Unputdownable

Lies by T. M. Logan (St. Martin’s Press, September 2018) piles complication atop complication atop complication as one lie leads to another and yet another.

Joe Lynch and his wife Melanie appear to be the perfect London couple, living a dream life. At least, Joe thinks so. They’ve been happily married nearly ten years and have a four-year-old son, William. Joe’s an English teacher at a private school, Mel’s an executive at a large retail chain. They own their house, two cars, and they have lots of friends.

Joe’s life begins to fall apart when he accidentally discovers Mel meeting her best friend’s husband at a motel bar. Ben Delaney is rich, handsome, smart, and ruthless. They have a super-smart fourteen-year-old daughter named Alice who sometimes baby-sits William. Ben and Beth have been married for 15 years, and Mel was maid of honor at their wedding. He’s owner and managing director of a software development company that specializes in creating computer games, and Ben loves to play games.

Why are Ben and Mel meeting at a motel when both are supposed to be working?

When Joe confronts Ben in the motel parking lot, Ben denies meeting Mel. Then he becomes angry and shoves Joe against his car. Joe shoves back, and Ben trips over his briefcase, loses his balance, and slams his head hard into the concrete. Blood oozes from his ear and Ben appears either unconscious or dead.

Joe tries to call an ambulance from his cell phone, but there’s no signal. William sees the blood and begins to suffer a severe asthma attack. Of course, Joe has forgotten to refill the inhaler he kept in the glove box, and he must drive William home and find another inhaler before the boy chokes to death. Save Ben or save his son? His son is infinitely more important.

When Joe returns to the parking lot to help Ben, the man and his Porsche are gone.

Mel returns home at her usual time on Thursday night. He mentions he’d seen her car at the motel and she quickly denies it, claiming she was playing tennis after work with Hilary Paine. When Joe insists he saw her with Ben, she admits she lied because Ben asked her to meet him to discuss a sensitive personnel problem she’d promised to keep secret.

Joe begins to have doubts: If his perfect wife lied to him, is then the rest of his perfect life also only a lie?

When Beth reports Ben missing to the police, Joe could become a suspect if he admits he was the last person to see Ben alive. Mel urges Joe to lie to the police, and things go rapidly downhill from there.

Joe turns to the internet to prove Ben is still alive, but technology is Ben’s strongpoint, not Joe’s. Someone has hacked Joe’s Facebook account and posted lies about him.

Told entirely in the first person from Joe’s POV, readers will easily identify with Joe and feel his pain as lie after lie comes to light and the noose is tightened around Joe’s neck. Is nothing and nobody what they seem?

Lies is a great read, fast-paced and unputdownable.

Dean Koontz has a new heroine

Dean Koontz combines Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate with Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives to create his latest pulse-pounding suspense thriller The Silent Corner (Bantam Books, June 2017).

Jane Hawk’s husband commits suicide, but he isn’t the only one to die by his own hand. When Jane, a highly-trained FBI Special Agent, takes bereavement leave and investigates the sudden rash of unexplained deaths, she and her five-year-old son are threatened by mysterious strangers who know all about her. Jane’s only hope to save her son and herself is to go entirely off the grid — to disappear into the silent corner where no one can track her movements or whereabouts.

Because those hunting Jane and her son don’t play nice, Jane can’t either. She becomes a rogue agent, a cold-blooded killer, and a thief.

Like Lee Child’s Jack Reacher, Jane Hawk has skills that allow her to survive against impossible odds. She goes on the offensive and ruthlessly kills people who deserve killing. We cheer her on each time another bad guy bites the dust.

The Silent Corner is only the first of at least three Jane Hawk novels. The Whispering Room will be out next January.

Exciting, thrilling, suspenseful, and well-written, I recommend The Silent Corner to everyone who enjoys a good read.

The Birth of a Book

After weeks of final revisions and consideration of comments and suggestions from beta readers and editors, I receive the page proofs of the typeset novel for one final review. I’m promised  ARCs shortly after the beginning of the new year, and then I can—at last–hold a printed copy of the book in my hands and feel, as well as see, the child of my imagination made flesh. I will sniff the paper and the ink, run my fingertips lovingly over the cover and interior pages, and cry real tears.

