A holiday gift to you from me…
Let me start with the blurb for the new Esther Brookstone novel, Defanging the Red Dragon :
Esther Brookstone, ex-MI6 spy and ex-Scotland Yard Inspector in the Art and Antiques Division, and her husband, Bastiann van Coevorden, ex-Interpol agent, along with NYPD homicide detective Rolando Castilblanco and his wife, TV reporter Pam Stuart, become embroiled in geopolitical intrigue as the West tries to thwart a plan China has for stealing its nuclear submarine secrets. Taking place mostly in the US and UK, this suspenseful story has multiple twists and turns and is also the tale of two cities, New York and London, and the bustling life found in both, from the rich and powerful to the most scurrilous criminal elements.
I should add that this all takes place around the holidays sometime im the future—no jolly old elf in a sleigh with his ho-ho-hos in this novel, though, just solid mystery, thrills, and suspense that tie together two of my major series, the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco” series and the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective:” series, in a nice, big bow just for you.
I hope this is a holiday gift you will enjoy. You’ll find the novel in the list among my other free PDFs. I had a little problem making it available. Microsoft had decided to eliminate one of my options that allowed readers to download these PDFs: The OneDrive sharing option is no longer available. (Big Tech strikes again!) Thankfully, I don’t need OneDrive, so good riddance. I have found a work-around (thank you, WordPress!). You only have to click on the title to bring it up in a PDF viewer (at least on my PC laptop; who knows what happens with Apples and smart phones?)—use the download button if you want to have a permanent copy (for your e-reader, for example). (This works for all the older PDFs as well—just remember to hit the back arrow in the PDF viewer to return to the website.) If this doesn’t work for you, you still have the option to email me using my contact page and list the free PDFs you want me to send to you.
Readers of the books in both series know they’re related. Brookstone and her husband van Coevorden have cameos in the first series, and Chen and Castilblanco have some in the second. Many readers are also TV viewers and surely have noticed that crossover series have become more prevalent. I don’t know where scriptwriters got that idea. Maybe from wanting to turn an hour’s drama (really forty minutes or so if you subtract out time for the ads) into something like a full-length movie? It occurred to me that no one had done that for two series.
In a sense, I suppose my “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy” and A. B. Carolan’s first three sci-fi mysteries for young adults have the same relationship as the two named above, but what they have in common, my sci-fi universe, is a setting, not characters. TV crossovers feature characters, in addition to settings. I wanted to experiment with both.
Why not publish this novel normally, with Draft2Digital, for example? The answer is simple: I wanted to make it free, so why bother publishing normally? I already had set up a mechanism for readers to access free fiction, after all (until Microsoft forced me to find that work-around!). And many authors make the first books in a series free. I’ve stood that on its head and made the last one in both series (for now) free! The motivation is the same: Motivate readers who might be interested in the other books!
It wasn’t easy to put all four detectives in one novel. I think I pulled it off, though. If you agree or disagree, let me know. By the way, the subtitle is A Brookstone-Castilblanco Holiday Adventure in order to recognize the principal detectives and indicate that the series were joined…for at least this one time! Each series might go its separate way again later.
Happy holidays!
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Comments are always welcome!
Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
