AN XMAS GIFT FOR ALL MY READERS

The 4th Sherlock Holmes in the 21st Century is free on Kindle for today, Xmas Day, and Dec 26th (Boxing Day in the UK). It contains 3 stories. In 'Vermilion Moon,' Holmes finds himself mired among the fleshpots of Amsterdam. In 'A Ghost in Tokyo,' Holmes not only visits Japan but meets his intellectual match in the diminutive female form of Inspector Haruko Minoshi. And in 'Flight of Fantasy,' heading back from the Orient, Holmes is trapped aboard a stricken jetliner with no obvious way off.

You can find out more and get your free ebook here.

TWO MORE ON KOBO

The fourth novel in the Raine's Landing supernatural adventure series -- Deadly Violet -- and my popular story The Rose Cottage are both now available on Kobo. Find out more about them here.

JOEL LANE - 1963 to 2013

Photo copyright (c) Peter Coleburn.

The British Fantasy Society's Xmas get-together is usually a happy event, a chance to meet up with people from all over this rainy isle and catch up with their news. And this year's was going fine until chairman Peter Coleburn got up with a mic to make some announcements. I was sitting over in a corner with some friends, and only picked up two words of the first one: 'Joel' and 'died.' And I only know one person called Joel, and so I turned to my friends, deeply shocked, to find out the awful news.

That terrific writer Joel Lane had passed away in his sleep the previous month.

I first met Joel about a decade back at a British Fantasycon in Walsall, and we immediately hit it off so well that we ate out that evening and talked for hours. It was the same at several events after that. I never saw him outside the convention circuit -- he lived in Birmingham, I live in London, and there were few other chances for our paths to cross. But we were like-minded in our approach to writing, and Joel was a terrific guy to be around, rather shy and modest on the outside, but deeply clever and perceptive, kind, humane, and with an effervescent sense of humor when you got to really know him.

And he was a top notch author into the bargain. He wrote two mainstream novels, but he's surely best-known for his urban dark fantasy tales, several collections of which won or were shortlisted for awards. He was never any purveyor of schlock, he was a serious artist. And he'd just the previous month pulled down a World Fantasy Award for Where Furnaces Burn.

He edited too. I'm very proud that he included one of my short stories in he and Allyson Bird's 2010 anthology Never Again: Weird Fiction Against Racism and Fascism. And I thought so highly of the guy that -- months before I learned of his passing -- I dedicated my most recent novel to him.

I doubt that he believed in any afterlife. And so I hope, just recently, he's had a very nice surprise. He was a friend I won't be seeing at conventions any more. That hurts.

A SMILE COSTS NOTHING

And here's another free pre-Xmas giveaway. My humorous modern-day fantasy story 'Real Life' -- based, as you ought to be able to tell from the cover, in downtown Manhattan -- is free on Kindle all today. Get your copy here.

Enjoy!

SHERLOCK HOLMES BREAKS FREE

The third volume of my modern-day Sherlock Holmes supernatural mysteries is absolutely free on Amazon today. Here's the 'back cover' material:

Sherlock Holmes didn’t die when he plunged down the Reichenbach Falls. He turned out to be unkillable, and is still with us to this very day, travelling the world and delving into all its most confounding cases. But these are not merely ordinary crimes … supernatural forces are at work. In “The Hunters and the Hunted” Holmes is confronted with a deadly insect swarm in Kenya … but what is directing the creatures toward their victims? In “Above the Boulevards” a powerful and mysterious vigilante is protecting women on the streets of Paris. And in “The Crimewave” Holmes is called back urgently to his beloved native London. And he no longer has Watson by his side … so here’s your chance to make the journey with him.

You can get your copy right HERE.

A ZOMBIE REBORN!

“Out at the edge of the ice, something dark appeared, rising from the water and then closing downwards on the frozen surface. I squinted. And was sure it was a human arm.”