Birthing a book is a joyous occasion. The conception, as always, may be a labor of love; but the delivery is nothing but pure time-consuming painful labor. Next comes the really hard part: introducing the child to the world and analyzing each ohh and ahhh or worrying when others don’t see the same beauty and potential in my offspring that I see each time I look.

Here are the vitals:

6″ x 9″ (15.24 x 22.86 cm)
Black & White on White paper
340 pages
$14.95 for Trade Paperback; $3.95 for Kindle version
2AM PublicationsISBN-13: 978-0937491195ISBN-10: 0937491195BISAC: Fiction / Psychological
Megan Williams returns to Twin Rivers after five years in a mental hospital to take final revenge on the men who raped and mutilated her. But the tiny Illinois town has grown into a bustling Chicago suburb near the end of the Metra line, and Megan isn’t the only serial killer now leaving dead bodies littering the streets. Can Megan keep her sister safe and still exact her revenge? Or will Megan’s actions make Susan, Tim, and Elsie targets? The Girl Who Lived, the sequel to Spilled Milk, is a fast-paced psychological thriller unlike anything you’ve read before. Not for the faint-hearted or squeamish, this is the story of what happens when a girl who was brutalized and left for dead gets a second chance at life.

Her picture is at the top of this page. Isn’t she lovely?

I’ve named her “Megan’s Story.” Megan is The Girl Who Lived.

You’ll get a chance to meet her on March 2, 2017.

If I sound like a proud parent, it’s because I am. Although two major NY publishers asked to adopt her, I wouldn’t let them. I chose 2AM Publications to be Megan’s god-parent. Until Megan is old enough and strong enough to survive in the world by herself, I prefer to keep her close to home. I know how cold and cruel the world can be.

If you read Megan’s story, you’ll meet unscrupulous people who’ll do anything for a thrill or to make a quick buck. You’ll see people cut into pieces and discarded like trash. You’ll witness seductions and murders and know what it’s like to be incarcerated in jail cells or mental institutions. You’ll feel a silenced automatic pressed against the back of your head and realize how horrible it is to feel hopeless and helpless.

But you’ll also discover love and, perhaps, even find redemption.

I know I shed a tear or two while reading Megan’s Story.  All of my beta readers claim they did, too.
When I wrote Spilled Milk, the prequel to The Girl Who Lived: Megan’s Story, I wrote it as an obituary. I wrote The Girl who Lived as a birth announcement.

Please welcome Megan to the world of the living.

And join me for her Christening on March 2, 2017.

Hello Mudder, Hello Fadder: The Psychological Insights of Paige Dearth's Born Mobster

https://www.amazon.com/Born-Mobster-Paige-Dearth/dp/1505831229/

Hello Mudder, Hello Fadder: The Psychological Insights of a Born Mobster

It took me almost a hundred pages to get used to Paige Dearth’s unique spellings of the South Philly dialect. I’m from Chicago where we speak a different variation on the South Philly cross between Irish and Italian. Dearth is obviously an auditory writer. I’m a visual reader. When words aren’t spelled the way I expect, I’m distracted from getting into the story. But Dearth’s great characterizations of Tony and Vincent kept me reading anyway.

Everyone has been bullied at one time or another in his or her life. We can all identify with Tony. Even Vincent and Carmen, Tony’s “fadder”, have been bullied. Tony Bruno, like so many of Paige Dearth’s characters in this novel and her previous novels, is trapped by his heredity and his environment. He feels helpless in a hopeless situation not of his own making. It is only when he says “enough” and begins to fight back, to take control of his life, that Tony has any chance of surviving.

Educational psychologists will tell you that humans tend to imitate behavior that is modeled: we—-both as impressionable children and as adults—-learn from the way we see others behave. Role models have great influence on us. We are products of our environments.

Characters constantly ask each other, “Are you okay? Is everything okay?” Ain’t nothin’ okay in Tony Bruno’s world. It’s a shithole. Shit happens. Period. End of sentence.

Bad things happen to good people all the time in this novel, and bad people get their share of shit dumped on them, too. Born Mobster is a gritty tale filled with graphic violence and four-letter profanity and explicit sexual situations. If it were made into a movie, it would rate a definite “R”. It’s not a story you want kids to read, though older teens might easily identify with Tony, Vincent, and Salvatore.

