WHAT ARE ROGER AND SUZANNE UP TO THESE DAYS?

            There are currently two Roger and Suzanne novels at the Work in Progress stage.   The first book, still untitled (but there’s a strong nominee for the honor), brings our two detectives to Alaska’s Denali National Park, a 6 million acre chunk of unspoiled wilderness capped by the highest mountain in North America.  If they’re going to leave South America, I reasoned, why not take them as far away as possible?  And, on top of that, Elaine and I had taken a vacation to Denali (and elsewhere in Alaska) a year or two ago in preparation for this book.

            The novel begins, as many of the Roger and Suzanne series does, with a brutal murder, this one in the National Park.  The victims, who we had met previously as supporting characters in “The Surreal Killer”, were close friends of one of our series regulars, Vincent Romero, Roger’s partner in his private detective agency in Los Angeles since “The Deadly Dog Show”.  Vincent asks Roger to investigate the death of his friends, and we‘re off for our usual mix of travel, tourism, and murder that are the trademarks of this mystery series.  The novel is complete, currently going through its third round of edits, and may be ready for publication as soon as the end of this month.   If anyone wants to volunteer to write a review for the book page on Amazon, I’ll be happy to send you a pre-publication copy to read as soon as the current round of edits (by Elaine and me) is complete.  Just e-mail me or message me on Facebook with your e-mail address if you’re interested. 

SOME OF THE DISADVANTAGES OF WRITING A MYSTERY SERIES

            Elaine was editing my newest work in progress when she suddenly asked, “Why did you have to name Roger and Suzanne’s son Robert?  Now we have to struggle with remembering a murder victim named Roberta Roberts and a boy named Robert Bowman in the same novel.  It’s confusing!”

I THINK THAT I SHALL NEVER SEE, A WEVIEW AS PWETTY AS A TWEE

            I came across a review of “The Surreal Killer” on the book’s Amazon UK site (only £1.93 for the novel).   The reviewer thought the book was “too twee” for them.  I think this is one of those classic cases of Americans and British being separated by a common language.  At least for me it was a new word, which sent me quickly to the nearest dictionary.

            Before I share the definition with you, a word about the novel is in order here, I think.  The storyline is about a serial killer who murders in a particularly brutal fashion with a machete.  The murderer kills ten victims, with two of the killings described in detail in the novel.  Several other killings by others are mentioned in one place or another in the book, and another killing is described as it occurs.  All in all, an impressive body count I thought.

            “Twee” means excessively cute or delicate.  That’s an interesting way to describe multiple murder and dismemberment.  I find it difficult to imagine my hard-boiled mysteries as being delicate.  But that’s the fun of being a reader---in the end the book is whatever you the reader want it to be. 

THE NEWEST REVIEW OF THE BODY IN THE BED.

Great review.   5.0 out of 5 stars

Fast paced novella,

By 

Loves All Things Books (Oklahoma)

This review is from the Amazon book page:

The Body in the Bed (South American Mystery Series) (Kindle Edition)

I received The Body in the Bed by the author for an honest review. This is a short read, a print length of about 68 pages. The reader doesn't have to read the past Mystery novels written about Roger and Suzanne to read this one. Though I fully recommend you read those too if this one sparks your interest.

Roger and Suzanne head back to Montevideo to celebrate their friend's promotion in the police force. When they arrive they find a body in the bed. Seems like every time they visit this country there's a new mystery to solve.

I cannot wait to start reading the other novels by Jerold Last. Two thumbs up for The Body in the Bed!

A Historical Discovery

Where does the next new book idea come from?  In this case I can give us a very simple and precise answer.  After a lot of years it was time to paint the inside of our house again. That in turn was an excuse (necessity?) to reorganize messy desks and closets and peek into various cracks and crevices. Even (shudder!) to throw away a lot of old junk. But we unearthed a few lost treasures, too. One of them was Elaine's journal from our trip to Quito, Guayaquil, and The Galápagos Islands several years ago. This little bit of hidden treasure ensures that somewhere on the to-do list is a visit to the Galápagos Islands and a body or two for Roger and Suzanne to discover among the Booby Birds and the tortoises. I've also been meaning to re-read Darwin's classic treatise, "Origin of Species", so it might be an excuse to sprinkle a bit of biology into a novel. We'll see.

