Actress free downloads

Just a quick note to thank anyone who downloaded for free my contemporary novel, Actress, during the last week. In total there were 4613 downloads of the book between 15th - 19th August, which is one of the more successful freebie promotions I've done. Getting the promotion on Pixel of Ink had a good deal to do with that, as it contributed to 2296 downloads on the day the book was promoted on that site.

Now to see whether this has any knock-on effects on sales of other books, which is the point of it all. If you're interested, the book is now available for £1.49 from Amazon UK, $2.99 from Amazon US, and Euros 2.60 in Europe. 

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The Strange Girl, which is the next book in my Sam Dyke Investigations series is now entering its final phase of writing. There's about a third of the book left to complete. I think it should be ready, rewritten and proofread in about a month. There, I've not really put any pressure on myself at all ... 

German mysteries

The Dark Meadow is by a writer new to me, Andrea Maria Schenkel. She comes trailing plaudits as the first writer to win Germany's Crime Prize two years running and with her books translated into over twenty languages.

Schenkel seems to have developed a much-admired style that is minimalist and bleak, unfolding her stories in short chapters, each from the perspective of a different character, including the victim. The Dark Meadow, in a nicely-produced edition from Quercus, tells the grim story of a young single mother who returns to her family home having failed to find a life for herself beyond the village limits. It's 1947 and life is hard for a young woman with a child and living with parents who struggle to feed themselves, never mind another two mouths. The tale revolves around what happens to her, her parents and the various subsidiary characters who are witness to, or involved in, the murder itself.

Eee, book covers!

I've had a lot of fun lately designing book covers, both for myself and for others. The latest was for my good friend Jochem Vandersteen's latest hard-boiled book, the first in his Vance Custer series and soon to be published. Here's a preview of the cover:

The mastery of James Lee Burke

I've said many times before that James Lee Burke is probably the finest writer working in America today. His latest book, Wayfaring Stranger, is not going to dissuade me from that opinion.

Burke has had two strands to his fictional world - one of them involves the one-time police officer and private detective, Dave Robicheaux, who has featured in the majority of his novels over the last 30 or so years. The other strand plays with the fictional Holland family - apparently a meditation on Burke's own family, the Hollans. He has gone backwards and forwards in time with this family, and in Wayfaring Stranger we alight just before, during and after the Second World War.

Wendel Holland lives with his slightly detached mother and his grandfather (the hero of an earlier Burke novel), and at some point in the early 1930s has a run-in with Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, a meeting which colours and illuminates his adult years.