I give Born Mobster five stars for characterization and storyline. The quality of writing, especially dialog, is consistently four stars. Paige Death is still learning her craft. But she is a writer to watch, and this novel proves it.

My Return from the Dead

Coming back from the dead is never easy.

I deliberately killed myself off twenty-five years ago. I stopped writing fiction to help my wife overcome chronic life-threating illness. Instead of writing fiction, I earned several masters degrees and worked on doctorates in educational psychology and cognitive neuroscience. I learned hypnotic techniques to help prolong human lives and improve the quality of life. I made a name for myself as a hypnosis instructor and author of journal articles.

But Paul Dale Anderson the author of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and thrillers was buried and forgotten.

When I returned to fiction writing in 2012, it took two long years for my novels and short stories to again appear in print. I’m still in the process of resurrecting my backlist, but new Paul Dale Anderson novels are now available as paperbacks and e-books.

I began making live personal appearances in 2014, and this year I’m doing the full convention circuit. I’m getting my face and name out there to show people I’m still alive.

I have been back in the fiction game for four consecutive years, and I am about to have a breakthrough. Breakthroughs come when an author publishes consistently for at least five years in one genre or related genres. Breakthroughs occur when name recognition and writing quality reach critical mass.

It takes at least five years before people in this industry take you seriously, five years of writing your heart out, five years of pitching and submitting manuscripts to agents and editors, five years of attending conventions and doing readings and book signings, five years of reaching for the golden ring, missing it by millimeters, before you can grab hold and hang on.

It takes five years for word to get around that your work is worth reading. Any writer worth his or her salt who sticks around for more than five years should notice a breakthrough at the five year mark.

It takes ten additional years to produce a bestselling book. Your writing improves with each book you write, so the more books you write, the better your writing becomes. Sales, also, are accumulative, and the more you write the more books you’ll sell. And the more you sell, the more readers will recognize your name. The more people who recognize your name, the more books you’ll sell. It’s a vicious circle. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Writing is a numbers game.

In order to play the writing game and have a chance at winning, you need:

1. Name recognition

2. Facial recognition

3. Genre recognition

4. Quality (Content) recognition

5. Peer recognition

People will want to buy your work only if other people buy your work. You must fist show that other people like and trust you. Humans are socially conditioned to do what they see other people doing. That’s why books have lots of blurbs from other bestselling authors and reviewers on their covers and in their front-matter.

That, my friends, is a hard truth most writers refuse to admit.

I now have a New York agent, one of the best in the business at a literary agency I respect. I have made new friends, many of them bestselling authors, who know my name and like my work. I help fledgling authors with reviews and blurbs. I have found heaven on earth and I am once again alive and well.

Watch for my breakthrough novel to appear from one of the Big Five publishers. I’m hard at work on a sequel and three stand-alones.

I’m scheduled to appear on panels at MidAmeiCon II, the World Science Fiction Convention in Kansas City, in August. I’ll be at BoucherCon in New Orleans in September.

Life is good.

Deviants is now on sale

Many of my readers have waited patiently to read Deviants, a short suspense novel that I expected to appear in print during 2014 or 2015. The publisher who contracted for Deviant’s hardcover, paperback, e-book, and audio rights sold their imprints to another publisher in 2015. During the transition, certain agreements of the original contract became null and void, and I asked the new publisher to return all rights to me. Although that new publishing company offered me a new contract with a tentative publication date in 2016, I declined.

When Crossroad Press, the publisher who has done such an amazing job promoting my Instruments of Death series, asked to let them know if the e-book rights for Deviants ever became available, I agreed to let them know. Although Deviants is a stand-alone novel, it does share certain similarities with the Instruments of Death novels. Crossroad Press’s Gordian Knot imprint is probably the ideal place for Deviants.

I am happy to announce the e-book publication of Deviants. It’s now available for Kindle and Nook. Here’s a sample:

Augie, by default, fit right in. He didn’t belong in normal society. He didn’t want what most people wanted. He had no use for a big house with a monthly mortgage to pay, no job with which to pay a mortgage even if he did want a house, no desire for a wife and children. He didn’t want a fancy new car every couple of years. What Augie wanted, ordinary society refused to provide, rejected as dangerous, and sought to stifle because the very idea was repulsive.

