 Well, if you're a fan of psychological thrillers, you've probably heard the name Brian Freeman. Freeman is the author of the Jonathan Stride series set in Duluth, and he stopped by the Brainerd Public Library today to give a tour of the different settings of his novels. Clayton Castle has more. The two of them fought their way forward through a cage made of tree branches. That's Brian Freeman, author of the Jonathan Stride psychological thriller novels. Freeman visited Brainerd today to take us on a tour of Stride's fictional world in non-fiction Duluth and to talk a little bit about Stride himself. One of the things I like about working with Stride is a character. He's very much a Northern Minnesota kind of character. He kind of tucks his chin against the wind and keeps moving on. Freeman decided to set his novels in Duluth because of Stride's character and the development of the character throughout the novels. I think that Duluth as a city works for the kind of stories that I tell. It's big enough that you can imagine some dark things happening there and yet small enough that you're always kind of bumping into your past. And that's a theme that comes up in again and again in the Stride novels. Many of the settings within Duluth are real places and Freeman himself visited them all before deciding to use them. For me the only way to do that is to really scout locations kind of the way a film director would. So we literally go up to Duluth and we tour around the area. And I look for just the right setting to enrich the drama of every chapter so that I can find just the perfect place so that where a chapter takes place is just as important as what's actually going on inside that chapter. Despite many of his novels depicting murder in Mayhem as he describes it, Freeman says that the city of Duluth has embraced being part of Stride's journey. You know the Duluth people have just really embraced the Stride series and they've put the spine of immoral on part of a mural outside their downtown library. And I literally will have readers who will write to me and suggest areas where I can be killing people in Duluth. Much like the people of Duluth embraced the fictional thrillers, the people of Brainerd embraced Freeman for telling Stride's story. Reporting in Brainerd, Clayton Castle, Lakeland News. Freeman's next installment of the Jonathan Stride series comes out in May of this year titled Alter Ego.