It’s been a while since I cluttered your mailbox with a newsletter. But it’s summer, as you’ve very likely noticed, and a summer replete with more distractions than usual, and so I hesitate to bother you at all. Still, there are a couple of quick points I ought to make, and then I’ll get out of your way.

1. LB’s eBay Bookstore is closed. It’s scheduled to re-open the first week in August, but may well be shut down for most of the summer.

2.  Amazon has The Crime of Our Lives in hardcover at a close-out price.  My collection of essays and remembrances of the genre has been well-received, but the hardcover edition was not a marketing triumph; I printed only 1000 copies and sent almost all of them to Amazon for order fulfillment. And there they languished. To escape storage charges, we chopped the price from $24.99 to $9.99—$5 less than the paperback price, with free shipping to Amazon Prime members. They’re available until we get around to having them pulped to stop storage charges altogether.

3.  My new book this summer is the Hard Case paperback edition of The Girl with the Deep Blue Eyes. (The hardcover’s still available, along with the ebook and Mike Dennis’s fine audio version.) The book, set in central Florida, has been described as “James M. Cain on Viagra,” and that strikes me as fair. My new books this fall include In Sunlight or in Shadow, an anthology of new stories inspired by paintings of Edward Hopper, with a stunning list of contributors; Pegasus will bring it out in December, and you might want to pre-order now to lock in a good price on a first edition. And fall will also bring Sinner Man, my long-lost first mystery novel, set for November release from Hard Case Crime. Again, pre-ordering’s not a bad idea…

4. The Collection of Classic Erotica now stands complete, with 23 titles available in print and electronic editions—and ten of them in audio as well. (Four Lives at the Crossroads will be in audio shortly; Theo Holland, whose rendition of Resume Speed has been getting such a good reception, has finished narrating the novel, and it should be on sale any day now.)

Speaking of Four Lives at the Crossroads, it’s priced a dollar higher than the other Classic Erotica titles—not because it’s a crime novel as well as an erotic thriller, but simply because it’s a little longer and thus costs a little more to produce. But, because it lists at $10.99 instead of $9.99, Amazon has discounted it to $7.75—which makes it $2.24 cheaper than its fellows, which don’t get discounted. This doesn’t make an abundance of sense to me, but if you’d like to have  the book, now’s probably the time to grab it.

There’s more, but I don’t have the heart for it. I’m going away for a couple of weeks, and maybe I’ll have something written by the time I return, and maybe I won’t, and either way is fine with me. By then no doubt some new atrocities will have shoved the most recent one off the front pages, and perhaps out of our minds as well.

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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