HAPPY THANKSGIVING, EVERYONE
DON’T FORGET THE FRANK-N-FURTERS.
DON’T FORGET THE FRANK-N-FURTERS.
Greetings. So, here’s a fun fact to amaze your friends and colleagues on your next Zoom call. Apparently, spiders can suffer from arachnophobia, too. Researchers did a study using jumping spiders and found they had an innate ability to avoid other predator spiders—even if they’ve never encountered them before. The original Spidey-Sense, I guess.
How do you deal with spiders? I trap them and escort them outside. So far, I haven’t run into anything like this.
In honor of Thanksgiving here in the US, I thought I’d share with you a food-related short story. If you’re thinking there’s some horror angle, forget it. There is, however, some sweet revenge. Enjoy.
Marta Gutiérrez de Alma had been cooking soup for days. She told her friend Teresa that this was going to be the best soup she ever made. What she didn’t say is that it would be her last.
To be honest, she hadn’t been right since her husband Cinto went off with “that woman.†Making soup, people felt, was her way of keeping herself occupied. And they had approved at first.
Marta’s mother Juanita became alarmed when she discovered that the children hadn’t been bathed in days. The house was filthy, and there was no food in the kitchen—except for the damned soup ingredients.
Something needed to be done.
So Juanita moved in with Marta, explaining to her own husband that it was the only way to save her grandchildren from turning into criminals. They were five and seven.
Juanita cleaned the house, bathed the children, and did the dishes while Marta went out shopping for only the freshest ingredients to make her amazing soup.
Marta bought ranch-fresh chickens and slaughtered them for their necks and gizzards. She chopped, diced, peeled, minced, and sautéed until her hands were swollen and bloody. The town felt that, even if Marta was well on her way to the loony bin, she would leave behind a soup never to be forgotten.
Finally, after seven days Marta said, “Está lista, mamá.â€
With tears in her eyes, Juanita watched her poor daughter go off to the bathroom to have a bath. As soon as she heard the sound of water running and Marta singing a lively canción, she found a spoon and tasted the soup. It was magnificent.
Ready for some new mysteries and thrillers? Check out the Twisted Mysteries & Fast-Paced Thrillers promotion going on until November 21, 2021.
And don’t forget to try these Fall/Winter Thriller Freebies, available until November 23, 2021.
If you’re an Amazon Prime member and need a horror fix, check out Exorcist: The Beginning, starring the talented Stellan Skarsgård and directed by Renny Harlin. This is Father Merrin’s origin story—and wow.
Logline. Years before Father Lankester Merrin helped save Regan MacNeil’s soul, he first encounters the demon Pazuzu in East Africa. This is the tale of Father Merrin’s initial battle with Pazuzu and the rediscovery of his faith.
Okay, I’m outta here. See you next month when I see how much Christmas candy I can stuff into my gob. Peace and love.
Sins of the Father is a crime thriller worthy of Walter White. There, I said it. I’ll also add that Evan Buckley is not the sharpest tool in the shed. He’s tone-deaf when it comes to women. And often, the investigator lets his emotions get in the way instead of doing the sensible thing. Good thing he has that cop, Kate Guillory, to keep him in line.
Despite his shortcomings, Evan is dogged when it comes to solving a mystery. And he has a big heart. Sure, he takes risks. But isn’t that what literary PIs are supposed to do? Sometimes, though, I wish he’d think first before leaping into the festering maw of the unknown. I mean, seriously. You could poke your eye out.
All of the characters in this book are well defined. And their motives are clear. But, though the story’s driving force is a direct path, there’s nothing straight about it when it comes to the twists and turns Evan must navigate to get to the truth. And as they say, the truth ain’t pretty.
If you enjoy edge-of-your-seat thrillers with an outstanding cast of characters, check out Sins of the Father. You won’t be sorry.
Fifty years ago, pharmaceuticals magnate Frank Hanna got a girl pregnant. Then she disappeared. Now he’s dying with nobody to inherit his fortune – apart from his weak-willed daughter and her bullying lover, a gambler in over his head with the Russian mob, willing to do anything to save his own skin. Desperate to atone for his sins, Hanna hires maverick PI Evan Buckley to investigate, to find answers to the questions that haunt him. Did she have the baby? And if so, what happened to it?
As Evan searches for somebody who might never have existed, peeling back fifty years of lies and betrayal to uncover the tragic story hidden underneath, he faces a terrible dilemma: the closer he gets to the truth, the more he puts his quarry in danger. How can he stop himself from becoming an unwilling pawn, his dogged tenacity turned against him as he leads the ruthless mobsters to the one person who stands between them and Hanna’s fortune?
