You Are Invited to a Par-Tay!
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Author's Note
New Releases (That I'm Excited About)!
Two Writers You Should Read
Events
It's Contest Time!
Other Writing
You Are Invited to a Par-Tay!
Welp, it's almost time.
A few years after the first words were written, the characters developed, the agent approved and a publisher offered, No Home for Killers is coming out into the world tomorrow. Technically, it came out into the world on January 1st, as part of Amazon First Reads, but Wednesday is the official launch day. The day that you don't need to be a swanky person who has Amazon Prime to read the book. Now anyone can buy it, or listen to it, or stick it on their TBR pile, or give it to someone who likes cheerfully violent vigilantes. I'm cool with all that.
If you've followed this newsletter for a while now, you know that I try to be as honest as possible about the business of publishing, because it's so different from the craft behind writing. And being good at one doesn't necessarily prepare you for the other. There are very few who can do both well.
In truth, this writing business, like all businesses, rarely shows its heart. Published story tellers (in any medium) exist at the whim of our readers and viewers and listeners, and we don't have the right to ask for more than they are willing to give. That's the contract we sign with you. and you're under no obligation to give us anymore of your time than you want.
So I want to use this month's note to thank you for giving me your time. It's precious, and I'm truly honored, more than you know, that you chose to spend it with me.
Okay, enough seriousness. The virtual launch for No Home for Killers is tonight, and it'll be off the hook, chain, and meter! Come join me and Kathleen Barber and Sara Jones and Chantal Tseng and let us entertain you for a half hour! Here's a dumb video I made to get you EXCITED.
I'm glad you're here, and I hope to see you there. There will be puppies.
EA
I mean, look, I know that this is a little repetitive considering the Author's Note above, but it would crush my little marketing heart if I didn't push my new book here. For members of Amazon Prime, this is your last day to get No Home for Killers for FREE through First Reads (and at a greatly reduced cost !or everyone else)!
Greta Vinet Seville, E-Discovery Counsel and Deputy General Counsel at the international law firm of Coarse & Cotton, finds herself on the run from her own firm after absconding with firm data to conduct her investigation, and enlists a diverse cast of friends and experts to help her comb through the mountains of data that confirms a trail of corruption that has shaped generations.
Her off-the-books, rag-tag legal team includes a genius litigation technology professional, a possibly psychopathic (but effective) summer associate, an AP investigative reporter, a classical painting art restorer, Greta’s philosophy professor brother, and Greta’s love interest, a compliance attorney at Tenkill. Romance, action, technology law, corruption are all explored, and married with Greta’s personal backstory about a renegade, vigilante aunt who’s been on the run for decades and fighting her own politically-charged battles.
They create a make-shift war room in a historic Salem, Massachusetts home, and their pursuit of more evidence leads them in action-packed chases around Boston…and a massive hospital—Tenkill—that is at the center of the corruption. But this investigation is like no other Greta has ever conducted, as people who have millions to lose and careers to ruin have and will kill to keep what she seeks to uncover secret.
Welcome to Mae Pruett’s Los Angeles, where “Nobody talks. But everybody whispers.” As a “black-bag” publicist tasked not with letting the good news out but keeping the bad news in, Mae works for one of LA’s most powerful and sought-after crisis PR firms, at the center of a sprawling web of lawyers, PR flaks, and private security firms she calls “The Beast.” They protect the rich and powerful and depraved by any means necessary.
After her boss is gunned down in front of the Beverly Hills Hotel in a random attack, Mae takes it upon herself to investigate and runs headfirst into The Beast’s lawless machinations and the twisted systems it exists to perpetuate. It takes her on a roving neon joyride through a Los Angeles full of influencers pumped full of pills and fillers; sprawling mansions footsteps away from sprawling homeless encampments; crooked cops and mysterious wrecking crews in the middle of the night.
After reckless behavior costs NYPD detective Leigh O’Donnell her job and her marriage, she returns with her four-year-old daughter to her beautiful hometown of Copper Falls, Ohio. Leigh had stayed away for more than a decade—even though her brother and a trio of loving uncles still call it home—because, while the town may seem idyllic, something rotten lies at its core. Three men in town have drowned in what Leigh suspects to be a triple homicide. She hopes that by finding out who killed them, she just might get her life back on course.
Headstrong and intuitive, Leigh isn’t afraid to face a killer, but she has to do more than that to discover the truth about what happened to those men. She must unravel a web of secrets going back generations, and, in doing so, plumb the darkness within herself.