David and Bobby are a pair of twin brothers, both in love with the same woman. But on a trip to Finland, the matter gets resolved in the worst way imaginable – Bobby drowns in the icy waters just outside Helsinki. Two years later, David is still in that city and living with Krista, when a supposed magic artifact comes into their possession. And when David makes a wish upon it, dark things from the past begin resurfacing. Things like old-time sins and misdeeds. Like guilt and awful memories. And things like Bobby himself, two years drowned and trapped under the ice ... but still here with us.

My zombie novel Under the Ice first appeared as a collector's hardback from Sarob Press back in 2005. It had long been out of print when I published it again myself as an ebook on Kindle at the start of this decade, where it quickly became my best-selling title. And now it's available from Samhain Publishing as a smart new ebook edition. Here's its first (rave) review:

“Every now and then you’ll stumble upon a low-key piece of work that totally and completely stuns you. Under the Ice is a stellar tale ... brilliant, well thought out and perfectly delivered by Tony Richards, who understands the balance that must be upheld between fantasy and reality. The story boasts numerous layers, fine character examination and a final curveball that’s going to leave readers pleased. Whether you opt to label this one a revenge tale, a ghost story or a zombie tale matters not. It’s original, creative, and somehow successfully blends all of the aforementioned classifications, wrapping a plethora of ideas into one. This is an excellent read, and you want to get your hands on it as soon as possible!” – Horror Novel Reviews. 

You can read the complete review here.

Under the Ice is available directly from Samhain Publishing, or from Amazon, B&N Nook, Kobo and a variety of other outlets. 

THREE 4 FREE

The last in my 3 collections of horror tales is free on Amazon Kindle for the whole of today and Sunday. Like its two sister books, The Books of Shadow: Volume III only contains stories that have previously seen print, and includes fiction from Weird Tales, Midnight Street, and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine.

ALL RIGHT NOW

I'm very fond of letting you know when things are going well, aren't I? And so it's only fair that I cop to it as well when I occasionally mess up.

I was having at look at the template documents for  my triple collection of horror stories on Kindle -- THE BOOKS OF SHADOW -- a few days back and realized that I'd let a formatting mistake slip through. And that's a shame, because these three books represent the best of my dark fiction over more than 30 years, the very oldest in the series being 'Headlamps' from The 14th Fontana Book of Great Horror Stories back in 1981.

And so I promptly sat down and fixed the error. All three books are now properly formatted, and have brand new linked tables of content and publication info about every story.

GOOD VIBRATIONS

Favorable reactions continue to roll in for my newest novel TROPIC OF DARKNESS (Simon & Schuster/Pocket Star).

Night Owl Reviews says: "Tropic of Darkness in a really good thriller."

While  the Dew on the Kudzu literary blog adds: "Filled with Voodoo, 200 year old curses, beautiful ghosts and the nightclubs of Havana, the story sucks you in."

And I learned just yesterday that both TROPIC and my short story 'The Hunting Party' (Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, October) have won nominations for Mystery Writers of America Edgar Awards.

A COUPLE OF NEW ROUTES INTO RAINE'S LANDING

My fourth Raine's Landing supernatural adventure/dark fantasy novel -- DEADLY VIOLET -- is now available on B&N Nook. Or, if you're inclined that way, you can pick it up on Smashwords too.

THE REAL THIN MAN

A weird coincidence, this. No sooner had I finished reading -- and loving -- Dashiell Hammett's The Dain Curse than a discussion sprang up about the guy on a site I regularly visit, The Book Corner on Kindleboards. And it's great to see ebook readers taking such an interest in the fellow, because Dash Hammett is something of a hero of mine. Not only was he a terrific writer, he was a fascinating individual into the bargain.

As has already been pointed out, he served in both wars, and is buried at Arlington as a result. According to his long-term on-off partner, the playwright Lillian Hellman (whose memoir Pentimento is well worth a look as well) army life quite suited his temperament. Unlike the vast majority of crime writers, Hammett actually was a professional private detective before he hit the typewriter, one of the top agents for Pinkerton's, so adept at his job that he once demonstrated to a reporter how to follow someone not from behind but from in front. Sheesh! He finally quit that job and took up writing when Pinkerton's started getting into strike-breaking, which went heavily against his principles.