Augie wanted to watch people die as he slowly and systematically dismembered them. He wanted to smell the coppery-rich scent of fresh blood, feel the slimy, slippery parts of the human body grow cold beneath his deliberate touch. In a sense, he wanted to play God, for he had been told that only God could give life or take it away.

Deviants is part psychological horror, part crime-suspense. It’s lots of fun.

Order from http://www.amazon.com/Deviants-Paul-Dale-Anderson-ebook/dp/B01CTTXZNS

I'm in Ecstasy!

Today was the official publication date of Winds: A Novel, and I’m ecstatic.

I began writing Winds (working titles “Whispers on the Wind” and “Written on the Wind”) in 1979. The first draft featured Philip Ashur, the main protagonist of a planned series of supernatural fantasies I tentatively titled “Cast Away Stones”. Over the next 35 years, Philip Ashur evolved into the villainous behind-the-scenes manipulator you’ll meet in Winds.

Ashur could astral travel. He learned the precious secret more than 8,000 years ago in the Indus Valley. Philip Ashur wasn’t originally a bad man. In his own way, he was quite heroic. Like all mortals, however, Ashur wanted a way to not only prolong his life but to accumulate incredible knowledge and wealth he could take with into his next lives. Ashur’s fatal flaw was he didn’t care what he had to do nor whom he had to hurt to accomplish his goal. I sought to follow Ashur’s quest for immortality, omniscience, and omnipotence through multiple reincarnations. I think I have done that in Winds. Spoiler alert: Ashur will return next year in Stones.

I pitched the idea to my agent Barbara Puechner in 1989. Barb said she thought Stones and Winds would be my break-out novels. She encouraged me to continue developing those stories. But, she said, editors wanted me to also produce the kind of horror and police procedurals I was already known for, and that’s what I did.

I worked on Winds and wrote a few short stories for anthologies and magazines while Barb took time out to deal with family and personal health issues. Gretta, my wife, also had family and personal health issues in the early to mid 1990s, and I experienced my own health crisis and close brush with death in 1996 and 1997. I didn’t try to find another agent nor attempt to market any of my novels on my own when Barbara Puechner died. I had nearly fifty novels—science fiction, fantasy, horror, westerns, and mysteries—in various stages of completion when Gretta died in January of 2012. If I wanted to see any of those novels in print before I also died, I needed to get busy. I completed twenty 100,000 word novels and began work on several more between January 2012 and November 2015.

4 agents and six respected editors expressed interest in my work, but none wanted to tackle the Winds series. David Niall Wilson at Crossroad Press agreed to reprint my previously published horror novels and short story collections, and David said he also wanted to publish all of my original horror and police procedural novels. I revised those manuscripts and Crossroad Press has been successfully publishing them as e-books for the last two years.

Eldritch Press published Abandoned, the first novel in the Winds-series, in March 2015. I pitched Abandoned as a stand-alone novel to several small presses, and Eldritch was the first to offer me a contract. I wanted to see how Eldritch marketed the book before I offered them the rest of the Winds novels. I’m glad I waited.

Because Eldritch Press did little or no marketing, I revived the 2AM Publications imprint Gretta and I had founded back in 1985. 2AM published Darkness in June, Light in September, and Winds in October. Winds was still in the hands of a traditional publisher in May 2015. The editor loved the novel but the publisher saw no place in their list for a novel with a reincarnation theme. When I received their rejection, I was thrilled. 2AM would publish the novel. If Eldritch Press does not renew their contract for Abandoned, 2AM will publish a new edition of Abandoned late next year.

Likewise, the editors who have considered Spilled Milk for nearly two years without offering me a contract, are out of luck. 2AM Publications will publish Spilled Milk in November 2015.

Some people have cautioned me against publishing too many titles in a single year. When you’re 71 years old and have been writing novels for fifty years and few of your titles are in currently print, you don’t want to wait. And you sure as hell don’t want to use pseudonyms. Been there, done that. I want all of my new books to be published with my byline.

I write every day from 9 AM until 2 PM, and again from 10 PM until 2 AM. I produce at least a thousand words a day of fresh fiction. I write four novels a year with time to do revisions and minimal marketing. Writing has taken over my life.

Although I have had ten new novels appear in 2015, those novels were written long ago and recently revised. I have another forty novels—some in first drafts, many in second and third drafts, and a few in partials with detailed outlines and synopses—in progress. And I have one or two brand new novels on the drawing boards.

