Open Road has just made Grifter’s Game part of a special promotion, dropping the price all the way down to $2.99 for a limited time. (How limited? I don’t know, but you can see for yourself at Kindle or Nook. If the ePrice is still $2.99, you’re in luck.)

I wrote an afterword especially for the eBook:

This turned out to be the first book published under my own name, although I assumed it would be pseudonymous soft porn when I started it. A couple of chapter in I decided it might be a cut above what I’d been writing, so I wrote it as a crime novel with the hope it might work for Gold Medal. They were the first house to see it, and Knox Burger bought it. I can’t recall that he asked for any changes.

But they changed the title. I’d called it The Girl on the Beach, because that was such a Charles Williams/Gil Brewer/Peter Rabe title, perfect for Gold Medal. Knox didn’t like it. Go figure. Then somebody, he or I or my agent, came up with Grifter’s Game, and that was one everybody liked.

Next thing I knew, it was published as Mona. Years later I learned from Knox that this was publisher Ralph Daigh’s idea. He’d bought a painting of a woman’s face from an illustrator, and wanted a chance to use it on something. If he’d used a portrait of himself, I might be the author of Horse’s Ass.

The book’s had various titles over the years. Someone used the phrase “sweet slow death” in a cover blurb, and Berkley made that the title of their reprint edition. When Hard Case brought out the book a couple of years ago, we finally got to call it Grifter’s Game…

There’s more, and I’ve posted the afterword in full on the Afterthoughts page. Moving right along, it’s my pleasure to tell you about the newly available adventures of a very naughty young woman:

Kit Tolliver, whose totem animal is clearly the Black Widow spider, debuted in a short story, “If You Can’t Stand the Heat.” (Keller got a similar start, in “Answers to Soldier.”) The Kit Tolliver stories coalesced into a novel, Getting Off. A year ago I made the first three stories available on Kindle, and their reception showed that many of you like to consume them one at a time.

Well, now’s your chance. All twelve Kit Tolliver episodes are now available for Kindle . They’re live on Smashwords as well for Apple, Kobo, Sony Reader, and everything else. (And, after having been stalled in the B&N pipeline, they’re live on Nook. )

They’re sequentially numbered, which does make it easier to read them in order. They get more violent and erotic as they go along, and Kit’s not everybody’s dream girl, but you might want to give her a whirl…

This will be my last blog post for a while. I’ll be woodshedding—as the jazz musicians used to say, and perhaps still do. I’ll be off the grid, deprived of (or spared, as you prefer) email, Facebook, Twitter, and even such old-time agents of connectivity as snail mail and the telephone. LB’s eBay Bookstore will be closed while I’m gone. Enjoy the summer—and if you feel deprived of my presence, well, I’ve got a few books out there. And I’ve always been at my best on the page…

LB