He served time in jail during the McCarthy era for refusing to cooperate with HUAC. And such was the respect the man commanded that the prison guards didn't call him 'pinko' or suchlike, they called him 'sir.' And he wrote screenplays as well as novels and short stories, earning himself a small fortune in a bare couple of years.

If you want to know more about him, then I heavily recommend Shadow Man: the Life of Dashiell Hammett by Richard Layman. And if you ever find yourself in San Fran, you can go on a genuinely enjoyable Dashiell Hammett Tour. DH wasn't a perfect human being by any means, and would never claim to be so. But he was a far more interesting man than any other half a dozen writers you could put in the same room.

NORWEGIAN GOOD. LOCATION CHANGED.

I'm usually far more of a jazz fan than a folk music fan. But just last week, some friends of mine persuaded me to come and listen while Norwegian Hardanger fiddle virtuoso Annbjorg Lien and Swedish guitarist Roger Tallroth treated us to a straight ninety minutes of Scandinavian folk. It was staged as part of the London Jazz Festival, ironically enough. And they were brilliant, magical, carrying you away on ever-ascending spirals of song, rhythm, and melody. A spellbinding evening. Catch them if they ever come your way.

And to make it even better, it all took place at a venue that I've never visited before, a terrific arts center called King's Place on York Way, very nicely designed and laid out and with a cafe backing out onto a houseboat filled cutting of the Regent's Canal, so that the evening was memorably picturesque as well. I wish I'd taken my camera along, and shall next time. And all this in an area of London -- north of King's Cross station -- which had quite a nasty reputation not so long ago, a grubby red-light district and the scene of gang fights and some pretty notorious crimes. Some people believe that gentrification is a bad thing. I'm not one of them.

TICKET TO TERROR

My latest collection of short fiction -- my seventh -- is now available for preorder from Dark Renaissance Books. THE UNIVERSAL AND OTHER TERRORS has eleven stories and a novella, with fiction from Hitchcock's, The Black Book of Horror, Scheherazade and Midnight Street, and includes five brand-new stories -- Aegea, Under the Shroud, Covered Mirrors, The Visitors in Marvell Wood, and the title story -- that see their very first publication in this book.

As well as painting the cover, the terrific M. Wayne Miller had illustrated every individual story ... you can take a look at some of those on the art gallery of my website.

And here's the back cover material for the book:

What could be so bad about a golden Greek beach with scores of beautiful young people lying on it? Where could be the danger in a perfectly normal-looking southern English seaside town? Or an even more ordinary town out in the Nevada desert? An old, abandoned building on a rocky shore…what could be awful about that?
Discover the truth behind the origins of Abraham van Helsing. Find out how a decrepit old man continues to attract beautiful young women. Learn about the real link between crows and the Grim Reaper. Travel a few decades into the future and see a fresh and modern Africa…and the menace that still lurks there. Here are twelve new stories, five of them previously unpublished and unique to this collection, that will open your eyes to the hidden terrors in the world around us. Read them at your peril.

Praise for Tony Richards

“A hell of a writer, one of today’s masters of dark fiction.” Mario Guslandi, Horror World

 “Richards is a master at combining horror, fantasy and humor in a way that will mesmerize readers from cover to cover.” Rhomylly Forbes, Romantic Times Book Reviews

“The rest of us stand on the sidelines with eyes wide open at his audacity and wonder what he’ll do next.” Peter Tennant, Black Static


“…Richards creates something unique.” Clay Bye, Alternative Reads

THE UNIVERSAL is only available as a collector's edition at the moment, but a trade paperback edition will be along soon. You can find out more more it here.

TROPIC OF DARKNESS -- FIRST REVIEWS

The reviews for my new novel – TROPIC OF DARKNESS, a supernatural chiller from Schusters/Pocket (see my posting on this blog for 29^the September) – have started coming in.

The first review on Amazon gives it 5 stars.

The Monster Librarian says: “Tropic of Darkness is a well-crafted tale, and well worth reading.  I rate this work as Highly Recommended for adult readers.”

