New “Barbara Allan” Out This Week!
The day this update goes live, the new Barbara Allan – ANTIQUES CON – will be available. You should be able to find it at your favorite bookstore (and if they don’t have it, ask – but Barnes & Noble has been a big supporter of the series, so that’s a safe bet). And of course you can get it on line.
Those of you who got advance reading copies can now post a review on Amazon (and elsewhere).
One of the fun things about this one (commented upon by several reviewers) is that we begin with Chapter Two. The conceit is that our editor made us drop Chapter One because that chapter – dealing with the attempt to recover the paperweight that beloved Aunt Olive’s ashes had been turned into – had nothing to do with the mystery plot.
Well, you can read Chapter One, and for free, by going to our Barbara Allan web site.
The web site is a work in progress, with lots of fun stuff to come, but for now it’s already very cool (thank you, Nate!) with individual pages for each Barbara Allan book, including BOMBSHELL and REGENERATION. Many of the books have sample chapters, for those of you who haven’t dipped into the world of Barbara Allan as yet. Check it out!
To further celebrate, read this fantastic review from one of our favorite people (and favorite writers), Bill Crider.
Speaking of great reviews, here’s one that is about to appear in Booklist for SUPREME JUSTICE:
In the near future, the Supreme Court has reversed Roe v. Wade, strengthened the Patriot Act, and dismissed the Fourth Amendment. Devlin Harrison, the second African American president, is a liberal, but the court’s conservatives plan to outlast him. Then conservative justice Henry Venter is shot and killed in a D.C. restaurant. Enter former Secret Service Agent Joe Reeder, who took a bullet while guarding a president. Hailed as a hero, he made the mistake of expressing his opposition to that president’s neocon politics and quickly became a pariah. His only remaining federal-cop friend is FBI Agent Gabe Sloan, and Sloan, valuing Reeder’s insight, adds Reeder as a consultant to the multiagency task force investigating Venter’s murder. Soon a second conservative justice is killed, and the mastermind behind the crimes may be just getting started.
Collins (Ask Not, 2013), perhaps best known for his Nathan Heller novels, has crafted a spiky thriller with a fine inside-the-Beltway sensibility. His politics are transparent enough to cost him conservative readers, but the sense is that Collins is probably OK with that.
Here’s a LAST QUARRY review – better late than never.
Craig Zablo has posted a pic of Mickey and me. I wonder if he knows it was shot outside the Tower of London?
Here’s an interesting love/hate evaluation of series fiction in the mystery genre, with a brief but nice QUARRY mention.
Speaking of Quarry, our images this week include shots of the structure honoring me as one of the authors on Iowa City’s Literary Walk (I am part of the Northside Marketplace expansion). This is particularly sweet to me, since as many of you know, I was kind of a black sheep at the Iowa Writers Workshop because of my insistence on writing crime fiction. Quarry was created when I was in the last semester of my MFA work at the Workshop, and the opening three chapters were “workshopped” to mixed reviews, mostly negative, including my instructor. My champion at the Workshop was the great mainstream writer Richard Yates – and his pedestal with quote was added to the walk at the same time as mine…how sweet is that? Writing well is the best revenge.
M.A.C.
