly comes from men, but not always.

“Sometimes the pressure from other women seems to be even worse,” he said. “But it’s the men who largely get to define the rules.”