New Release FOOTSTEPS IN THE DARK

Well, it's here at last! FOOTSTEPS IN THE DARK is live. :-)

The snick of a lock.

 The squeak of door hinges. 

The creak of a floorboard...

Nothing is more mysterious than footsteps in the dark. Are those approaching steps that of friend or enemy? Lover or killer?

Authors L.B. Gregg, Nicole Kimberling, Josh Lanyon, Dal MacLean, Z.A. Maxfield, Meg Perry, C.S. Poe and S.C. Wynne join forces for Footsteps in the Dark, eight sexy and suspenseful novellas of Male/Male Mystery and Romance.

(That's over 200K worth of M/M Mystery and Romance for $3.99 -- half-price!)

Available at these fine retailers:

Amazon

Barnes and Noble

Kobo

iBooks

Smashwords

Google Play


What's it all about, Alfie? Read on!

Entrée to Murder. After a steady diet of big city trouble, Chef Drew Allison moved to the island town of Orca’s Slough to get a taste of life in the slow lane. But hometown hospitality goes stale when he finds a dead body in the basement of his own Eelgrass Café.

Twelve Seconds. A mysterious phone call, a missing executive, and an exploding rocket throw space reporter Justin Harris and Air Force Special Agent Greg Marcotte into an investigation that will change their lives…if it doesn’t kill them first.

Reality Bites. Detective Cabot Decker is called to the set of hotshot TV producer Jax Thornburn’s reality-TV show after a contestant is mauled to death by a tiger. Is someone trying to ax Jax’s career—or Jax himself?

Blind Man’s Buff. A game of Capture the Flag turns deadly inside an abandoned shopping mall when Tommy and Jonah stumble into a homicidal maniac’s hunting grounds.

A Country for Old Men. Inspector Calum Macleod has returned to the Western Isles of Scotland to bury a part of himself he can’t accept. But the island has old secrets of its own. When a murderer strikes, Calum finds his past can’t be so easily escaped.

Pepper the Crime Lab. When Lonnie Boudreaux’s neighbor is murdered, he must foster the man’s dog, befriend a mysterious former cop, and stop the killer—or else!

Lights, Camera, Murder. Hired to recover a stolen script, NY PI Rory Byrne must go undercover on the set of the ground-breaking historical drama The Bowery—a job complicated by Rory’s unexpected attraction to handsome, talented, and out-and-proud actor Marion Roosevelt.

Stranger in the House. Miles Tuesday’s memories of Montreal are happy ones, but now that he has inherited the mansion at 13 Place Braeside, everything feels different. Was Madame Martel’s fatal fall really an accident? 

FOOTSTEPS IN THE DARK Playlist

I love playlists. I love to listen to them and I love to create them.

It's interesting when you're listening to someone else's playlist and you immediately get a very strong feeling for the emotional core of their book. It's even more interesting when you listen and just can't figure out what they heard that you don't. :-D  I don't think there's anything more subjective than musical taste.

The exercise of choosing songs for a playlist helps me refine the emotional arc of the book I'm working on. That said, there's always one or two songs that just really seem to capture that book for me and those I'll listen to over and over and over. And afterwards, any time I hear that song, I remember writing that particular story.

Anyway, I asked each of the authors in the FOOTSTEPS IN THE DARK anthology to choose a song that seemed to capture the mood or theme or message of their story (or that they just couldn't stop listening to while writing) and the end result is this very eclectic and listenable playlist.

I hope you enjoy it--and I hope it whets your appetite for the book!

FOOTSTEPS IN THE DARK Playlist

Entrée to Murder by Nicole Kimberling

MAKE ME FEEL (Janelle Monáe)

Twelve Seconds by Meg Perry

START OF SOMETHING GOOD (Daughtry)

Reality Bites by S.C. Wynne

STRAWBERRIES & CIGARETTES (Troye Sivan)

Blind Man’s Buff by L.B. Gregg

LADDERS ( Mac Miller)

A Country for Old Men by Dal MacLean

TAKE ME TO CHURCH (Hozier)

Pepper the Crime Lab by Z.A. Maxfield

HELLO MY OLD HEART(The Old Hellos)

Lights, Camera, Murder by C.S. Poe

HUMAN (Of Monstersand Men)

Stranger in the House by Josh Lanyon

ET L'ON N'Y PEUT RIEN (Jean Jacques Goldman)

You can preorder the book here

And so on and so on and so on...