I also have a couple of hundred trunk stories I’ll get around to revising for magazines or short story collections.

I have no idea when Damnation Books will publish Deviants. That novel has been under contract for more than a year and no publication date has yet been set.

I have news for all the agents and publishers who said reincarnation doesn’t sell: Reincarnation is the next big thing, bigger even than zombies. During the twenty-plus years that I was a professional hypnotist and past-life regression therapist, I regressed thousands of people who discovered their own past lives. I was completely booked up at conferences, and even today I get people requesting past life sessions every week (I tell them to buy my books instead). True, there are many people who are turned off at the thought that their karma will follow them even after death. The main selling point of Christianity is forgiveness for one’s sins. The fact that one is responsible for one’s actions and must suffer the consequences for everything one does is reprehensible to those people. They’re entitled to their beliefs. I pity them when they stand before their God and must account for what they have done with their talents. They’ll be up the proverbial creek without a paddle. Crying “Forgive me for I have sinned” just ain’t gonna cut it.

Winds is fiction. It’s a suspense thriller. You can read Winds as a stand-alone novel or as part of a series. The same is true of Abandoned, Darkness, Light, Time, and Stones.

I did something completely different with Spilled Milk. Part of that forthcoming novel is written in first person from a female’s POV. Part of Spilled Milk is written in third person from male POVs. Like the rest of my novels, Spilled Milk is not for everyone. It’s filled with graphic depictions of rape, murder, and mutilation and is meant as a cautionary tale. If you’re offended by graphic violence, please do not read Spilled Milk.

Read Winds instead. Then read Darkness, Light, and Abandoned. You’ll be glad you did.

Worth the Read

I love a good psychological thriller. Jonathan Kellerman has written his share of them, and I’ve enjoyed most of the Alex Delaware novels. Kellerman is a clinical psychologist turned novelist, and he creates characters who suffer believable traumas. Delaware pops up briefly in The Murderer’s Daughter, but it’s only a brief walk-on part. The Murderer’s Daughter (Ballantine Books, ISBN 978-0345545312, August 2015, $28.00) is a stand-alone novel, and Doctor Grace Blades—not Alex Delaware—is the protagonist.

Grace survived a horrific childhood. She grew up, earned a doctorate, and became a clinical psychologist. Kellerman writes about what he knows., and he knows psychology and martial arts. Grace, too, knows psychology and martial arts. Grace is a survivor, one of those resilient children who not only survive childhood but thrive as adults. Psychologists publish case studies about children like Grace. In fact, Grace wrote and published in a peer-reviewed journal a thinly-disguised case study about herself. It was that case study about a child who sees a parent kill and be killed that attracted the attention of Andrew Toner. Andrew, like Grace, is plagued by childhood trauma and family secrets.

Andrew Toner (A. Toner) is Grace’s last clinical appointment before a well-earned two-week vacation. Grace is a rescuer. She rescues animals. And she rescues people when she can. That’s why she became a clinical psychologist. A clinical psychologist named Malcolm rescued Grace. Grace repays Malcolm by paying it forward. However, when Andrew keeps his appointment, Grace discovers she and Andrew have a history.

Andrew is the man Grace seduced in a bar the night before.

Complication follows complication. A homicide detective informs Grace that a man matching Andrew’s description was killed, and Grace’s business card was found in his shoe. Grace, fearing she is a prime suspect in Andrew’s murder, tries to unravel the mystery of A. Toner. She finds herself hunted by both the police and psychopathic killers. In order to survive, Grace becomes a killer herself.

Kellerman alternates the here and now with backstory reminiscences of Grace’s early life. Hidden within her own history are clues to Andrew’s real identity and the identity of Andrew’s killers.

As an educational psychologist, I loved Kellerman’s keen insights into the human condition. As a novelist, I could appreciate the sparse language, rich character development, and detailed descriptions of people and places. Grace’s risk-taking behavior is indicative of many survivors of PTSD who feel they have nothing more to lose.

The Murderer’s Daughter isn’t the best book I’ve read nor the best book Kellerman has written. But it’s certainly worth the read. Five stars for great insights and a character I empathized with and learned to care about, despite all her faults.