The Don d'Ammassa's Horror Reviews site says: “This is a rapidly paced story with supernatural incidents to add suspense along the way. The underlying mystery and the fast paced plot complement each other admirably.”

AlternativeWorlds concludes: “Tropic of Darkness is an exciting horror thriller.”

And Crossroad Reviews adds: “Last year I had started to expand on what I was reading.  And it’s (because of) books like this one that I am so happy that I decided to go ahead and do that! This is a deff must read and why not pick it up!”

Find out more about TROPIC OF DARKNESS here. And here’s the Schusters UK link.

DARN, MY CRYSTAL BALL IS BUSTED!

A few postings back, I confidently predicted that Michael Douglas would be nominated for, and even win, an Oscar for his performance in Behind the Candelabra. But now I've been informed it can't be so. I already knew that that particular biopic started out its life as a TV movie ... what I didn't know is that disqualifies it for an Academy Award.

So much for my matchless powers as a fortune teller. Does anybody know of someone who can fix a crystal ball? My one doesn't seem to be working properly.

DARK SATANIC CHILLS -- THE NEW RAINE'S LANDING NOVEL

If you've ever visited this blog before, then you're quite familiar with the following words: "It may look like a perfectly ordinary New England town, a little larger than most. But Raine’s Landing, Massachusetts, holds some very dark secrets. The real witches of Salem fled here just before the Trials of 1692, and the place has been full of magic – the good and the bad kind – ever since. And a curse hangs over the whole population … there are so many people because nobody born here can ever leave."

Well, they're all still stuck there, troubleshooter Ross Devries, his sidekick Cassie Mallory, Doc Willets, police lieutenant Saul Hobart, high witch Emaline Pendramere, Judge Samuel Levin and the whole other crew, including master magician and arch-loon Woodard Raine himself. And in the fifth book in the series, they are facing down worse trouble than they've ever seen before. Here's the description:

"It’s only early February, and the town should still be in the grip of winter. But the air has turned unseasonably warm and an unexpected thaw has come. And as the snows begin to melt back, bodies start to be discovered, murdered human corpses, each with strange ritual markings carved into their flesh.

At first another serial killer is suspected, but it is not that. The markings are satanic ones. Somebody inside the town is practising black magic of the foulest kind. Demons have been summoned, dark spells cast, doorways opened into deeper realms. And then the Landing’s adepts start to be attacked.

And with his sidekick, Cassie Mallory, unable to help him, ex-cop Ross Devries is facing the toughest and most brutal fight of his entire life. Because this time, he is battling the Hordes of Hell."

You can read an excerpt right HERE.

The book's first review on Amazon calls it the best Raine's Landing thriller yet, and gives it 5 stars.

SPEAK OF THE DEVIL is available exclusively as a $2.99 ebook on Amazon US and Amazon UK.

SHERLOCK HOLMES IS FEELING LIKE A BRAND-NEW MAN

 Fans of the great detective might like to know that I've revamped all 4 of my books of modern-day Holmes stories on Amazon Kindle, with linked ToCs and new information about the humble author and his other books. You can find out more about the Immortal Holmes series here. And if you're a true blue Brit (cold, wet, and hacked-off, in other words) here the UK link.

TWO SURE THINGS

It's been a good long while -- college days, in fact -- since I wrote a regular film column. So I haven't had the chance to predict any Oscar nominations, in public at least, for quite a time. But I'm going to do so now.

The obvious one, already pegged as a sure thing by many, is Cate Blanchett in Blue Jasmine. Despite the ravings of the critics, I found the movie itself something of a let-down after the whimsical brilliance of Midnight in Paris, rather uneven and forced. But Blanchett's performance as a mentally ill woman is a revelation, a modern-day Blanche DuBois, almost wholly reliant on the waning kindness of people who ought not be strangers, but who are.