We met a few very interesting people on that trip. I assume that Roger and Suzanne will meet their fictional doppelgangers in this book to be (book in utero?). These characters should include the two sisters from San Francisco and the mysterious handsome Ecuadorian dude, Raul, who was trying so hard to pick them up (in the face of little or no resistance to the idea).  Raul had his big secret in real life.  Should that secret also transfer to his fictional doppelganger?  I strongly suspect that it will.  One of the low spots of that trip was the taxi drivers' strike in Quito where they closed down travel in the city by setting huge bonfires consisting of burning old tires on the main boulevards.   I don't know if I'll try to work that experience into the story.  One of the high spots of our trip was sitting next to an Ecuadorian Air Force General on the flight from Guayaquil to Baltra and learning about what the Air Force of a modern South American country just to the south of Colombia does.  I'm sure the general will make a guest appearance in the book.  He'll probably get a good sized chunk of the Baltra chapter to himself.

We talked about new technology and writing blog entries more or less spontaneously in an earlier post.  Here's a great example of it.  I have a 1.5 hour train ride and my iPad.  As I sit here now on the Amtrak train traveling from Davis to Oakland, CA for a meeting, I've been thinking about this book, for which I just started writing some scenes. To my right, through the train window, is a beautiful view of the north end of San Francisco Bay.  Next stop is Martinez if you know the route.  Or even if you don't.  My thoughts are on this book in utero. Will this be a romantic getaway just for Roger and Suzanne or should Robert and Bruce be invited along for the trip? Should Eduardo Gomez fly over from Paraguay to meet them or will he be superfluous this time? How about Vincent Romero, Roger's new partner in his detective agency? Decisions, decisions, decisions!

The Magic of KDP

It's completely counter-intuitive that Amazon's KDP model of giving away free books will stimulate sales of the same book. Why would anybody want to buy a book that they could have downloaded free the day before? If it's in the KDP program, won't it be available free some time in the future if the would-be buyer is just patient enough to wait?

My son Michael suggested that I try two consecutive book giveaways starting on Christmas Day and ending on January 3, 2013, ten days later. All of those brand new Kindle readers who got them for Christmas presents needed downloaded books to read, so this made sense, at least to me. I had previously had free book giveaways for two of my novels in KDP, "The Surreal Killer", a full-length novel, which was very successful, and a novelette, "The Body in the Parking Structure", which was not very successful in stimulating new sales. But I learned a few lessons along the way. They were lessons everybody was already saying on Facebook, Goodreads, and Kindle Forums. Short forms of books---novellas, novelettes, and short stories---aren't as popular as full-length novels even if they are free.   People seem to want more pages for their money, even if the total cost is $0.00.  And nobody wants to download any book, free or at full price, unless it has a lot of positive reviews.  And maybe a catchy cover too, but this isn't quite as clear to me yet.

"The Surreal Killer" giveaway lasted five days, from 12/25-12/29/12.  In the USA more than 1,150 free copies were downloaded during this period.  Interestingly, Amazon UK readers almost matched this performance by downloading 995 copies of the book.

The performance of the novelette, "The Body in the Parking Structure" was different.  In the USA there were more than 825 downloads of the freebie between 12/30-12/31/12, with a little over 700 more taken in the first three days of January.  There was much less interest in this free novelette on Amazon UK, where only 29 free copies were downloaded between 12/30-12/31/12 and 39 more for the 3 days in January.

But then came the magic:  More than a 1.5 books a day (thus far) were either sold or were borrowed via Prime, mainly "The Surreal Killer" despite the more than 2,000 free downloads the preceding month.  Total sales/borrows were almost exactly equally distributed between Amazon.com in the USA and Amazon UK.  The January sales included all six of my book titles for sale on Amazon, but "The Surreal Killer" led the pack, with "The Body in the Parking Structure" comfortably in second place in the USA, but not in the the UK where "The Ambivalent Corpse" followed "The Surreal Killer" in sales.

What lessons are to be learned from this simple, but uncontrolled, experiment?  What do you think, readers?

A New Review of The Body in the Parking Structure

This review is from Amazon: The Body in the Parking Structure (Kindle Edition) 4 Stars

"This is a short, fast paced read that has all the elements of a detective series with a notable shortage of detail.
This may sound like a negative but it is not.
This turned out to be a fun read. All the necessary information is contained herein but all those details that are used to drag out a story and flesh it out was absent.
Making it a really easy and nice read.
None of the essential information is missing.
The characters are fluffed out enough for the reader to connect to them though not so fluffed that they become THAT family member, you know the one!
The family member where you know every single breath taken.
This is a nice read and worth it's 4 * review rating."

