It might as well be spring, too, as Oscar Hammerstein wrote, though that’s not at all what it feels like outside. But if you’re as restless as a willow in a windstorm, or as giddy as a baby on a swing, maybe I can help. Even if it’s a couple of days too late to be Orange Wednesday, I’ve got a Dramatic Price Reduction designed to comfort you, along with a virtual giveaway starting Sunday.

First the Dramatic Price Reduction. Back in September, Hard Case Crime teamed up with Subterranean Press to bring out Catch and Release, containing 17 of my previously uncollected short stories. (Well, 15 stories, actually, plus a newspaper op-ed piece and a one-act stage play. And a couple of the stories are actually novelettes. And…oh, never mind.)

Subterranean’s hard cover edition sold out in a heartbeat, it was essentially gone by the time the books were off-press, and I brought out the book myself in trade paperback and ebook, and it’s been selling well in both formats. But, well, it’s six months since publication, and that strikes me as a good time to drop the price of the ebook. Drop it? Hell, let’s cut it in half.

It was $9.99. It’s now $4.99.

The new lower price is already in effect at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Smashwords, and Apple. The paperback, with the same great artwork as the hardcover edition, is $13.49 (list price $14.99) at Amazon and B&N. And may I call your attention to Dreamscape’s audiobook? I did the narration, with an assist from the incomparable Lynne Wood Block, making her debut (and, she swears, her final appearance) as a voice artist. (She reads the female role in the two-character stage play, How Far, and also voices Without a Body, a first-person female viewpoint short-short.)

If you’d like an autographed copy of the Catch and Release paperback, we have them in LB’s eBay Bookstore for $16.99 plus shipping. If you’d like 5 autographed copies, the price drops to $59.99 with free shipping.

And now on to what’s for free, or very nearly so. In 1977 I published the first Matthew Scudder short story—a novelette, actually, called “Out the Window”—in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Over the years, other Scudder stories have followed, and three years ago I gathered them all together, wrote a new one to keep them company, and self-published the collection as The Night and the Music.

The book got a strong reception and has been selling steadily ever since. Several readers and reviewers noted that it essentially constitutes an eighteenth Matthew Scudder novel, ranging in time alongside the others. If you’re a Scudder fan, I recommend the book to you without hestation.

The individual stories are eVailable; most are Kindle Select titles, but a few can be found elsewhere as well. “Out the Window“ is exclusive to Kindle, and I’m thus able to offer a Kindle Countdown deal for the title, starting Sunday at 11am Eastern time and running for about a week. While it lasts, the $2.99 novelette will cost you just 99¢.

That’s not free, but it’s close. And my real objective here is not to euchre you out of a hot 99¢ but to get you to buy the whole book for a princely $4.99. By all means wait until Sunday morning and pick up the bargain—or, if you want to take a flying leap at the rolling doughnut of faith, and get all the Scudder stories in hand sooner rather than later, just buy The Night and the Music. It’s not exclusive to Amazon, but can also be had at Barnes & Noble and wherever ebooks are sold. And both Amazon and B&N have the trade paperback as well. (There’s an audio edition, too, narrated by some old dude nobody ever heard of. Hey, cut him some slack. He’s doing the best he can.)

A couple of other things, before I forget. The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons continues to move nicely in paperback and ebook. The ebook is an Amazon exclusive, the paperback more widely available. And, because of your strong response, we’re continuing the special offer on the Limited Collector’s Edition—buy it now at our eBay store and a free signed paperback comes with it.

Borderline, an early pseudonymous erotic crime of mine that’s way older than most of you, is coming in hardcover from Hard Case Crime; you can pre-order it now. You ought to click on that link just for a look at the cover, which is gorgeous. Publishers Weekly reviewed the book this past week, and found some nice things to say about it. I don’t expect to be offering autographed copies of this title, but I’m sure you’ll be able to obtain one through the Mysterious Bookshop.

Enough! I want to get this in the mailstream before you down your computers for the weekend. What? You don’t shut them down for the weekend? You don’t ever shut them down? You’ve long since forgotten how to shut them down?

Yeah. I know the feeling…