And then, just last night, I watched the DVD of Behind the Candelabra, the Liberace biopic. And, my Lord, did Michael Douglas shine! That guy's come a good long way since Streets of San Francisco, let me tell you, capturing perfectly an extremely strange man (with a stage show like that, how could he not be?) who was neither a good person nor a bad one, but merely a person wholly detached from the normal world, inhabiting a universe that existed only in his mind.

Both are brilliant. Both are surely going to make the shortlist for that little golden statuette. And if there's any justice in the word, then they'll both win.

OH, WHAT A LOVELY BAY!

I already sang the praises of Ibiza Town -- capital of the Balearic island of Ibiza -- in an earlier posting on this blog (A Sight for Tired Eyes, 8th May). But Louise and myself got the chance to return to the island for a four-day break just recently, and found ourselves in a great location, in the next bay along from the town. I just thought I'd share a couple of the views with you.

And here's what the place looked like at sunset.

ICE COLD IN THE CARIBBEAN

My first novel from a major publisher in 4 years - and my first stand-alone novel since 1995's Night Feast - is now available from Simon & Schuster/Pocket Star.

Tropic of Darkness is set mostly in Havana, Cuba, with the action shifting from the present day to the late Fifties, when the Mob virtually ran that city. In fact, the action starts with none other than Meyer Lansky stepping off a plane at Havana Airport, only to receive some rather strange and troubling news. Here's the book's back-cover blurb:

"Enter a dim-lit, sultry world full of the darkest secrets, where age-old legends come to life, dreams get mixed up with reality, and nothing save for death is truly as it seems.

Jack Gilliard is a man with a dark past, and he hasn’t been back to the United States for more than a decade. But when he washes up in Havana, Cuba, he finds himself being drawn into a business darker than he ever dared think. Ancient passions, ancient treacheries, an age-old curse, and the evils of his past are now consuming the present—and Jack is caught in the midst of it all. To survive, all he has to do is leave the country—a prospect much more difficult than anticipated. But the real question is: can Jack escape before the darkness claims him altogether?"

And the first review's an excellent one:

“The tension built well as the story progressed and kept me turning pages. All in all, Tropic of Darkness is a well-crafted tale, and well worth reading. I rate this work as Highly Recommended for adult readers” – The Monster Librarian.

Read an extract here.

Tropic of Darkness is available in a wide variety of different ebook formats. Find out more here. 

A paperback version will be released in 2014.

REALITY RELOADED

My long-running website, richardsreality.com, has just been completely updated. There’s a better Photo Gallery, a massively expanded Art Gallery with over a dozen new paintings and drawings by M. Wayne Miller and Steve Upham, a new interview conducted by award-winning author Ed Gorman, a complete list of my available ebooks, both from major publishers and self-published, and news of my latest novels and collections.

Huge thanks to Marie O’Regan for putting it all together.

Why not take a look?

JUDGING A BOOK, Part Two

And this one's an absolute beaut. I've had some terrific artists provide covers for my books before, Steve Upham, Wayne Miller, Erin Wells, Paul Mudie, Paul  Lowe, all talked about in earlier postings in this very blog. But this one by James Perales is near perfect. It's for my supernatural horror novel Tropic of Darkness, due out on 16th September from Simon & Schuster/Pocket Star and largely set in Havana, Cuba. And what James has done is create a brand-new artistic sub-genre  ... let's call it 'Caribbean Gothic.' It's a great piece, and I hope that you agree. I'll be talking about the book itself a little later on.

JUDGING A BOOK, Part One

Towards the end of this year, Samhain Publishing, under the auspices of chief editor Don D'Auria, will be bringing out an ebook version of my 2005 supernatural novella Under the Ice. It's set in Helsinki, Finland, in the dead of winter, and features a revenant, which I suppose is just a fancy way of saying 'zombie.' That's all I'm telling you about the plot for now, but the terrific cover by Scott Carpenter has already been approved, and here it is.

I'M FINALLY ON SMASHWORDS!

