It's been a month since my newest western story, "The Home Place," was published as a Full Speed Singles ebook and there are some great reviews!

Read on!

The first comes from Bruce H.

And here's another from Jill C. Hand.

Thank you very much for the kind words, Bruce and Jill! I'm thrilled you enjoyed the story!

For everyone else out there, why not check it out for yourself? Only $0.99 on Kindle or free on KindleUnlimited!

​And please remember to leave a review!

HUGE NEWS!

My next novel BURN ME OUT is coming from Black Rose Writing September 6th, but you can pre-order yours NOW!

I've talked about this novel a lot over the last year or so as it's a very important and personal one for me. It is, in large part, about what some things I've been dealing with over the last few years: desperation, depression, hiding the most significant part of yourself from everyone (especially those you love because hurting them is the last thing on earth you want) and a deep, aching desire to matter and be recognized for it.I really, really want people to read this novel and enjoy it, but I also hope readers can empathize with some of the characters and their situations. Few, if anyone, in this novel is a decent persona, but I think they're very human.

The cover and back-cover blurb are below.

Al Vacarro is a made man, with all the honors and responsibilities that entails. But after a literal lifetime of violence in service to the Castella crime family, Al’s past is catching up with him and neither his present nor any future he can imagine seems to hold any hope for salvation.

For the sake of his family and his very soul, he needs out of “the life.”

But how does a man escape the only world he’s ever known?

​This is a story of blood and desperation, and these are the last twenty-four hours of life as Al knows it.

Click here to pre-order at a discounted price and an early ship-date for pre-ordering readers!

Please give this novel a chance if you like crime novels, human drama, or anything I've written in the past. I think it represents some of my best work.

Coming soon, in April, it's issue seven of Occult Detective Magazine! (Formerly Occult Detective Quarterly)

I'm excited to announce that my newest western story "The Home Place" was just released as part of Full Speed Publishing's line of Kindle Original stories!

1889, Indian Territory. Jim Maddern brought his family into a new world, to start a new life, with dreams of owning the best horse ranch west of the Mississippi. But he isn't the only one with such dreams and there are men who will stop at nothing to achieve their goals, regardless of who they have to hurt along the way.

Get it today for only ninety-nine cents or free on Kindle Unlimited!

Check it out and please let me know what you think!

 I have read a lot of Lawrence Block and like most writers, he has some lousy works, some great works, and a lot of forgettable works in between. His most consistently-good works, however, are the Matthew Scudder series of mysteries about an ex-cop, private investigator (initially unlicensed, later licensed).

However, the more I read of the series, the more I realize that it is, by itself, like a microcosm of Block's overall career. There are some truly great Scudder novels, a few less memorable ones, and a few really really bad ones (his most recent, A Time to Cast Stones being the absolute worst).

This one isn't great.

While I've read a lot of Block and a fair amount of Scudder, I haven't read the Scudder novels in order. This is from the early part of what I refer to as "old Scudder era," in which Scudder is becoming an old man (age-wise and in his own mind) the novels are more about Scudder worrying over his place in the universe than anything else, with the mysteries taking a backseat. This one, in fact, the mystery is fairly transparent to the point of being kind of boring.
 
Not that there's nothing to like in this novel, but it's far less interesting and enjoyable than what he was putting out in the mid-70s and early 80s. Most of his stuff from the 90s I've read seems to herald the end of the truly great storytelling Block is capable of in favor of this kind of overly introspective, and frankly, kind of self-indulgent, writing. It's true that Scudder has aged with Block, but some of these later books feel too much like non-fiction for my taste.

If you like truly excellent P.I. stories, however, you can't go wrong with Block's Scudder books from the beginning (Sins of the Fathers, 1976) to the mid-way point (A Walk Among the Tombstones, 1992. Also made into a film), and I highly recommend anything from the first half of the series.

Here's a sneak peek of a video concerning a project I'm part of and of which I'm very, very proud of my contribution!

​More coming soon!

I've been thinking about this comic a lot the last few days.

I've long been a fan of Archie Comics--I own literally thousands of them--and working for them as a dream of mine for a long time. Unfortunately, getting your foot in the door of a company just as it's completely changing its publishing strategy, line up of books, and its future is uncertain is difficult, to say the least.

This comic, a try-out for all of us, is something that I think we can still be proud of, even if it is a shame that its official publication never came to pass. 

That said, there's nothing preventing me from re-posting it for all of you folks to enjoy, so please do.

Click the banner below to read the full comic and please enjoy!