CREATING A SCENE DOWN THE JERSEY SHORE If you vacation down the Jersey Shore this summer, you might end up a murder victim. Or a witness. Or maybe even the murderer. Author Chris Grabenstein, who vacations every year in Beach Haven on Long Beach Island, is always looking for faces and places for his series of John Ceepak/New Jersey mysteries. "I have a digital camera with a real long zoom lens!" he jokes. For instance, for his newest novel MAD MOUSE (due from Caroll & Graf in June, 2006), he toured the boardwalk in Seaside Heights, New Jersey. "A few years back, when I was an advertising creative director at Young & Rubicam, we shot a Dr Pepper commercial on the boardwalk, so I knew it was a great location. Full of colorful characters. Wild architecture. And, of course, a Mad Mouse roller coaster." Grabenstein spent a day snapping photos that would later help him recreate the scene on the pages of Mad Mouse. "I usually write the books over the winter. The photos help you remember what summer feels and looks like." One scene in MAD MOUSE takes place at a paintball arcade. A booth in Seaside Heights inspired it. Grabenstein took notes, snapped a few more photos, and created the following scenes for MAD MOUSE: As we climb the steps up to the boardwalk, I can see the distant silhouette of the little roller coaster at the end of a pier jutting out into the ocean. It's what they call a Mad Mouse -- a tight track with wicked sharp turns. Instead of a train of connected cars like a bigger roller coaster, it has tiny, individual cars shaped like mice. The undercarriage of each one is designed to make you feel like you hit the turns before the wheels do and every time you fly into a curve, you think you're going to rocket off the edge and die. Just when you recover, the little mouse car whips into another turn, throws you another curve, and you think you're about to die all over again. It's a blast. * * * Paintball Blasters is a politically incorrect shooting gallery right across from the Mad Mouse pier. The gimmick is the targets. You get to splatter life-size photographs of folks like Osama Bin Laden, Adolf Hitler, O.J. Simpson, Saddam Hussein and, of course, Britney Spears. Or Michael Jackson. They're all strung up on a clothesline about twenty feet back on the firing range When you get tired of defacing America's current crop of evildoers, you can take a shot or two at this garbage-can lid that pops open to reveal a red-white-and-blue bull's eye target. Then, when that gets boring, you can blast away at a rusty old Pontiac down in the sand underneath the dangling targets. Looks like the windshield is a popular spot to splatter. "Ten balls for five bucks," the burly guy running the place says when Ceepak and I step to his counter. He's reading a newspaper and doesn't look up. "Thirty for ten." "Are these Trippman 98's?" Ceepak asks. I can tell Ceepak did his paintball homework last night on the Internet. The burly guy puts down his newspaper. "What?" He snuffles his nose and sounds like he might hock a loogie. "Am I supposed to be impressed here or something? You know the name of a gun?" "I was merely inquiring." "Huh." The paintball proprietor turns back to his paper. "Who's your best?" Ceepak now asks. "What?" "Who's your top gun?" "Me." He proudly snorts some more wet stuff back into his throat. "Who besides you?" "Depends. What category? Kid? Adult? Local? Tourist?" "Juvenile. Boy. Spiky blonde hair. Tattoos on his forearm. Sound familiar?" "Why should I tell you?" Ceepak smiles. "Because I'm a better shot than you."