Now on sale for a limited time only at $2.99 for the e-book.

The Kindle version can be purchased here.

The Nook version at Barnes and Noble can be purchased here.

The Vanishing Smile is now on sale for only $.99 till the end of May. Now you can get all three of the books in the Birchfield trilogy for just $.99 each, but only for another week.

The Vanishing Smile for Kindle at Amazon can be purchased here.

On Nook at Barnes and Noble here.

These three books should be read in order, the only Thomas Blacks I feel should be read in order. If you read them and like them, please post a review. Thank you.

Last weekend Mystery Writers of America, Northwest branch, gave me the Willo Award for lifetime achievement. This was only the fourth time the award was bestowed and I’m very grateful to the board of Mystery Writers for selecting me. It was really a great honor.

The award is named after the late Willo Davis Roberts, who was a major force in young adult literature and a two-time winner of the Edgar for best mystery. Willo was always an inspiration to other writers and as free and candid with her advice as anybody I’ve ever met. I vividly remember attending Mystery Writers monthly dinners back when I had only two books published, trying to get a spot near her so I could glean pearls of wisdom during the meal. And the pearls came with frequency, unguarded, honest, helpful and insightful. Writing is a business and nobody knew that better than Willo. Unfortunately, I rarely sat next to her because everybody else in the room was thinking the same thing. Get next to Willo. Learn something that will change my career.

Writing is a tough gig even when you’re wildly successful, as Willo was, and it was always amazing to me that she could be so generous with her time and thoughts. If I could be half the inspiration to other writers she was, I would be happy.

It’s finally here in electronic form. The first of my personal three favorite Thomas Black mysteries.

It’s available for Nook here.

And for Kindle on Amazon here.

Yellow Dog Party is the first in a trilogy. The other books in that trilogy are The Portland Laugher and The Vanishing Smile.  The books are about desire, jealousy and relationships between men and women and in particular, between Thomas Black and Kathy Birchfield.

In Yellow Dog Party Thomas Black is asked to find the dreamgirls of four different bachelors. Each man has reached a pinnacle of success in his life, each is lonely, and each believes a woman he’s been dreaming of can fill a hole in his life. One is a cheerleader from the guy’s high school, one a woman with season tickets to the Mariner’s, same as him, etcetera. In this book Thomas and Kathy are getting closer and farther apart at the same time. Kathy’s got a boyfriend.

While I was doing signings for this book, or maybe it was the next one in the series, an alert reader, a researcher for one of our two local newspapers at the time, told me she liked the book, but why hadn’t I written about four women looking for men from their past. Of course, she said, they wouldn’t be looking for love. They would be looking to get even. Unwittingly, or maybe it was wittingly, she gave me the plot for the third book in the series, The Vanishing Smile.  These really are my three favorites in the Thomas Black series, both for how they work as individual books and for how they compliment each other in both theme and storyline.

If you haven’t already read it, enjoy Yellow Dog Party.

Another cover by Cinelli.

Recently in a forum for writers I read a post from somebody bemoaning the fact that her British sales had plummeted to nothing. She attributed this to the one review the book received in Britain, an on-line review from a purported reader. In the review the critic admitted they hadn’t  read the book. That didn’t stop them from rating it with one star. And that one-star brought UK sales to a halt.

It is my understanding that Amazon has taken measures to make sure authors don’t blitz their own books with favorable reviews by checking out the IP address of review writers and blocking more than one review from the same IP listing. They are protecting the readers from unscrupulous authors but who’s protecting the authors from unscrupulous or just unthinking readers?

For my part I’ve received more than one on-line review  from readers who admitted they hadn’t read the book. One woman gave one of my books a one-star review based on the price, something I had no power over since it was decided by my New York publisher’s marketing department. It seemed to her that an electronic book should be a little less expensive. She hadn’t read the book. She hadn’t even bought it. She said as much in her review. Later, she posted a note, a comment on her own review, saying she finally read the book in question and loved it. The one-star rating still stands. Another “critic” wrote he liked all my other books, a lot, but didn’t care for the particular one he was reviewing. It was the only novel of mine he didn’t like and the only one he bothered to review. Gee, thanks.

If you want to do a favor for an author, if you want to see more work from an author, write a favorable review after reading one of their tomes. This doesn’t have to take a lot of time. Just a few minutes.  If you review one of my books, I will definitely read it. If you want an answer from this author, include a copy of the review in an e-mail to me and I’d be glad to correspond. I answer all of my e-mail within a week, sometimes within the hour. Cheers.