Three years ago, Alice spent one night in an abandoned house with her friends, Ila and Hannah. Since then, Alice’s life has spiraled. She lives a haunted existence, selling videos of herself for money, going to parties she hates, drinking herself to sleep.
Memories of that night torment Alice, but when Ila asks her to return to the House, to go past the KEEP OUT sign and over the sick earth where teenagers dare each other to venture, Alice knows she must go.
Together, Alice and Ila must face the horrors that happened there, must pull themselves apart from the inside out, put their differences aside, and try to rescue Hannah, whom the House has chosen to make its own.
Seventeen-year-old Bret is a senior at the exclusive Buckley prep school when a new student arrives with a mysterious past. Robert Mallory is bright, handsome, charismatic, and shielding a secret from Bret and his friends even as he becomes a part of their tightly knit circle. Bret’s obsession with Mallory is equaled only by his increasingly unsettling preoccupation with the Trawler, a serial killer on the loose who seems to be drawing ever closer to Bret and his friends, taunting them—and Bret in particular—with grotesque threats and horrific, sharply local acts of violence. The coincidences are uncanny, but they are also filtered through the imagination of a teenager whose gifts for constructing narrative from the filaments of his own life are about to make him one of the most explosive literary sensations of his generation. Can he trust his friends—or his own mind—to make sense of the danger they appear to be in? Thwarted by the world and by his own innate desires, buffeted by unhealthy fixations, he spirals into paranoia and isolation as the relationship between the Trawler and Robert Mallory hurtles inexorably toward a collision.
When Louise finds out her parents have died, she dreads going home. She doesn’t want to leave her daughter with her ex and fly to Charleston. She doesn’t want to deal with her family home, stuffed to the rafters with the remnants of her father’s academic career and her mother’s lifelong obsession with puppets and dolls. She doesn’t want to learn how to live without the two people who knew and loved her best in the world.
Most of all, she doesn’t want to deal with her brother, Mark, who never left their hometown, gets fired from one job after another, and resents her success. Unfortunately, she’ll need his help to get the house ready for sale because it’ll take more than some new paint on the walls and clearing out a lifetime of memories to get this place on the market.
Chery Head made a name for herself with her award-winning, highly praised Charlie Mack Motown series, and everyone who knows her has been waiting for her breakthrough. We're about to witness it with Time's Undoing, her first novel with a major publisher and one that's been appearing on recommended lists right and left. It's a story that comes from her own life, based on the murder of her grandfather, and its destined to put her on the map. Also, Cheryl is just one of the loveliest, most supportive people ever.
And a writer Cheryl Head recommends?
Amidst a cascading number of books and TV series focusing on Native Americans (I’m writing one myself), I highly recommend two, #ownvoices Native crime fiction authors: Marcie Rendon who writes the award-winning Cash Blackbear series, and Ramona Emerson with a wonderful debut novel, Shutter.
To learn more about these authors, click on the photos above.
Book Launch: No Home for Killers!
Yes, yes, by now you know, I'll stop bothering you, sorry.
(Register HERE.)
Mystery and Thriller Mavens
I'll be chatting with Sara DiVello , the main maven and writer behind Mystery and Thriller Mavens, on Monday, February 6th! Sara is fun and chatty and I have no idea where this conversation is going to go. We'll probably touch on No Home for Killers? But I make no promises, other than it'll be a ton of fun. You can watch it on either Facebook or YouTube. Click HERE for more information!
Rogue Women Writers
If you look at the graphic above, you'll see an absolute slayers group of writers. This collective group supports each other, writes a helpful blog, and interviews writers for their monthly Zoom chats. I'm honored that they invited me to participate this month! For more information about the chat and their wonderful group, click HERE.
It's contest time! The monthly contest winner wins copies of the books listed in my "Two Writers You Should Read" segment. And the winner is...
m____stew@gmail.com
Congrats, and keep your eye out for a separate e-mail from me!
I'm happily under deadline for my next novel (Sunset Heroes, coming February 2024), so I didn't write a DANG THING but it over this last month. But I did do a podcast with John Copenhaver and Alan R. Warren! John Copenhaver is a celebrated writer (and former resident of the DC region, as well as a GEORGE MASON - 2006 Final Four - grad) and Alan is a renowned personality in writing and radioing. It was a fun conversation about writing, publishing, and why I have no idea about boundaries. You can check it out HERE.
Until next time, much love and happy reading!