I believe this is the first review of this book originating in the Southern Hemisphere (South Africa).  The 4-star rating overall is based upon a total of 9 reviews thus far.

It was fun experimenting with this short form mystery that takes place in Los Angeles rather than the much more descriptive style I used in my novels set in various South American locales.  It's quite amazing to me as an author how different the task becomes when you need to have a plot and a conclusion within some arbitrary constraint of total book length.

The Second Review of "The Body in the Bed"

A second review, also 4-stars, has been posted on the Amazon page for this fast paced and suspenseful whodunit novella.  This story is my personal favorite among the novellas and novelettes I've written thus far and I recommend it highly to all of you who enjoyed the preceding novels, The Surreal Killer and The Ambivalent Corpse.   I currently have parts of the next three books in this series under construction, so I can tell you that The Body in the Bed will be Roger and Suzanne's last visit to Montevideo for a while.

"The fifth book concerning married sleuth's Roger and Suzanne Bowman has them returning to Montevideo, Uruguay to celebrate the promotion of their good friend, Martin Gonzales to Chief of Detectives. When they check into their motel room the tension amps up when they discover an old acquaintance, Dr. Bernardo Colletti waiting for them - dead, with his throat viciously cut. After the duo becomes suspicious of three police captains being complicit in the murder, they team up with Gonzales to investigate the three different, but all dirty cops. Things go from bad to worse when they find out Colletti's assassin has an Iranian connection, enlisting the help of old friend Eduardo Gomez, who works with Mossad, to help put the pieces together.

As usual, Mr. Last has combined international intrigue, a far reaching criminal element, and the culinary wonders of Uruguay to create another volume of the intrepid husband and wife detective team. It's a novella that moves at a breakneck speed, serves up tasty dialogue, and a generous portion of the Latin American culture."

If you're looking for the perfect gift for that friend who likes to read mysteries you can't beat this novella, which you can purchase for less than $2.00 per gift copy with a single click from Amazon.  Treat yourself to a copy, too.

The Next Big Thing

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My friend Pat Bertram invited me to participate in this blog chain. 

The idea of this ongoing blog chain, called "The Next Big Thing," is to answer 10 questions about my current Work In Progress, and in turn "tag" 5 other writers who will write posts on their blogs. I thought this might be a good excuse to tell you about the next novel featuring Roger and Suzanne; this time they'll be investigating crimes closer to home rather than in South America.  The fun part for me in this work in progress is trying to integrate my love of mysteries with my (and my wife's) love of German Shorthaired Pointers.  I'm also toying with the idea of a future trivia question on this blog asking how many references readers can find to German Shorthaired Pointer dogs in the previous books in the Roger and Suzanne series.  I can think of several.

What is your working title of your book?  "The Deadly Dog Show"

Where did the idea come from for the book?   My wife, who has been urging me for at least a year to get Roger and Suzanne to buy a dog, to go to dog shows, and to solve the killing of an unloved dog show judge.  The suggestion was recently reinforced by a reader of a short story I wrote about a P.I. and a dog who asked me on Facebook to write a Roger and Suzanne novel with a dog-based theme.

What genre does your book fall under?   Hard-boiled mystery

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?  I think I see Kristanna Loken as Suzanne---a tall, blond, and athletic woman of 30-ish.  If you are asking WHO at this point, look her up on Google or The IMDB (try the name or the SyFy Channel series, "Painkiller Jane").  Roger---how about Aaron Eckhart?  They'd make a nice couple.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?   It's too soon to know, but let's try this one:  Roger and Suzanne

The first review of The Body in the Bed

"The Body in the Bed", a suspenseful whodunit novella, brings Roger and Suzanne back to Montevideo, Uruguay where another bloody murder needs to be solved.   One reviewer says:   

"Tightly plotted novella that will please followers of the Roger and Suzanne series, as an addition to the existing novels in the series. I enjoyed this *interesting weekend* with characters I plan to meet again.  Nice stairstep storyline that leads logically from beginning to end with a very good feel for the people and the country as usual. This has always been one of the major attractions of this series for me and was not lacking in this short story. I also enjoyed the suggestion of what I suspect may be a bit of tongue-in-cheek humor on the part of the author."

