Ready for dogs and drinks?
Out now most everywhere: Canines & Cocktails, which gives you the happy-ever-after for Atticus you’ve been waiting for! And besides Oberon and Starbuck, it also gives you adventures featuring Gumball the golden retriever and Peach Pit the pit bull!
Oberon the Irish wolfhound and his Boston terrier buddy, Starbuck, not only witness humans waste perfectly good sausage, but also a sneaky murder committed right before their eyes in THE CHARTREUSE CHANTEUSE by Kevin Hearne. Justice demands that someone pay for both crimes, and together with their Druid, Atticus O'Sullivan, and D.I. Rose Badgely of the Launceston police, they'll show the dastardly villain they messed with the wrong good dogs.
My self-published stuff like this is now available on Kobo and also Thalia in Germany, Vivlio in France, and some other platforms around the world. Yay! That’s progress, because I wasn’t on those platforms before! But here’s the big caveat: It’s no longer available on Amazon. Because Amazon, for some reason, has decided I’m not real and shut down my account. I’m banned! For being me! Obviously I’m appealing and hope they’ll see reason. I’ve given them proof and promised to provide more if they want, but so far I’m not getting any communication from them. It’s immensely frustrating because the audiobook is ready to go too, but we can’t publish it without the ebook on Amazon. If this annoys you at all, I promise I am more annoyed by several degrees of magnitude. But in the meantime, if you’d like to read it on another platform or in print, you can do that! (And ironically the print is available on Amazon because that’s not handled through the ebook account they shut down.)
Event Alert!
I’ll be signing copies of Canines & Cocktails at The Poisoned Pen in Scottsdale, AZ on Feb. 23 at 6 pm if you can be there—but if you can’t and you’d like a signed copy shipped to you, please give them a call ASAP to arrange it. Their number is 480 947 2974. They’ll also have me sign anything else you want, just ask!
Where I’m At
Currently I’m in Arizona, visiting my mom and taking pictures of birds. Mom’s turning 80 soon so I wanted to be here for that. But the paid issue of the newsletter with the new Oberon story coming out in a couple of weeks will include a gallery of stuff from my current visit. Wanna see a verdin? It’s the cutest little bird that is a species of penduline tit. (I swear I’m not making that up.) Verdins flit about trees and cacti looking for insects and spiders to eat. They have golden faces and little red epaulets on their shoulder.
Now ready to preorder
Folks, I’m super excited to share with you a sneak peek of THE HERMIT NEXT DOOR, which isn’t being announced to the public until next week. So if you want to preorder and get a low, low number on your signed and numbered limited edition, now’s your chance! It’s a science fiction novella that combines my typical humor with some hard-felt feelings, and it’ll be out in June. Here’s the lowdown:
Newly widowed and trying to cope with her grief, Winnie Mae Chisholm moves from Tennessee with her teenage son, Pax, to Oregon, hoping the change will let them both heal and move on. She’s warned when buying their new home that the next door neighbor, Mr. Fisher, is a famous recluse and no one has seen him in years, but that’s fine with her—she’s looking for quiet.
She’s not going to get it, however, because when Pax meets the neighbor, he discovers that the reason Mr. Fisher hides from the world is that he isn’t actually from this world. He’s been stranded for decades and he’s trying to get home, and he could really use some help.
Abruptly part of the best-kept secret on the planet, Winnie Mae and Pax have to protect Mr. Fisher from a nosy neighbor who would ruin his work and doom him to die among aliens, but they also have to ask themselves: How far would they go to escape their grief? Would another world be far enough?
Preorder your signed & numbered limited edition here:
Annnnd it’s time for book recommendations! I always give a link to Bookshop.org to help support small businesses, but of course you can look these titles up anywhere you like if you’re interested in them!
The Hexologists
The Hexologists, Iz and Warren Wilby, are quite accustomed to helping desperate clients with the bugbears of city life. Aided by hexes and a bag of charmed relics, the Wilbies have recovered children abducted by chimney-wraiths, removed infestations of barb-nosed incubi, and ventured into the Gray Plains of the Unmade to soothe a troubled ghost. Well-acquainted with the weird, they never shy away from a challenging case.
But when they are approached by the royal secretary and told the king pleads to be baked into a cake--going so far as to wedge himself inside a lit oven--the Wilbies soon find themselves embroiled in a mystery that could very well see the nation turned on its head. Their effort to expose a royal secret buried under forty years of lies brings them nose to nose with a violent anti-royalist gang, avaricious ghouls, alchemists who draw their power from a hell-like dimension, and a bookish dragon who only occasionally eats people.
Armed with a love toughened by adversity and a stick of chalk that can conjure light from the darkness, hope from the hopeless, Iz and Warren Wilby are ready for a case that will test every spell, skill, and odd magical artifact in their considerable bag of tricks.
The Warm Hands of Ghosts
During the Great War, a combat nurse searches for her brother, believed dead in the trenches despite eerie signs that suggest otherwise, in this hauntingly beautiful historical novel with a speculative twist, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Bear and the Nightingale.
January 1918. Laura Iven was a revered field nurse until she was wounded and discharged from the medical corps, leaving behind a brother still fighting in Flanders. Now home in Halifax, Canada, Laura receives word of Freddie’s death in combat, along with his personal effects—but something doesn’t make sense. Determined to uncover the truth, Laura returns to Belgium as a volunteer at a private hospital, where she soon hears whispers about haunted trenches and a strange hotelier whose wine gives soldiers the gift of oblivion. Could Freddie have escaped the battlefield, only to fall prey to something—or someone—else?
November 1917. Freddie Iven awakens after an explosion to find himself trapped in an overturned pillbox with a wounded enemy soldier, a German by the name of Hans Winter. Against all odds, the two form an alliance and succeed in clawing their way out. Unable to bear the thought of returning to the killing fields, especially on opposite sides, they take refuge with a mysterious man who seems to have the power to make the hellscape of the trenches disappear.
As shells rain down on Flanders and ghosts move among those yet living, Laura’s and Freddie’s deepest traumas are reawakened. Now they must decide whether their world is worth salvaging—or better left behind entirely.
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