Chapter 6
Wednesday, August 6, 2025
Tuesday, August 5, 2025
Sunday, August 3, 2025
Saturday, August 2, 2025
Wednesday, July 30, 2025
Monday, July 28, 2025
Friday, July 25, 2025
Wednesday, May 14, 2025
Introduction to my Morris Brick crime thrillers
When Michaela Hamilton approached me about writing a
serial killer series for Kensington Books, I used John Lutz’s brilliant Frank
Quinn series as inspiration for what would become my Morris Brick series. What
particularly drew me to the Frank Quinn books was the clever plotting, how Lutz
used chapters to flash back to the killer’s earlier life to explore the
killer’s evolution, the way the team of investigators working with Frank were
an extended family complete with sniping, jibes, and true caring, and how Lutz
made the victims flesh and blood instead of cardboard cutouts so we’d care
about them and dread what would be happening.
I named my detective Morris after a favorite uncle,
and I gave him the name Brick, because like my uncle, my detective would have a
short, compact body, in short, “built like a brick.” The Frank Quinn series
takes place in NYC whereas my Morris Brick series takes place in Los Angeles,
and not just so Morris and Frank Quinn wouldn’t compete to catch the same perpetrators!
Hollywood and the drive for fame (or infamy) are an integral part of this
series. At heart, I’m a crime fiction writer, and these books, particularly The
People We Kill, The Lives We Take, and The Pain We Bring are
filled with criminal activity and its consequences.
Now that I have the rights back for this series, I’m
publishing the books under my own name instead of the Jacob Stone pseudonym,
with the titles I had originally wanted, and with cover art that I feel better
captures the dark nature of these books. While I’m not promising now that there
will be more Morris Brick full-length novels in the future, several Morris
Brick short stories have been published in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine,
and I do expect to write more of these.
All five books will be released June 10th as Kindle books and are available now for preorder.
Saturday, May 10, 2025
crime thriller series available for preorder
Kensington originally published these books using a "Jacob Stone" pseudonym. I have the e-book rights back, and all five books in the series are now available for preorder.
Wednesday, March 19, 2025
Introduction for Buxton and Other Stories
The Introduction for my new short story collection Buxton and Other Stories:
One of the
definitions Merriam-Webster gives for fantastic is ‘conceived or seemingly
conceived by unrestrained fancy.’ Another is ‘so extreme as to challenge
belief.’ Since all the stories in this collection fit either of those
definitions, or at least graze them, I considered calling this collection The
Fantastics. But there's a double problem with that: First, there’s the 1960
play The Fantasticks, which could cause some confusion, and second, Merriam-Webster
also gives a third possible definition of ‘excellent, superlative’, and that
might convey more than a whiff of conceit.
Since
my first short story collection was titled 21 Tales, and there are twenty
stories in this collection, I briefly considered the title Almost 21 More
Tales. But the stories in this collection are very different from my earlier
noir stories in that first collection.
While
these stories run the gamut from science fiction to horror to mystery,
relationships are at the core of most of them—whether it’s the relationship
between a husband and wife, a couple which have just started dating, two
partners, a baseball player on his last legs and his parents, or a reporter and
the truth.