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The Rainy City and Deviant Behavior will be offline for a day or two. Cinneli updated the covers and it takes a while for Amazon and Barnes and Noble to update.

Deviant Behavior cover by Cinelli.

Now on Kindle and on Nook.

Four out of the first five Blacks are currently on line. My proofing person is stuck on Nervous Laughter,  the 3rd Black, and Cinelli has yet to come up with a cover concept for that title, so that’s next.

After this come the more mature Blacks, the ones I wish readers would start with. Readers never want to begin a series with the 5th or 6th title, but in this case, I would prefer they did, then go back and fill in the earlier stuff. But you know how that goes. If wishes were . . .

Coming slightly out of order in electronic book form, since this was the fourth Thomas Black and the third is still being professionally proofed, here is Fat Tuesday.

It is available at Amazon here and on the Barnes and Noble site for Nook here.

Fat Tuesday was the first bestseller in my quiver, racing up the Northwest paperback charts the summer it came out in paper from Ballantine Books.  The paperback version is slightly modified from the original hardback but only by about 1500 words. I did that myself. It was not in response to some monstrous editorial dictum. By and large, my editors have all been pretty good, if not excellent.

I invariably do a title search before using a title. When I researched “Fat Tuesday” it did not exist as a book title. I don’t want to put out a book with a tag that’s already been used a hundred times. Nine years after my Fat Tuesday came out, Sandra Brown brought out with a book titled Fat Tuesday.  It was mildly annoying but since titles are not copyright-able, I had no permanent claim to the words and knew it. The fact is, I was surprised somebody hadn’t used the title long before I did. It’s a great title. There are now several other books out with the same title. In those days I did my title searches at the public library using the huge most recent volumes of “Books in Print.” Now, of course, you google it.

As annoying as it was to have Sandra Brown—who sells much better than I ever have— come and take away some of my thunder, something good came out of it. Shortly after her book came out we sold the rights to Fat Tuesday to Italy, my first and only Italian sale. Generally, foreign rights to a title are not sold nine years after pub date. I had a wee suspicion somebody in Italy got the two authors mixed up and believed they were buying the title by Brown when they bought mine. I cashed the check anyway. A very small check. These new covers are being done by Cinelli.

Tell me what you think.

Next and coming soon: Deviant Behavior, which I consider the first of the modern Thomas Blacks.

Poverty Bay, as some of you have already noticed, is now for sale here on Kindle and nook.

When it came out Poverty Bay was nominated for an Edgar Award from Mystery Writers of America. Along with it’s predecessor, The Rainy City,  it was also nominated for a Shamus Award from the Private Eye Writers of America and won that year.  It was a glorious thing to have written two out of the five nominees for best paperback original that year. But then, glorious things are rare, which is why they are glorious. The series garnered five more nominations for Shamus awards.

The two boys in this story were inspired by a couple of twins I met when I was eleven. Clearly, they left an imprint, because I only knew them for one afternoon, yet twenty some odd years later I made them central characters in a novel. One thing I got in reader feedback on this one was that Kathy wasn’t in evidence as much as she had been in The Rainy City. People wanted to see Kathy with Thomas. In later books she plays a larger role. The hokey jokes were all used on my kids when they were growing up, but a number of adult readers have commented that they liked them, too. There’s nothing like a hokey joke.