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| News, Appearances, & Events | |
| Monday Mar 8, 2010 | For the next week, until March 15, you can buy either of Tom's two e-books for half price at smashwords.com. You can, of course, sample DR. CHILL'S PROJECT (new version) or BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WITCH FOR for free at the same site. But if you want the whole book (or both books) you can buy them for only a buck for DR. CHILL and $1.50 for BE CAREFUL. It's a great site to visit anyway, with thousands of books you can't buy in bookstores. |
| Friday Sep 25, 2009 | Tom posted a couple of his novels for kids/YAs online. One is a revised version of DR. CHILL'S PROJECT, which is about five young people with super powers who are recruited for a secret government project. One of them is kidnapped, and the others set out to rescue her. A fun book, and a sequel is on the way. The other book is BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WITCH FOR, which Tom thinks of as a wicca chick lit book. Olivia comes to visit her aunt in New York for a year. Aunt Tilda turns out to be a witch (a good witch, mind you). But her friend, another witch, teaches Olivia how to cast a spell on this cute boy at school. The trouble is, now he won't leave Olivia alone, and his old girlfriend is out for revenge. Wicca doesn't seem so powerful after all, until Olivia finds a book in her aunt's library....well, you can read most of the book at either scribd.com or smashwords.com. Tell us what you think! |
| Saturday Aug 15, 2009 | We've just posted two books on online sites where you can download them or read them direct on your computer. The first is a new, revised version of DR. CHILL'S PROJECT, which Tom wrote back in the 1980s. It's a scary story about a girl who has spent most of her life in asylums, but now is recruited by a mysterious doctor who coaches children with "special" talents. The other is a brand-new book titled BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WITCH FOR. It's the story of Olivia, whose movie-star parents send her to live with her aunt in New York for a year. Olivia soon discovers that Aunt Tilda meets with a coven in her back yard. One of the neighboring witches teaches Olivia how to cast a spell to attract a boy at her school who doesn't seem to care she exists. The spell works better than Olivia hoped for, and that's when the trouble REALLY begins. Read up to half of these books at scribd.com or smashwords.com, and decide if you want to read the rest. Let us know what you think! |
| Monday Jul 27, 2009 | July 27, 2009 We rewrote and updated one of our previous books for young people, DR. CHILL'S PROJECT. It's an exciting book about a young girl who has spent most of her life in mental institutions and now finds herself recruited by a mysterious doctor. Dr. Chill has other outcast children working for him--but for what purpose? IMPORTANT: This book is now available only on the website scribd.com. You can read a sample of it there, but you have to shell out $2.00 to download the entire book. We've decided that this is the best way to make our work available to young readers, and are charging a price that we hope anybody can afford. Some people have told us that if we charge such a low price, people won't think the book is any good. We argue that we would rather have anybody who wants to read it, be able to buy it. If you do, be sure and let us know if we ought to put more books like this online. (There's a sequel to this one already written, and it has never appeared in print.) Thanks! |
| Thursday Apr 2, 2009 | Vanity Fair, the magazine, is slated to print an excerpt from our latest nonfiction book, THE CRIMES OF PARIS, in its May issue. It should be on newsstands in the early part of April, but will probably sell out quickly because its cover has a sexy picture of some model on it. The excerpt is mentioned in the headlines on the cover, but nobody will be reading those! ;o) Anyway, lots of libraries subscribe to Vanity Fair, so you can probably read it there. The section of the book that is in the magazine deals with the theft of the Mona Lisa in 1911. But that's not all the book is about! |
| Friday Nov 28, 2008 | Our sixth book in the Samurai Detective series will be published in October, 2008. Its title is "Seven Paths to Death." Seikei and Judge Ooka are traveling in a northern province when they are called to investigate a badly wounded man found in a rice paddy. He has an elaborate tattoo on his back that the Judge recognizes as part of a map. It turns out that there are seven tattooed men, each with a different section of the map on their backs. However, someone else is looking for them: Tetsune, the mysterious ninja that Seikei defeated in our earlier book, "In Darkness, Death." Can Seikei and the Judge find the men before Tetsune does? And where does this strange map lead? You can be one of the first to find out by pre-ordering the book at amazon.com, or asking your local librarian to order a copy. Let us know how you like it! |
| Tuesday Sep 30, 2008 | Our fifth book in the Seikei series, "A Samurai Never Fears Death," is now in nearly 2000 libraries and also available through amazon.com. It has already received some good reviews. In the book, Seikei returns to his home town, Osaka, where he finds his brother and sister running the family tea business. They take him to one of the puppet shows for which Osaka is famous and murder breaks out! This time, however, Seikei becomes a suspect and then he has to prove that his sister's boyfriend is not involved. Along the way he is kidnapped by smugglers (wouldn't you know) and faces some of the spookiest criminals of his career. Let us know if you like it! |
| Tuesday Sep 30, 2008 | Our latest book for adults, "The Monsters: Mary Shelley and the Curse of Frankenstein," is now in paperback. Unfortunately, the biggest chain, Barnes & Noble, isn’t aware that it’s a nonfiction book about Mary Shelley and those who influenced her in the writing of her novel Frankenstein. The terrible fates that awaited all of them were the “curse” that haunted all those who were present in the summer of 1816 when Lord Byron challenged his friends to see who could write the best ghost story. Some Barnes & Noble stores are shelving this book under “fiction,” and others in a bizarre, hard-to-locate category called “Literary Theory.” Sorry, but the book is all true, not fiction, and as the reviewer for National Public Radio said, is “deliciously creepy.” |
| Thursday Jun 21, 2007 | Here's a blog that has an interview with us, along with some very nice things to say about our books. Check it out! Chasing Ray |