The Kindle editions of the two books in my Krista and Keith Larson series, Girl Most Likely and Girl Can’t Help It, are on sale this month – right now through July 31. You can buy them as a pair for $1.98, or 99-cents each.

While these two novels have done fairly well, their sales don’t compare to the bestseller status of the three previous books I did for Amazon’s Thomas & Mercer line, the Reeder and Rogers Trilogy (Supreme Justice, Fate of the Union and Executive Order), which sold in the hundreds of thousands.

I had hoped to do a third Krista and Keith novel, but so far the numbers haven’t justified that. Maybe this Kindle sale will change that. At any rate, if you like my work, I hope you’ll give them a try.

Full disclosure. Not all of my regular readers have loved them, including some mainstream critics who would have preferred new Nate Heller books; and of course my hitman Quarry has his own dark appeal. But one of the ways I’ve stayed fresh and enthusiastic over the years has been to try different things. That – in addition to creating income – was why I wrote so many tie-in novels in the ‘90s and early oughts: the chance to do different things.

In the two Girl books I was taking a conscious swing at writing an American take on Nordic noir. Matt Clemens and I (the Reeder and Rogers team) had already done What Doesn’t Kill Her for Thomas & Mercer (also a strong seller), which was intended as an American “answer” to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. With the Krista/Keith books I was working another shade of noir, again an American variation on the Wallander novels, and such Nordic TV mini-series as The Bridge, The Killing, and (again) Wallander.

As I prepared to write Girl Most Likely, I used my brilliant in-house sounding board, Barbara Collins, to try to come up with a setting that had some Nordic flavor while being resolutely American. We discussed Pella, Iowa, home of the Tulip Festival (and boyhood home of Wyatt Earp), in part because I liked the small town with tourist appeal aspect of the place. Meanwhile, Barb and I had taken to going to Galena, Illinois, for short post-project getaways, and it seemed an interesting, even ideal setting for what I had in mind.

Galena – as many in the Midwest know – is scenic little hamlet on a bluff with a downtown right out of Norman Rockwell, a tourist destination all year-round (winter sports a draw, though not for me). It’s a town of 3000 that is home to a million or more visitors a year, with sixty-some restaurants and various comfy hotels and bed-and-breakfasts and a quaint Americana vibe.

I got interested in how a police department in a city that size dealt with those million-a-year visitors. I’d been noodling with the idea of a very young female chief of police in a small town whose recently retired father was a former homicide detective. This concept slipped in perfectly with the Galena setting, and when I began my research I was pleased, even a little astounded, to learn that Galena’s police chief was in fact a young woman.

Chief Lori Huntington proved to be not only cooperative but generous with her time and information, and the books would have been lesser things without her.

I was pleased with the first novel, which dealt with a series of killings that accompanied a ten-year high school reunion (Krista’s class). Part of my self-mandate was to get away from the larger-than-life lead characters I usually write about in my mystery/suspense fiction – Quarry, Nolan, Nate Heller, Mike Hammer, even the CSI crew – and use more “regular” people for my protagonists. Folks next door who, in this case, happened to be a tourist-town police chief and her retired homicide cop father (from nearby Dubuque, just across the river), who had recently lost his wife to cancer and was flirting with suicide (a very Nordic notion).

As is the case with many thrillers, these regular people would be thrust into a situation ruled by larger-than-life crime and jeopardy. It’s a mix that has worked for everybody from Alfred Hitchcock to Mary Higgins Clark.

To me, my third-person, one point-of-view at a time approach – which included as much or more violence than I ever serve up – was business as usual. Only the subject matter, and the more normal protagonists, differed. But some self-professed “big fans” of my work – not many, but a few vocal ones – bitched about what they perceived as a radical change of pace.

A particular complaint of reviews (and, frankly, of my editor) was my somewhat detailed descriptions of clothing. I have always (and I’ve discussed this here) used clothing, grooming and the living quarters of my players to help characterize them. And anyone who’s attended a class reunion knows that how people dress at that event is very revealing of who they are (or who they’ve become, and who they want us to think they’ve become).

Did I overstep in this regard? Maybe. But my editor was so disturbed by this recurring criticism that she asked me to cut every clothing description in the second book – including that Chief Krista Larson wore a uniform. I resisted this request, as I don’t care to have my characters running naked through a book (in certain scenes, yes; but not an entire book).