To make matters worse, Evan’s own troubled past is back with a vengeance as his nemesis, the degenerate child-killer Carl Hendricks, feeds his festering hatred from his prison cell, sending a killer intent on Old Testament-style retribution after Evan and his family.
Did you enjoy this review? Check out my other reviews here. And don’t forget to follow me at BookBub.
Greetings. Well, just in time for Halloween, our cat had a mishap that turned into a bloodletting—for me. Somehow, she got herself tangled up in a Trader Joe’s wine bag. You know, the kind with the cloth dividers inside? Early in the morning, she tore around the house, caterwauling and hissing, trying to get the thing off. Long story short, I had to hold her while cutting the bag off her legs with a pair of snub-nosed scissors. And here’s what I looked like after. Yeah.
Do you have any crazy pet stories you’d like to share? Honestly, it would make me feel better knowing I’m not the only person who’s experienced the no-good-deed-goes-unpunished effect.
Anyway, on with the show.
All this month, you can download a copy of The Girl in the Mirror for free. And I’ve reduced the price on Books 2 and 3, as well as the box set.
That’s not all. I’m also offering free shipping when you buy a signed paperback from my Etsy shop. So, if you’re looking for a gift for friends who love thriller, supernatural, and horror fiction, now’s the time to grab some books and save.
Check out the Haunted Paranormal & Urban Fantasy promotion going on now. You’ll find some fun, creepy titles.
And finally, here are some free Fan Favorite Thrillers and Suspense titles to enjoy.
If you’re an Amazon Prime member and enjoy psychological thrillers, watch The Mad Women’s Ball. It’s in French with subtitles, and it will blow you away with powerful performances and a gorgeous Paris setting.
Logline. A woman who is unfairly institutionalized at Paris asylum plots to escape with the help of one of its nurses. Based on the novel Le bal des folles by Victoria Mas.
Okay, that’s a wrap. See you next month when, once again, I ignore NaNoWriMo and do whatever I damn well please. Peace and love.
Greetings. If you like supernatural horror, check out my new Sarah Greene box set. “The Darkness Trilogy†includes Sarah Greene Mysteries Books 1–3. The regular price is $11.99. But for a limited time, you can pick it up for a cool $4.99. That’s a 40 percent savings.
For Sarah, The Darkness is real. And it knows her name.
Sarah Greene is a successful realtor who sees ghosts–and sometimes wishes she didn’t. While renovating an old house with her ex-husband, she finds a mirror haunted by a teenager’s tortured spirit. But, as she sets out to discover the victim’s identity, Sarah stumbles onto something even more chilling. An insidious evil known as The Darkness is infesting the town of Dos Santos.
Things escalate with a series of disturbing accidents at a women’s shelter. The horrific events center on a recent arrival—a young Guatemalan woman who might be possessed. Meanwhile, the streets are plagued by a wave of senseless violence at the hands of soulless strangers. Despite the danger, Sarah decides to use her psychic ability to stop The Darkness from destroying the town.
Box Set Contents
The Girl in the Mirror
House of the Shrieking Woman
The Blood She Wore
And there’s more. Check out these Mystery & Thriller, Paranormal, and Urban Fantasy deals over at Amazon. But hurry. This promo ends September 30, 2021.
Here’s a guest post I did over at the Kill Zone. Writing an original screenplay is hard enough. But adapting one from a novella is a whole new kind of crazy. Read an excerpt here.
Recently, I took a break from writing fiction to focus on screenwriting. Currently, I’m adapting my latest novella, Brandon’s Last Words, as a feature screenplay.
If you’re wondering why anyone in their right mind would take on something like this, it’s simple—I live in LA. Trust me, you can’t swing a dead cat at Starbucks without hitting a screenwriter huddled at a corner table, determined to crank out the next Black Widow.
Okay, that’s partly it. The other reason is, I wanted to see if I could do it.
The novella is a prequel to a new thriller series. It takes place in the same universe as another of my series—only this time, with new characters. For those who have written a screenplay, you already know you need a log line. Here’s what I originally wrote for the novella:
Brandon Wheegar has just joined a secretive government-funded lab as a security guard. Why did no one warn him about the murderous test subjects?
That’s not bad. The question is, does it work for a movie? We’ll see. Of course, there’s plenty of other stuff to worry about. For this post, I’ll focus on three lessons learned.
As fiction writers, we are keenly aware of story beats. They’re hammered into us starting in the womb. I’m tempted to joke that our friend James Scott Bell has beat that concept to death, but it would be low-hanging fruit, so.
The point is, screenplays need beats, too. But these are different and immutable. And without them, you effectively have something that is not a screenplay.
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