 

People have been asking me -- on message boards and forums -- for quite a while now whether any of my self-published ebooks are available through anything else but Kindle. And the answer until this week has been NO. But now I've got two of my short story collections up on Smashwords. Dark Futures is a compendium of my sf/horror fusion tales, from the pages of The 3rd Alternative, Black Static and suchlike, with a cover by the excellent Steve Upham. Whereas The Immortal Sherlock Holmes: Volume I comprises four of my modern day Holmes stories, 'The Desert King' in Arizona, 'The Hidden Shore' in the Carribean, 'The Terror in the Park' in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and the Las Vegas based 'The House of Blood,' originally published in Gaslight Arcanum: Dark Tales of Sherlock Holmes. Both books have gone onto Smashwords' Premium Catalog, btw, and so they ought to be available on Nook, Kobo etc. fairly soon. You can find out more about them HERE.

A SIGHT FOR TIRED EYES

Even writers have it tough sometimes. It's been a pretty busy year so far. There've been the various edits of my new supernatural thriller -- TROPIC OF DARKNESS from Pocket Star/Gallery -- to deal with. I've a new horror novel on the boil. And to add insult to injury, I honestly thought that I was getting near to a final version of my fifth Raine's Landing novel -- SPEAK OF THE DEVIL -- only to realise it needs a couple more drafts at least before it's properly complete.

Ah, the joys of being a perfectionist!

Throw in an absolutely terrible British winter which has lasted right until the end of April, and by the middle of that month  I was absolutely drained and needed, very badly, to get away for a while.

A couple of days scootching around on the Internet and Louise had come up with an inexpensive one-week deal in, of all places, Ibiza. You know, hangout for hippies in the Sixties and Seventies, now the favoured destination for all-night clubbers. But we went for it.

We wound up in a nice hotel which was a little isolated and was, frankly, pretty quiet. Very early in the season, you see ...it had only just opened, and I doubt if a quarter of its rooms were occupied. But right outside the entrance was a bus stop, and in ten minutes you could get into the heart of the island's capital, Ibiza Town, and what a joy that was. The harbour was nice enough -- face it, they always are. But heading away from that, you come into the Old Town, all tall, gaily-painted old houses with wrought iron balconies, and leafy, cafe-lined squares. Absolutely charming. But the best was yet to come.

Past the Old Town is the mostly 16th Century walled  city of Ibiza Town, founded -- I think -- by Philip II of Spain. We're talking huge walls, massive fortifications, cannons at the top. To defend against whom? I'm not quite sure. Pirates? Corsairs? Even the Perfidious Brits?

You go in through the main entrance -- across a drawbridge, no less -- and suddenly realise that you've wound up somewhere very special. And it's not just the lovely old architecture. The whole of the walled city is built on the slopes of a very steep hill, so that the streets running acrosswise are normal lanes, but the streets running upward are not lanes at all but flights of stone stairs, hundreds of them, heading in every which direction. And the place is no museum -- people live there by the thousand. I could have wandered there for hours, and I generally did.

I hear that Luca in Italy is built along similar lines but, never having been there, I found Ibiza Town's walled city quite unique, a place of special magic. There's a lot more to that island than just clubbing.

THE SPEED OF DARK

Further down this blog, you'll find an interview with Canadian author and publisher Clayton Bye. And now I'm in an anthology of his. It's horror, and it's different and unsettling stuff. At 334 pages, The Speed of Dark has 27 stories by 19 authors from across the world, all of them by invite, and includes my latest Birchiam-on-Sea tale, 'Across the Tracks.'

A GREAT HORROR FREEBIE!

For the whole of today, Saturday 23rd February, one of my collections of horror tales -- The Books of Shadow: Volume II -- is absolutely free on Amazon Kindle. A dozen of my best creepy tales, all of them originally published between the Eighties and the present day. There are two other books in this series, by the way. You can find out more about them HERE.

A BELATED NEW YEAR

I've never cared too much for Xmas. Honestly, I find it dull. So once family duties are over, Louise and I like to get away for New Year if we possibly can. This year it was Palma, capital of Mallorca, a charming town with a large and beautiful Old City, full of winding streets, Arab baths, and amazing buildings including a huge and very beautiful cathedral. I thought I'd share some of it with you (rather late in the day, because I've been pretty busy since I got back).

