The headline says it all. For the next 5 days, Wednesday through Sunday, we’ll be giving away a Kindle book a day. So let’s see what you can get and when you can get it.

Wednesday, January 27—”The Ehrengraf Fandango” There are 12 stories in all about Martin Ehrengraf, the resourceful defense attorney who never has a guilty client and never loses a case. They’re all collected in Defender of the Innocent, and the first 11 have been individually eVailable for years. But I held back #12, Fandango, pending publication of Defender, and that of Buffalo Noir, where the story also appears. (Ehrengraf, in case you didn’t know it, is a hardy Buffalonian.) And then I forgot about it.

And now it’s a Kindle Select title. Kindle Unlimited subscribers can borrow it free of charge, and anyone else can buy it for $2.99. And Wednesday it’s free to all. If you’ve got Defender of the Innocent, you already own it; if you’ve been reading the stories piecemeal, this is the one you’re missing, and Wednesday it’s yours.

Thursday, January 28. Passport to Peril, originally published in (gulp) 1967 under the pen name Anne Campbell Clark, is a novel of romantic suspense set in Ireland; heroine Ellen Cameron is an American folksinger collecting traditional ballads, and, well, stuff happens. It’s #15 in our Classic Crime Library, and the one CCL title enrolled in Kindle Select—which means I can give it away. And I’m doing just that for just one day, Thursday.

And this might be a good time to mention that, come February, I expect to be moving several of the CCL books to Kindle Select, where I’ll be able to do the occasional giveaway or price promotion. This means they’ll no longer be available, as they presently are, at B&N and Kobo and Apple—so you might want to act accordingly.

Friday, January 29. The 4 Chip Harrison novels, in their fancy new covers, have drawn an enthusiastic response in both ebook and paperback form. The series also includes two short stories. One, “As Dark As Christmas Gets,” has been eVailable all along, and also turns up periodically in anthologies of Christmas stories. The other, written back in the 1980s, is “Death of the Mallory Queen,” and it’s only appeared in two collections of mine. It’s full of insider humor, with references that may be lost in time, but it’s Chip Harrison and Leo Haig hired to solve a murder that hasn’t happened yet, and, well, come Friday the price is right. Which is to say that it’s free. And if you haven’t yet met Haig and Harrison, here’s your chance.

Saturday, January 30. Last week we gave away the first two Kit Tolliver stories, “If You Can’t Stand the Heat” and “Rude Awakening.” If you missed out, well, there’s nothing I can do about that now—except to give you a chance at #3, “You Can Call Me Lucky,” which finds our girl at an Indian casino in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, doing what she does best. It’s free to all comers on all Amazon platforms, but only Saturday. (And yes, we still have a few signed copies of Getting Off, the Hard Case Crime paperback containing all 12 stories, for $9.99.)

Sunday, January 31. Back in the day—make that way back in the day—I wrote upwards of twenty books of sexual nonfiction as John Warren Wells. They’re mostly eVailable, many of them on Kindle Select, and they may or may not be your cuppa, but 3 is Not a Crowd is one of the best, consisting of 4 case histories of 3somes, and on Sunday you get to download it for free.

And there you are—5 bright winter days, 5 free books. Each is free for one day only, so you’ll want to keep this newsletter handy for quick reference. I’m not sure exactly what time of day the promotions kick in, and I’m sure that varies with your location, but I know all of y’all to be a resourceful lot, and I suspect you’ll work it out just fine.

I’ll end by changing the subject—to Die Sünden der Väter, Stefan Mommertz’s new translation of the first Matthew Scudder novel, The Sins of the Fathers. It’s now for sale at all Amazon platforms, including amazon.com and amazon.de, and plans call for a paperback edition in the near future. If you’re a blogger/reviewer, contact me to arrange an interview or a review copy. (And if you buy the book and enjoy it, please spread the word with an Amazon review.)

And that’ll do it for now. We had a light sprinkling of snow here in New York, as you may have heard, but all it really did was give us a chance to hole up and read, and what’s so bad about that?

Cheers,

PS: As always, please feel free to forward this to anyone you think might find it of interest. And, if you’ve received the newsletter in that fashion from a friend and would like your own subscription, that’s easily arranged; a blank email to lawbloc@gmail.com with Newsletter in the subject line will get the job done.
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