Killing the Beast

I'm working, albeit deliberately, on a sequel to The Hero of Gucci Gulch.  Called Killing the Beast, it features plenty of murder and mayhem just outside the halls of Congress and implicates leaders at the highest level.  Who are the murderer or murderers?  And who or what is the beast of the tale's title?  That, of course, is the mystery that drives the action in this coming book.

I'm on chapter 22 now, with another few chapters yet to conceive. As is usual with mysteries, mine at least, even I don't know how it will end or the culprits will be found out. But that's the fun of writing!

Like The Hero of Gucci Gulch, now in production for an audiobook, I'll be releasing via Audible.com when it has been published, sometime later this year.  I'll announce it here when it's available.

Update on My Audiobook

As I mentioned previously, I began the process of converting my first novel, The Hero of Gucci Gulch, into an audiobook.  I'm pleased to report that I received seven auditions for the narration before I made a final selection.  I could have gone with any of three of the narrators.  The one I chose, A. Bran Peacock, has both the voice and the interpretive skills that will bring my novel to life.

Over the next several months, he and I will review his initial performance to identify any pronunciation and performance issues.  After that, he'll narrate the entire story.

I'm hoping the fully-narrated novel will be ready for release sometime this fall.

The Hero of Gucci Gulch, a murder mystery set on Capitol Hill, features a public interest lobbyist as amateur sleuth.  It's an easily read novel with a lot of action that I think will translate easily into narrated form.  When it has been released by Audible.com, I hope you will agree.

Facing the Truth of Climate Change

The Hero of Gucci Gulch is a murder mystery set in the world of lobbyists, corporate representatives and members of Congress and their staffs.  It takes place on Capitol Hill--sometimes known as Gucci Gulch--for the prized brand of Italian leather often worn by the well-paid corporate lobbyists who patrol its halls. 

But the novel is much more than the story of murder, muggings and mayhem, though it has plenty of these.  It is set against the backdrop of the global challenge of climate change and the need for meaningful U.S. policy to address out-of-control carbon emissions into the environment.  It revolves around the struggles of environmental lobbyists to persuade a reluctant Congress to cap and trade legislation as a way to curb those emissions and bring the U.S. into better alignment with environmental actions being taken in much of the rest of the world.

The protagonist, Henry Wright, is an environmental lobbyist for a public interest organization.  He coordinates his work with Alicia Cummings, a pretty young intern.  But the impetuous intern gets too close to the nefarious secrets of the anti-environmental opposition.  When Henry finds her body in a lonely Washington garden, the investigation begins.

While the police slowly follow up false leads, Henry tries to assuage his grief by working members of Congress to support environmental legislation.  At the same time, he is drawn deeper and deeper into the murder investigation until at last his own life is put in danger.

Throughout, the story follows Henry's attempts to get a cap and trade bill passed over the objections of industry's heaviest polluters.  In the end, the book not only traces the chase to find the guilty but also the difficult path of facing up to global environmental challenges.

The book is available from Amazon.com and the CreateSpace eStore.  A Kindle edition is also available.

The Story Line of Gucci Gulch

The Hero of Gucci Gulch features Henry Wright, a milk-loathing dairy promoter turned environmentalist, who is naïve, unsure of himself, sometimes quirky.  Now he is caught in the political fight of his life—to get a climate change bill passed by a Congress riddled with the scheming pals of polluters.  But this test of his political skills is no match for his fight to escape his own seemingly inevitable death. The Hero of Gucci Gulch is set in the halls of Congress, where anti-environmental skullduggery mixes with mayhem to create exciting twists and turns sure to entice any fan of mysteries.  

Henry befriends Alicia Cummings, a pretty young intern whose passion for environmental justice matches his own. But youthful impetuosity leads her to ignore Henry’s warnings and she digs too deeply into the nefarious plans of the powerful opposition.  When Henry finds her strangled body in a lonely Washington garden, he becomes the number one murder suspect.  He tries to plow his anguish into his legislative campaign, but the unsolved murder weighs heavily on him and he can’t leave it alone.  He stumbles onto clues that point to his anti-environmental enemies, and when the police are slow to act he takes matters into his own hands.  His increasingly daring amateur investigation gets him crosswise with the police but he persists until violence and still more death force him to live on the run. Henry faces both personal threats and political challenges as he claws his way toward the surprising conclusion. 

The first novel in a series featuring the lobbyist amateur sleuth is rich with Washington and political insider details and explorations of environmental policy and the need for climate change legislation . It will appeal to mystery fans, environmentalists and lovers of political intrigue alike.  But climate change-deniers should probably not apply!

The Hero of Gucci Gulch is available at Amazon.com and in the CreateSpace eStore.  A Kindle edition is in the works.  I'll announce it here when it becomes available.

And Now Available on Amazon.com!

Today I discovered that The Hero of Gucci Gulch, my murder mystery novel set on Capitol Hill, is available for sale on Amazon.com.  They had promised it would become available in five to seven days; they made it in one!   It is even available for free shipping by Prime, if you subscribe to that service, so you can have a copy by Monday if you order today.

As I said in my last post, the book will also be available in a Kindle version, but converting the file will take me a while so I can't yet predict when that edition will be ready.

At Last I'm Published

My murder mystery, The Hero of Gucci Gulch, passed all of CreateSpace's hoops as well as my own critical review (for the umpteenth time) and I approved it for release yesterday.  So now it's published!

Copies can be purchased immediately at the CreateSpace eStore.  It takes CreateSpace another week to release it on the Amazon.com web site, where it will be more readily available to the buying public.  A Kindle edition is also in the works, but that involves a fair bit of reworking of the text to make it readable in the scalable Kindle format.  However, because Kindle reaches a different audience--and a large one at that--I will make the necessary changes and get it posted there as soon as possible.

You can read the synopsis and my bio statement at the CreateSpace site.

Publishing My Novel

Over the last several years, I've been polishing a mystery novel--The Hero of Gucci Gulch--that I started now several years back.  Or, in reality, it has mostly been lying about untouched because I did not know how to go about getting it published.  But recently, my friend and cousin Jim Crawford, under the pen name of Mokuri, published a short volume of poems by Li Po via Amazon's CreateSpace. This gave me the idea that I would be far better off using this free service to get my book out to the world than fretting over the difficulty and costs of publishing it by other means.

CreateSpace is a print-on-demand service that sells books when purchased via Amazon.com and by offers them to other booksellers and libraries in the U.S. and Europe.  Books can also be made available in Kindle editions.  Although you can pay CreateSpace to set up your book for you, it is quite possible to submit a final edited text and cover design of your own making.  The cost of doing it yourself is nothing.

Books can be printed in any size, include color illustrations and artwork if desired, and run to any length--short or long.

Royalties can be paid out automatically to your bank account or sent via check.  A user dashboard allows you to check in and watch your royalties as they accumulate.

There are many other epublishing services out there, but most that I've found charge fees for even basic services--sometimes astonishly high fees!  While my book has not yet been published, it is in the queue for review and may be available in a few days.

I'll announce it here when it appears.