Cover Reveal: Fool's Run - A Si Reardon Novel

 Coming November 24, 2020

Pre-order now on Amazon

#coverreveal #cover #thriller #mystery

Midnight Eyes - Louisiana-set mystery thriller 99 cent special price

Crossroad is running a special on my novel Midnight Eyes at the moment. It's available on just about every e-book platform for 99 cents.

Amazon

Barnes and Noble

Kobo

The talk focuses on former FBI profiler Wayland Hood who's summoned back to his Louisiana hometown to help his estranged father solve a series of brutal murders.

Events seem to be tied to a beautiful and mysterious woman, and Wayland and his father, Sheriff Ty Hood, have to put old differences behind them to get to the heart of the mystery buried deep in Louisiana swamp country.

It's Alive - by Loren D. Estleman

Somehow I missed the Valentino series from Loren D. Estleman until browsing the other day and hitting on the latest book, Alive!

Happy to be aboard.

Valentino is a film archivist for UCLA, and he becomes embroiled in murder mysteries that swirl around lost films. We're talking things like Eric Von Stronheim's Greed or, happily, the lost screen test of Bela Lugosi as the Frankenstein monster in Alive!

The screen test is real and really lost, cleared away to make storage space in a time before its importance and value were recognized at Universal Studios. But Estleman imagines a world where the footage still exists, two reels shot with Lugosi hot off the success of 1931's Dracula and targeted for a role in the next big Universal monster movie. Of course the role went to Boris Karloff, but collectors and film fans would love to see what might have been, or what went wrong.

Estleman offers up an interesting blend of film history and fiction as Valentino races to find the lost footage after he realizes it's at the core of an old friend's murder.

His pal, a washed up star with addiction issues,  has come upon the footage, but criminal elements are involved. There's also a collector who's an homage to the late great punster and editor Forrest Ackerman of Famous Monsters of Filmland.

Estleman's imagined a rich world of supporting characters for Valentino including an intern who's into Steampunk and a department secretary from hell plus a fun pair of San Diego detectives. They're fun for the reader, not so fun for Valentino. The bad cop of the duo is on bad cop overdrive.

There's a nice and fairly twisty mystery plot woven through the tale, and tension builds as Valentino strives to solve the case and keep the film footage from decaying in a police evidence room.

The tale's also a fabulous look into film preservation with even a few contemplations on Steampunk's importance. Van Helsing qualifies, and Valentino's intern and friends watch with the sound turned down for the enjoyment of the production design.

All in all, it's nice mystery read and great book to pick up if you're an aficionado of Universal Horrors.

Must check out the other tales in the series as well including a collection of short stories. 

E-reading

Got to talking e-book reading on different devices with a guy the other day.

Before the iPad or the Kindle, I used to read e-books using the Notes feature on my iPods. My iPod with video is still going, though the clock appears to be a little off.

There's a little more surface area for the text view on newer devices.

Farewell to Michael S. Hart - Project Gutenberg Founder

I was sad to read this a.m. of the death of Michael S. Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg. I've found many hours of reading material on the site over the years.

I think the first e-book I ever read, most of it online anyway, was The Monster Men by Edgar Rice Burroughs. I worked for a while as a reference librarian. When I was on the night shift, I kept the e-text open in one browser window, reading a paragraph here or there when things grew quiet between helping patrons.

I found The Beetle and The Green Mummy on Gutenberg as well, along with a host of classics, the stories of John Silence, The House on the Borderland and more.

I guess never thought much about the man behind it all.

He kept a lot of books alive.

Booksprung Interview

I did a phone interview a while back with Chris Walters from Booksprung ebook news website. We talked about Midnight Eyes but also about adventures in e-book reading and much more.

He titled it How Sidney Williams escaped midlist oblivion.

Stop over and check it out if you get a chance. There are a few "you knows" since it was an actual, live, talking interview.

It was actually fun to do and to contemplate some of the queries about ebook reading and the new reading landscape.

Blood Hunter Sample

Blood Hunter proved to be my most popular ebook of 2010, so here's a sample to kick of the New Year.

Mostly Recharging

I've been getting a little bit of writing done on a couple of projects, but mostly I've been recharging the last few days, and wondering how I got a write-in-Hindi button on my blogger interface.

I thought I would get more read over the holidays and time off I've had, but I haven't managed to turn as many pages as I'd hoped.

I managed to veg a bit instead and discover a few guilty pleasures:

Legend of the Seeker

I'm guilty of never having read the Terry Goodkind books on which this new syndicated series is based. I'm told they're better than the show, but for the moment the show's what I have time for. It's on Hulu.com, partially in HD, and it's beautifully shot with likable actors, some swift action and a twinkle in the eye and just a slight smirk. For TV, it's Herc and Xena territory, but it's engaging me more than some feature films. I detect a trend of betrayal and redemption, but it's still captivating viewing in the sword and sorcery vein, and there's not much in that vein on the air now.

Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog

It's on just about every critic's year-end best list, so this is no revelation, but I liked it. Didn't get to see it when it was hot during the writer's strike. Happily it's also on Hulu in HD also and on DVD now as well. It's from Buffy-producer Joss Whedon, features Neil Patrick Harris of Doogie fame, plus Slither and Firefly's Nathan Fillion, who's soon to be seen in Castle, a mystery series that sounds like it might be fun.

Anyway Doogie is Dr. Horrible, aspiring super villain. I wondered how they were going to give him a suitable nemesis on a budget. Enter Fillion as The Hammer, a Captain Triumph-style good guy who's a bit of a jerk. He has the affections of the girl Dr. Horrible has a crush on, making things worse but paving the way for great songs. Really great show tunes. No kidding. Check it out.

The Big Bang Theory
So why is a show about über-nerds on opposite Heroes, a show they'd probably watch? I missed an entire season of this fab sit-com. It's got some standard misunderstanding gags, but it's brilliantly executed and ropes in Star Trek, online gaming, comic books and more as its youthful geniuses struggle with life outside their physics experiments. I resolve to solve all quandaries and disagreements in 2009 using rock, paper scissors, Spock, lizard!

Steampod

How'd I miss this great podcast for so long? It's a steampunk-themed 'cast with a stellar Christmas episode transposing late-sixties cryonics to the Victorian era, and you can backtrack to a multi-part novella and a great opening episode as well. Put it on your iPod, for sure!

QuasarDragon's Blog

Looking for free e-books, podcast recommendations and more? QuasarDragon's is a great place to stop by. It's a fantasy, SF cool-hunting blog pointing to various online e-zines, free fictionsites and more. It also occurs to me that it's a great guide to writing markets. Well worth a look. It's how I found Steampod.

Well, that's how I've been spending my free time of late. I think it has been energizing a bit as I prepare for the plunge into 2009, which promises to be challenging and busy. I had a tee-shirt in the appropriate year that read "Orwell That Ends Well, I Made it Through 1984." I'm thinking we all deserve an I Survived 2008 tee, and maybe a matching version for this year.

Let's look for fun where we can, and may everyone within the sound of my posts have a good one!

Free Comics Get the Bump

Updated - see below

Roland turned me on to WOWIO, a site for advertising-sponsored ebooks. It includes quite an array of comics as well as novels and non-fiction.

Basically after you sign up and prove you're you for the advertisers by one verification method or another, they generate .pdf files with a full-page ad up front. I used a permanent e-mail address to qualify myself and that took about a day.

The eproducts are customized with your name, so they know if you passed the book on, kind of like those screener DVDs from the Academy, I suppose. You can download three items a day, by the way.

I was pleasantly surprised by the comics selection. Moonstone even has a few titles in the mix including a couple of its graphic novels featuring The Phantom--the ghost who walks in purple--and an adaptation of the original Kolchak novel/movie.

Bump
My discovery in the mix is a comic book adaptation of a film called Bump. It's apparently in the works with Tobin Bell slated to star. Apparently he's the only one cast so far, but they're working on that according to the official website.

The comic, from The Scream Factory, is a beautifully drawn horrorfest. At first I was thinking, "Well this is another The Hills Have Eyes," but things twist and turn pretty quickly with a scary prologue focusing on a killer reminiscent of the real life Ed Gein who also inspired Psycho and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Then we jump ahead 30 years to a group of people who wind up trapped in the killer's farmhouse where he's not dead and neither are his victims.

I suspect reading the book on-screen as a .pdf is a plus especially when you get to the action portions where I got a sense of movement, scrolling upward as large, flashing panels revealed chases and scares.

I was a little dissatisfied with the ending, but all in all a nice--though be warned: gory-- four issues.

I've also snagged a few other titles so far including a Moonstone adaptation of The Mysterious Traveler, a new spin on the old radio series giving the traveler a role more significant than host, and a series called Carnival of Souls that seems to be more than an adaptation of the classic early indy horror flick with waltzing zombies. I should mention there are also some '50s classics in the mix. EC-flavored if not actual EC titles, and some of the artists represented include Jack Kirby and Joe Kubert. You'll also find, I think, the complete run of Clive Barker's Tapping The Vein, comic adaptations.

And I haven't even gotten around to checking out the mystery novels yet.

Addendum
(Posted 4/10/08)
Troy Brownfield from The Scream Factory dropped by to comment earlier in the week that more Bump casting news would be coming soon. He wasn't kidding.

Young Indiana Jones himself Sean Patrick Flanery will be playing Bret and Hellraiser's Ashley Laurence will be Elaine. They are now attached to the film according to The Scream Factory's My Space Blog. They're a troubled couple who get stranded in the horribly haunted house where much of the story takes place.