I've been really focused on writing lately, and haven't had much time to spend at Patreon, let alone blogging, let alone sending out my newsletter. 

The good news is I am really loving the work again (something I attribute to Patreon, as I've mentioned before) and I'm going through an extremely productive period.

The bad news...well, there isn't any bad news. I'm not even behind on my writing projects!

Some of the other stuff, yes. It's taking longer than I'd wanted to take my audio backlist wide. The same with my print backlist. The same with getting stuff onto Google Play. Getting everything listed and uploaded is hugely time-consuming. I've made some in-roads, but there's still a lot of work to do.

Also time-consuming is working on the Choose Your Moments Game.  I've never done anything like this before--well, wait. Actually, yes, I have. Stranger Things Have Happened is a lot like this (it's even based on the same book), but in that case I chose all the scenarios and paths and in this case, I'm just trying to do what the editor is requesting.

Basically I work on the game at night and during the day I write my own stuff.

Slay Ride came out last month. That had been promised for so long that it was a huge relief to finally deliver it. It was only supposed to be a short story, but I loved the characters and the mood of it so much that it ended up being a novella.

I've just wrapped up Stranger in the House, which is my contribution to the Footsteps in the Dark anthology. That goes live on the 31st of this month. It's such a great line-up of authors and such a variety of stories. I'm really excited about it. Plus I loved revisiting Montreal, even if it was only in my imagination.

At the end of June--next month!--comes The Monuments Men Murders which is the fourth Art of Murder book. It's up for preorders now. I'm looking forward to spending time with Jason West and Sam Kennedy--I'll start listening to the audio books next week to prep. With only two books left in the series, it's time to start figuring out the dismount--and at the same time that's the last thing I want to think about because I really love this series.

Then July and Mainly by Moonlight, first in the Bedknobs and Broomsticks trilogy. I LOVE THIS BOOK. I've been working on it steadily in between everything else because it's just so much fun. It's a lot more romance-focused than some of my stuff. Or is it? I'm not sure. Maybe it's because the romance is such a different kind of romance? Is it? I don't know! I just know it's really fun to write. Oh, and it's available for preorders too.

Then after July I have a tiny bit of a breather while I work on that long-delayed non-fiction project Mr. and Mrs. Murder AND put together a proposal--another trilogy--for Carina Press. This one is a mix of archaeology and FBI...but I don't want to talk too much about it. It's a bit different from my other FBI ones, that's all I'll say.

So there will probably be a couple of months with no new release, though I hope to have more audio out by then.

And then we hit the fall. First is I Buried a Witch, the second book in the Bedknobs and Broomsticks trilogy. I'm not sure if I'll do this one for Patreon or not. I mean, I'll share it with Patreon, obviously, but I'm not sure it will be a Patreon book since that should probably be another exclusive story. 

Then Haunted Heart: Spring. Originally I had intended a quartet, but I think I probably waited too long. So unless I really have a great time writing HHS and readers really, really take to it, that will probably wind up right there.

December will see the (probably last) of the Dangerous Ground books, Blind Side. That's going to be an emotionally fraught one, but hopefully worth the wait. It's taken me quite a while to get to the point where I felt ready to write this one. I've always known the basic idea, but it just hadn't gelled.

So lots of stories still to come. Lots of things in the works. It's just a really positive and productive period for me. For which I'm truly grateful.

SLAY RIDE SPOILER

THIS IS A SPOILER FOR THE END OF SLAY RIDE, SO IF YOU HAVEN'T READ THE STORY STOP HERE.


YOU BEEN WARNED.









It turns out that what I thought was a really clever and artistic way to handle the climax of Slay Ride was a technological fail for some readers, especially those with older reading devices.

Oh no!

Sorry about that. That aspect just never occurred me--and I spent a ton of time trying to figure the damn thing out too!

Anyway, here's the newspaper article (notice the byline? :-D :-D :-D) which reveals what ultimately happened.