2016 was good to us

#Shakedown will continue working hard to unravel some of the highest-profile crimes in the world in 2017.

Nick and I started this venture into true crime writing in 2014 as two curious people on opposite ends of the planet trying to figure out who the other Oscar Pistorius was; not the one burbling in court, the other one.

In three years we’ve written thirteen books to that end, eight covering the trial as it unfolded, two covering the appeal [which we both attended] and three covering the sentencing [which Nick attended]. Did we succeed in exposing the Other Oscar?

In 2017 Nick will appear in a documentary that covers the unanswered questions that still linger in that case. Unanswered questions are our specialty. We believe with enough resolve, all can be brought to light.

What has surprised us as authors is just how much information is buried in plain sight, and further, how much more can be found when one scratches just below the surface.

We believe we’ve found a golden thread where many other narratives either simply rehash news stories or get lost in minutiae, or simply go off track following a tangent to its illogical conclusion.

“There is nothing worse for the lying soul, than the mirror of reality”..Steve Maraboli… The White Horse trilogy, (written with penetrating insight by Nick and Lisa) explodes into our consciousness revealing the reality of the tangled web of lies that remained after the trial of Oscar Pistorius … This tragedy is truly a mirror, blinding in its fractured and splintered reflections revealing the emptiness behind a mask… Brilliant!

In an incredibly short span of time, people from around the world have found value in our deep drilling interrogations. Our aim has been to create authentic narratives, and to go further than the definitive accounts do in uncovering powerful insights and exposing the clear psychological patterns driving these cases.

Where others concede defeat, do we come up with brand new explanations that integrate all the data in a credible fashion? Our readers have quickly become just as obsessed as we are with our thorough interrogations, and as a result, our work has been all consuming. It consumes our energies and our readers quickly become addicted to the “no holds barred” quality of it.

Back alley facing Nicole’s condo

Our 20 highlights from 2016:

#Shakedown published 18 books this year covering the cases of: Steven Avery, OJ Simpson, Oscar Pistorius and JonBenét Ramsey.
Nick added three more books to his popular series of mountain narratives with the release of Neverest II and III, as well as his narrative focusing on the tragedy at K I I.
By March, our books regularly started making the bestsellers list.
Juice, published on March 6, was a #1 bestseller consistently for more than 4 weeks straight.
Ten of our books would go on to be #1 bestsellers by the end of 2016.
On May 20, #Shakedown launched its website.
On June 17, only one month later, we got 41,334 hits in a single day. The story that inspired so many people to visit our site was the publishing of Reeva Steenkamp’s crime scene photos. On June 16, Barry Steenkamp, Reeva’s father, pleaded with Judge Masipa to let the world see what Oscar had done to her. He asked, we answered, and the world responded.
Nick spent three days at the High Court in Pretoria for Oscar’s sentencing. While there, Nick met privately with Gerrie Nel and Andrea Johnson to provide a tip. He also had a chance to briefly reunite with Barry and June. From that experience, three additional Oscar narratives titled White Horse were conceived.
Also in June, we collaborated with Beth Karas regarding Oscar’s manipulation of the crime scene. That interview achieved over 1,000 views in just a few short days.
Beth would join us again in the fall for a discussion about JonBenét Ramsey.
Additional interviews and podcasts included discussions with Leonard Carr, Dr. Lillian Glass and the Mollett brothers.
After months of research, on September 13, we published our first book on JonBenét titled The Craven Silence.
Three weeks later, on October 5, the top news site in Australia interviewed us about our work on the JonBenét case. Their article was then picked up by numerous other sites not only in Australia but also in New Zealand and parts of Europe.
Since that time, we’ve published two complete trilogies on America’s most famous unsolved case – a total of six books with three more in the pipeline. For both Nick and I, this case has been by far the most challenging, most emotionally draining, and rewarding thus far In 2017, we’ll be visiting Boulder to bring you more on this story.
Smack dab in the middle of our JonBenét work, Nick was approached by a producer he’d met in Pretoria back in June. That producer will soon be completing a documentary about Oscar.
Of the eighteen books published this year, two I haven’t mentioned yet are Nick’s solo works: Hot Water, the story of Michael Phelps, and White Privilege, a fascinating and scathing interrogation of race in South Africa.
To date, our most reviewed books are Deceit [67], Neverest [45], Audacity [44], Dark Matter [28], Fool’s Paradise [18] and The Craven Silence [18]. Recidivist Acts, which was an assemblage of both published and unpublished investigative magazine and newspaper articles covering Oscar Pistorius, has the highest average review rating of 4.8/5.
On December 18^thwe reached a new milestone in Kindle pages read in a single day – 9964 pages read over a 24 hour period.
Nick also signed an exclusive publishing contract for his Bloodline fantasy fiction in November 2016 with an American publisher.
I’ll leave you with one more statistic. I’m sure our loyal readers will appreciate this one. The book that wins the award for most F-bombs goes to Juice. Nick and I tore it up with a whopping 47!

We have a lot of really exciting stuff planned for you in 2017. In addition to our continued narratives on JonBenét, Oscar and OJ, we’ll be tackling the upcoming murder trial of Robert Durst.

Durst will be in court in Los Angeles early in the year, while CBS slugs it out in an epic $750 million lawsuit against Burke Ramsey. The cases of Oscar Pistorius and Steven Avery are still ongoing. And what is Jodi Arias up to?

If there are books you want to read that we haven’t written yet, leave a comment and perhaps we’ll bump some up or down the schedule based on your feedback.

A good year starts with a commitment from all of us to simply be better. Things change gradually and along a prescribed continuum.