 

DEADLY VIOLET REVIEWS

Just like the previous three Raine's Landing supernatural novels, the fourth in the series -- DEADLY VIOLET -- has started pulling down some seriously good reviews. Except that, only being an ebook at the moment, those reviews are all on Amazon. Here are the first few:

“What can I say? As entertaining as the other novels, perhaps even more so. I've been a fan of Raine's Landing since I purchased the first novel in the series from the Science Fiction Book Club, and they just keep coming, each one as satisfactory as the last. I always look forward to opening a novel whose title has the subheading: A Raine's Landing Novel.
     This one brings back familiar characters from past stories...Boston cop Lauren, a recovering Saul Hobart, and a pregnant Cassie, trying to maintain a normal life with her boyfriend, the recently-deceased adept Quinn Maycott, as well as others only mentioned previously. There's a little more on Willetts, who came to the Landing, committed what he considers a criminal sin, and stays to work out his own punishment. None of these side stories are enough to detract from the main theme, namely, why does the mysterious violet light suddenly gleam and then nasty things appear and do away with homes and their inhabitants in particularly gruesome ways? It also answers some questions I, and no doubt other readers, have raised through the years.
    I'd call this one a nail-biter, and I'm not going to say any more for Spoilers can pop up unexpectedly whenever one speaks about the Landing. Just read it for yourself, and you'll see what I mean” – T.P. Vissage.

“Deadly Violet, along with the other Raine's Landing novels are page turners. Not a boring part in the whole series. Deadly Violet left you with a cliff hanger at the end, so I'm looking forward to the next in the series” -- Judy.

“Welcome back to Raine's Landing, the town that was built by the original Salem Witches as an escape from the infamous witch trials (1692). However, the town ended up on the wrong side of the wrong witch and found itself cursed in perpetuity. Anyone born in Raine's Landing can never leave and those not born there find it extremely hard to find or visit the town. It is due to this curse That Raine's Landing, a town populated primarily by magic users, exists just off a major highway in the present.
    There are a few people who don't use magic in this town. Ross Devries--a former cop--and his tough sidekick, Cass Mallory, are two of them. Not only that, their peculiar backgrounds make them perfect problem solvers for whenever magic gets out of hand, something that seems to happen with some regularity in Raine's Landing.
    Take this day for example: People have begun disappearing. And giant, purple worms with massive, circular rows of teeth that rotate are grinding unprepared people into nothingness. Then come the little bubbles of violet light that shoot through everything and everyone they find, repeatedly, destroying them just as surely as a "grinder" would. But when houses begin to disappear and people are attacked by their worst nightmares, even the town's adepts can't stop the destruction.
    They keep trying though. Trying to understand and communicate with the intelligent, violet life-forms who seem to be behind all that is happening. But when the sun itself takes on a purple hue, it leaves everyone certain that reality is being consumed by another universe.
    Since magic has failed to protect them, Ross and Cass seem to be the only people who can fix this particular problem. What's the source of that problem? A little girl a hundred years in the past has stolen a powerful talisman, reached out and forward to find the "little girl" from previous stories (She occupies one room in an abandoned house, hovering in the air, spinning slowly and seeing all) and then entwined their minds. It's this that has caused a rip in the continuum of space and allowed the strangest of races access to our world.
    With the clock ticking down to nothingness, Ross and Cass must somehow find a way to break the bond between the two girls and repair the bridge between the universes.
    Be sure to pick up a copy of this superb fantasy. Deadly Violet by Tony Richards just hums along, taking you at high speed to places of which you will never have dreamed. In fact, I think Deadly Violet is the best Raine's Landing novel to date. ” – Clayton Bye.

The book is available for $2.99 (plus a very small delivery fee) from Amazon Kindle, and for those who prefer something more solid, a paperback version ought to be ready sometime later this year.

ELECTRIC ANGELS

At last, after a good long wait, my third Raine's Landing supernatural thriller -- Midnight's Angels -- is available in ebook form. You can get it both on Smashwords and on Amazon Kindle.