Why Junction City?
On choosing a small Kansas town as the heart of a crime thriller.
When people ask me where Serial Husbands is set, I tell them Junction City, Kansas. And the first thing most of them do is pause. It is not exactly the name that conjures crime thrillers. It does not have the dark glamour of Chicago or the gothic weight of New Orleans. It is a small town in the Flint Hills, anchored to the plains, with a history most people outside of Kansas have never bothered to learn. That, in part, is exactly why I chose it.
The other reason is simpler and more personal: From 2011 to 2013, I was stationed at Fort Riley, barely 21 years old, young and restless and doing what young and restless people do when they are given a patch of freedom and a town nearby. I was not studying Junction City's history then. I was living inside it, whether I knew it or not.
The Town That Was Almost Manhattan
Here is something most people do not know: Junction City was supposed to be Manhattan, Kansas. In 1855, land agents from the Cincinnati-Manhattan Company set their sights on the confluence of the Smoky Hill and Republican Rivers, sent supplies upriver on a steamboat called the Hartford, and fully intended to build a city there. Low water levels stranded the vessel short of the intended site. The settlers went ashore early, merged with a settlement already forming, and named it Manhattan. The captain of the Hartford pressed on to the original site, and what grew there eventually became Junction City.
That history captures something I find endlessly useful in fiction: the sense that a place is the result of an accident, a detour, a wrong turn that somehow settled into permanence. The town had three different names before it stuck. It sat at the junction of two rivers that together become the Kansas River, which is why it earned the name it finally kept. Geography as identity. That is the kind of detail that does not just decorate a story. It is the story.
A Few Things Junction City Did First
Junction City holds a quiet list of firsts that most people pass over. It was home to the first complete flagpole dedicated to the United States. It hosted the first night football game west of the Mississippi River. Its Ladies Reading Club is the oldest federated club in Kansas and among the first west of the Mississippi. In 1929, the Uptown Theater was one of the first in Kansas to screen talking pictures.
Fort Riley, just next door, was once the headquarters of Lieutenant Colonel George Custer and his Seventh Cavalry. The Buffalo Soldiers of the 9th and 10th Cavalry Regiments were stationed there. Generals Patton and Wainwright walked the same streets I stumbled down on weekend evenings. The land holds more history than its square mileage suggests.
And then there is the darker footnote: Timothy McVeigh rented the Ryder truck used in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing from an auto body shop in Junction City. A quiet town in the plains, and yet the thread of something catastrophic ran right through it.
"The ground here has always been unstable."
One of the details I kept coming back to when I was building the world of Serial Husbands was something I had heard during my time there about houses sinking. It sounds almost absurd when you first say it, but it is grounded in geology. Kansas sits above ancient salt deposits and dissolving limestone formations that, over time, create voids beneath the surface. The ground subsides. In the Flint Hills near Fort Riley, the Kansas Geological Survey has documented sinkholes on the military reservation itself, some containing dozens of individual depressions within a single square mile. Across central Kansas, structures have tilted, highways have cracked, and in some cases the earth has simply swallowed what was built on top of it.
For a crime writer, that is not just an interesting footnote. It is metaphor made literal. A town where the foundations slowly give way. Where what looks stable on the surface is quietly collapsing underneath. Where something built to last might not. Serial Husbands is, at its core, a story about exactly that kind of hidden rot. The setting earns its place in the narrative.
Junction City is the kind of place where the ground has long memories, and so do the people. That combination is what crime fiction is built from.
Fort Riley and the Town That Grew Around It
Fort Riley was established in 1853 to protect travelers along the Santa Fe, Oregon, and California Trails. Junction City grew up in its shadow, becoming a trading hub, an outfitting point for westward expansion, a stop on the Kansas Pacific Railroad. By the 1860s, limestone was being quarried from the river bluffs and used in construction across the region, including stone for the Kansas State Capitol. The town had jazz clubs on Ninth Street, a trolley system running between the fort and downtown, a hotel famous enough to host Gloria Vanderbilt, John Wayne, and John Philip Sousa. It was small, but it was not nothing.
By the time I arrived in 2011, Fort Riley had become home to the 1st Infantry Division, the Big Red One. Junction City was still the town that existed to serve soldiers who needed somewhere to be when they were off post. Some of my most memorable evenings from those years were spent out there, doing exactly what 21-year-olds do when they feel like the world is both too big and just the right size. The bars, the open roads, Milford Lake at the edge of everything. That feeling does not leave you.
What I Wanted to Show
Here is the thing I want readers who are from Kansas to understand: when I placed Michael Denton and Ryan Hayes in Junction City, I was not using the location as a backdrop. I was writing about a world I actually inhabited, for a time, in my own life.
In 2012, same-sex marriage was not legal in Kansas. It would not be for years. But that does not mean we did not exist there, living quiet, full lives in the shadow of the Flint Hills. I know what it was like to be young and gay in a military town in central Kansas and still manage to find joy in it, real joy, the kind that does not need permission or recognition to be genuine. I wanted that reality on the page. Not as a political statement, but as a correction to the assumption that lives like mine were absent from places like that.
We were there. We had good evenings. We had relationships that mattered. Serial Husbands carries some of that with it, underneath the crime and the darkness and the procedural weight of the story. The town is real. The lives are real. The history is real. And so is the ground shifting quietly under all of it.
If you are from Kansas, I hope you recognize something when you read it. If you are not, I hope you leave knowing that Junction City is more than a footnote on a map. It is a place where history accumulated, where rivers converged, where the earth itself has a tendency to swallow what was built too carelessly. That is exactly the kind of place a story like this needs.
