The Lusitania Murders on Amazon
For the month of March, Amazon is featuring The Lusitania Murders for $2.99 on the Kindle storefront. Lusitania was nominated for the 2003 Shamus Award for Best Paperback Original P.I. Novel, and Publishers Weekly wrote of the novel: “[Collins] ably weaves a well-paced, closed-environment mystery reminiscent of Agatha Christie.” Here’s the scoop:
The Lusitania’s final voyage is a newsman’s dream. First come the torpedo warnings. Then come the murders…
Journalist and mystery writer Willard Huntington Wright boards the Lusitania in pursuit of a hot story. Under the guise of conducting interviews with prominent passengers, his real assignment is to investigate rumors that the luxury liner is carrying illicit cargo for the British war effort against Germany.
But Wright, traveling under the pseudonym S.S. Van Dine, isn’t the only passenger with an ulterior motive. Hours after the ship receives torpedo threats, three German stowaways are found murdered. And Wright suspects the deaths are part of a larger conspiracy. Comparing clues and matching wits with Detective Philomina Vance, the pair must solve the murders before the killer can sabotage the entire ship. Recreating the days up to the ship’s fatal encounter with a German U-boat, The Lusitania Murders is historical fiction at its entertaining best.
If you haven’t read any of the Disaster series, this is a great place to start. The Disaster books are a series in theme rather than continuity, and each book stands alone. For more information on the series, I recommend this December Kindle Post interview: Max Allan Collins on The Disaster Series.
Don’t forget that Lusitania and the rest of the Disaster novels are also available in handsome physical editions at all major online retailers as well as your local bookseller through indiebound.org.