Amazon is usually terrific at marketing, but I feel they slipped up with Girl Most Likely, which they debuted in the UK. That’s where the reviews got off to a bad start – the very American high school reunion theme was wrong for that audience, and some readers resented an old guy like me writing about a young female protagonist. And it may hurt the feelings of this Anglophile, but not everybody on the other side of the pond has a love for Americans.

The second novel, Girl Can’t Help It, represents only one of two times I’ve really addressed my rock ‘n’ roll years in a book (the other time was Scratch Fever, which is half of the current Hard Case Crime Nolan omnibus, Tough Tender). Again, while Krista and her father Keith are just folks, the killer is a dangerous, deadly force leaving a horrific trail behind her.

Yes, her. That’s another aspect of the novels that sometimes throws readers. In their point-of-view chapters, I don’t identify the killer (the first book’s homicidal point of view chapters are “he” and “him,” the second book’s are “she” and “her”), which limits the number of suspects. The mystery element is minor in both novels and it’s not terribly hard to figure out who is responsible in either one.

This seems to bother some readers, who brag about figuring out whodunit and then complain that they did.

If you have even casually followed my updates, you know that I from time to time offer book giveaways to prime the pump on Amazon (and other online) reviews of new titles. The review aspect of Amazon (primarily, but Barnes & Noble and various review blogs, too) is something relatively new. It used to be the newspaper and magazine reviewers were all an author had to worry about. The professional reviewers weren’t always nice, but they tended to be fair and accurate (they still do) (there are exceptions) (pretends to cough as he says “Kirkus”). I have mixed emotions about Amazon reviews. It’s an undeniably democratic method, but it also opens the door to readers with various agendas – everything from personal animosity to being the author’s mom.

But that’s the world fiction writers live in now. Girl Most Likely has a four-star ratings (averaged over 852 reviews) and Girl Can’t Help It a four-and-a-half star rating (averaged over 196 reviews). And yet here I am warning you (rather pathetically) that there are some Amazon reviewers who don’t like the books. It doesn’t help that the “top reviews” of both books begin with some of the worst ones. Why Amazon wants to discourage readers is beyond me.

Anyway, I like these novels, but I almost always like my own work, with reservations. When I listen to an audio book of my own stuff I am alternately smiling and wincing. I surprise myself when something strikes me as really good, and disappoint myself when something strikes me as not so good. I think that’s natural.

All I can tell you is these two novels came out exactly the way I wanted them to. And if you haven’t given them a try, I hope you’ll invest $1.98 (or at least 99-cents) and see what you think.

If enough of you do that, maybe I’ll get to do a third Krista-and-Keith. I promise not to over-describe the clothing.

On Saturday July 2, my band Crusin’ appeared in Muscatine at Proof Social on the patio in the late afternoon and early evening. It was a nice crowd, very responsive, applauding after each number.

Three-hour gigs wear me out. I admit freely to that, and the other two gigs this summer are two-hour ones, for which I’m grateful. I am very comfortable in front of an audience, generally, cases of nerves rare – the Iowa Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame induction concert in 2018 gave me a brief butterfly flurry, but frankly that’s the exception not the rule.

(Girl Can’t Help It opens with an induction concert at the Iowa Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame. Also a murder.)

But in the second of three sets Saturday evening, my amplifier started acting up – distorting badly. I am told nobody but me noticed it, but brother I did. And it threw me. Suddenly I wished I were anywhere else in the world doing just about anything else. That’s one of the oddities of performing – when it goes well, or even just okay, it’s a pleasure; when it goes wrong, it’s the worst.

On the following day, Sunday, I – as usual – felt like a bus had hit me. That’s not old age (entirely), as that’s always been the case the day after a gig. Nonetheless, I set up my keyboards and amp and tried to figure out what had gone wrong, second set. It appears to have been a problem with my volume pedal. I ordered a new one for about two-hundred bucks.

I made $100 for the gig.

Why do I do this?

Because I love it.

Author Brandon Barrows (cool name) writes about his list of the best mob novels…and my prose novel Road to Perdition is one of them!

Some people think the Batman strip by Marshal Rogers should be reprinted. Gee, I wonder who wrote it?

This piece looks at Paul Newman’s last screen appearance…in Road to Perdition.

And, finally, yet another write-up about the gangster film you didn’t know came from a graphic novel (but you did, didn’t you?).

M.A.C.

Tags: Batman, Crusin', Deals, Girl Can't Help It, Girl Most Likely, Krista and Keith Larson, Road to Perdition, Road to Perdition Novel, What Doesn't Kill Her