From now until September 24th, one of the best novels of my career, certainly the most critically acclaimed, is going to be appearing in electronic formats for the first time, and its price will be listed as Free. A few readers have asked me why I'm doing this. So I'm going to tell you exactly why.
This novel, GINGERBREAD MAN, was a romantic thriller. I've done several books labled romantic suspense by the publisher, that I consider romantic thrillers instead. The action is constant, the pacing breathless, the thrills and chills are rapid-fire. The word “suspense” conveys a slower pace to me. Maybe I'm wrong.
Anyway, I've done seven of these books now. The Mordecai Young trilogy (Thicker than Water, Colder than Ice, Darker than Midnight) followed by its spinoff, The Secrets of Shadow Falls trilogy (Killing Me Softly, Kill Me Again, Kiss Me, Kill Me.) And this stand alone novel, Gingerbread Man, which is still awaiting its sequel. (I swear I'll write it one of these days!)
When I look at the number of RITA nominations and other awards and nominations I've received for my romantic thrillers, as opposed to the number for my parnormals (for which I'm more widely known, because I've done so many more of them) I see that the kudos rate is far higher for the thrillers. PW has raved about them, four out of the seven have garnered RITA nominations. (That's 57%) They've raked in several other industry awards as well.
And now I'm stepping into a whole new phase of my career with a new set of thrillers that are better than anything I've ever done. In these books, which we're calling “The Brown and De Luca Novels” we'll see the same hero and heroine over the course of several stories. Their relationship builds slowly, but more deeply, while the stories themselves are fast paced thrillers that throw them together over and over again.
I figured I had a ways to go to convince readers used to me writing paranormal romance, to trust me enough to buy a thriller series. (There are paranormal elements to SLEEP WITH THE LIGHTS ON, WAKE TO DARKNESS, and DREAM OF DANGER, namely Rachel's uncanny extra sense developed during 20 years of blindness. And in Book One, it's even more than that via her transplanted corneas, from a donor who was a serial killer.)
My best bet, I think, is to show those paranormal fans who haven't read my thrillers before, and those thriller readers who haven't read me before, what I can do. And the best way to do that is to give them one for free. And that is the honest and frank reason why I'm releasing GINGERBREAD MAN for the first time in all ebook formats, absolutely free. And because I want readers to get excited about the new Brown and De Luca series, I'm including a super-sized excerpt of SLEEP WITH THE LIGHTS ON that you won't find anywhere else. Four chapters! That way, you'll know for sure whether you're going to love the book before plunking down the publisher's list price.
GINGERBREAD MAN is free now at the following sites: