The summer before I went away for college, I worked at the B&N in Shrewsbury, NJ. I loved that job! I took care of the scifi and fantasy shelves — I even did a little ordering by the end of my tenure. 🙂
The mystery section wasn’t mine, but I read quite a bit out of there — Robert B. Parker, Dick Francis, and the alphabet mysteries of Sue Grafton starring Kinsey Millhone, who was definitely on my mind when I thought up a female gumshoe for my twosome of mystery novels, Skin Deep and Deep Roots, which have gotten a lovely makeover.
The books come out in less than two months, from Datura Books! Special preorder sale at B&N until 4/25.
My Substack is named From Nothing to Something. My last post was October 2024. So I think it’s safe to say that the Nothings are beating the crap out of the Somethings.
Still, an occasional Something is better than Nothing, right?
F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that “there are no second acts in American lives.” That may well be true, but you know what? There most certainly is a second act for an American book, or in my case, two books.
Skin Deep and Deep Roots, my series of mystery novels, was published through Polis Books. Skin Deep came out in 2020, during the pandemic — which made promotions difficult. Deep Roots was supposed to be published two years later, but it took another year, and by then, Polis was a shell of itself. This spring, its doors were officially shuttered, and I thought that was the unfortunate end-of-life for Siobhan O’Brien, my intrepid private eye.
Except that wasn’t the case at all. Jason Pinter, Polis’s publisher, was able to find a new home for my novels, and goodness, what a beautiful home it is. To really drive the point, the books themselves got a makeover. The new editions can even be preordered from Datura Books, an imprint of Angry Robot, a UK-based publisher who distributes through Penguin Random House. Voila!
The books won’t come out until June 2025, but they can already be pre-ordered:
Of course, they will be available via the usual outlets such as Bookshop, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble as we near the pub date.
You can read the official news in Publishers Weekly — there’s even a quote from me at the end of the article. Happiness and authorship are rare combos for me, but there are very bright days like this one that makes the struggle worthwhile.
Another review for Deep Roots, but this one has quite a few spoilers, so you might not want to read it until you’ve finished the book. 🙂 Thank you, Korean Quarterly, for covering my second Siobhan novel! I should also thank them for using a photo of mine that dates back a decade and change. Nary a single gray hair to be found back in those youthful days…
Available starting today — via Audible, Spotify, and everywhere else as far as I can see. It’s already at my library via Hoopla Digital, even! Click on the video above to listen to the first chapter.
I’m not sure what I like more, having a book out or having the opportunity to create a playlist for it. Many thanks to Largehearted Boy, a.k.a. David Gutowski, for hosting my song list on his beautiful site!
We’re almost at the end of book release week, and what better way to celebrate that than with Koda (BTW, a whippet does make an appearance in Deep Roots!)?
He’s our little whippet, and if you want to know more about him and me, Coffee with a Canine is the place. Thanks for reading, as always.
“Why has this food-providing human placed this non-edible object between us?”
Today is the official publication day for Deep Roots, my fourth novel. Friends and family have told me they have already received their pre-ordered copies over the weekend, so I guess the publication day is actually kind of useless. But hey, it’s still the official day, and it got me in a thinking mood, or more accurately, a calculating mood:
14 years 4 novels 1,249 pages 360,726 words
That’s my career so far as a novelist, in strictly numerical terms. The word count is suspect, of course, since I used Microsoft Word’s Word Count feature from the final drafts and added them up. But what’s a few hundred words here and there?
audiobooks will be made of both Deep Roots and Skin Deep
I’m quite excited about #2. The actress Jennifer Sun Bell will be narrating; she read Min Jin Lee’s Free Food for Millionaires, so I’m fortunate to have such a professional lending her voice. The audiobooks will be widely available (via OrangeSky Audio, a subsidiary of Spotify) next month.
Three days until the book’s pub date, though I have heard from some people that they already have it in their hands. Hearty thank you to the kind folks at Booklist who reviewed (and liked!) Deep Roots. Full review below.