If you're looking for the perfect Holiday Season gift for that friend who likes to read mysteries, you can't beat this novella, which you can purchase for less than $2.00 per gift copy with a single click from Amazon.  Treat yourself to a copy, too.

The Iranian Connection

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The Uruguayan economy, as was the Argentine, was mainly based on beef, leather, and dairy products for almost two centuries.  Before commercial scale freezing and shipping of beef and beef by-products after World War II created competition from Australia and New Zealand, corned beef, canned beef, dried beef, and leather goods from Uruguay were shipped to Europe, and exported beef products were the source of enough wealth that the Uruguayans had one of the highest per capita incomes in the entire world.   They used this money to build a functional economy that featured free universal health care, free education through college and post-graduate (law, medicine, etc.) professional training for all who wanted it, and a more than adequate system of Social Security for the elderly.

Post-World War II Europe needed meat it couldn't produce in war-ravaged countries, and imported it in large amounts from the USA and South America.  But with competition from many other countries that had cheap land for ranching and with European farm recovery, the bottom fell out of the beef export market for Uruguay, and they became a poor country within a single generation.  They suddenly had a very high cost of living due to large Social Security (for the elderly and disabled) and free universal healthcare systems for an aging population.  Only now are they beginning to recover economically from their former total dependence on the beef industry, and they still are dependent on high quality free range-grown beef as an export item. 

The Body in the Bed

The next entry in the Roger and Suzanne South American mystery series is a new novella, The Body in the Bed" (18,000+  words), which was just uploaded a few minutes ago to Amazon.  In this new book, Roger and Suzanne are back in Montevideo to attend a festive dinner honoring their friend Martin Gonzalez's promotion to police captain.  But, there's a surprise guest waiting for them when they get to their hotel room (hint:  that is where the title of the novella comes from).  Roger and Suzanne are the lead suspects in a murder, their allies on the police forces of Uruguay and Paraguay may be the targets of a conspiracy, and nobody can be trusted.  This fast paced, action filled, novella should satisfy readers of the previous books in the series as we renew acquaintances with old friends and enemies, and say farewell to one of them.  Readers new to the series can enjoy this book as a stand-alone introduction to the region and to the series characters, while series veterans should enjoy getting reacquainted with several characters from The Ambivalent Corpse and some of the later stories.  I've posted a link to the new book in the right hand column on this page.  Just click on the image of the book title, which will take you directly to the book page on Amazon Kindle.  

I like this little story a lot---as you can read in the new accompanying blog entry ("The Iranian Connection"), it has a solidly researched background in reality as the basic premise for the fictional story.

Going To The Dogs

At Elaine's (my wife's) urging, I'm trying to bring her hobby of dog breeding, which we've discussed here before in some of my earlier posts, into Roger and Suzanne's fictional world of mysteries and whodunits.  There are two noteworthy efforts to tell you about thus far:

(1) For Roger and Suzanne Trivia buffs we can pose the following questions and the source of the answers.  What was Roger Bowman's first case as a P.I.?  What very unusual fee was he paid?  Who was his most unusual client ever?  The answers are in a new 2,000-word short story, "The Dog with No Name", available free on Erika Szabo's blog at http://www.erikamszabo.com.  Go on over and take a look.  Enjoy the story.  It's a little bit different than my usual style.

(2) Currently under construction is a new book, tentatively entitled "The Deadly Dogshow".  I can promise that no dogs will be killed or injured to advance the plot, but can't make any such promises with regards to the human characters.  In fact I can almost certainly promise that one or more humans will be killed in this story.  Suzanne and Roger have bought a dog (Juliet, a German Shorthaired Pointer, of course).  Bruce, among his many other talents, turns out to be a skilled dog trainer and handler so will be a featured player in all doggie subplots from here on.  Robert is getting old enough to help Bruce train the dog, so will also get more toner than he used to in these stories.  For the old-timers here:  remember when that used to be ink? 

There are also bit and pieces of several other short stories and one or two novels being worked on.  Current plans for the next South American book will take our characters to The Galapagos Islands to mix biology and murder in one of the most special places in the world, located off the coast of Ecuador.  They will also get a chance to visit Alaska to investigate a homicidal bear.

Now, if I can only find the time to write all of these stories........