I will be doing another live reading here on this website. I'm going to schedule it for the same time as the last reading, 7:00 p.m. EST. I'll read from The Serial Killer's Wife as well as maybe the opening chapter to my next thriller, coming this fall. I also plan to end the reading with a Q&A, and this time will be sure that my email is turned on, so when questions are left on the blog, I will actually see them. In the mean time, Mason Canyon reviewed The Serial Killer's Wife yesterday, calling it a "breath-taking ride filled with twists and surprises along the way. Just when you have everything figured out, author Robert Swartwood drops in a surprise or two." Hey, that's me!
Man Eating Bookworms & Crazy European Chicks
The other day Peter Andrew Leonard reviewed The Serial Killer's Wife on his blog The Man Eating Bookworm. He calls the novel "an explosive summer thriller" and says "Robert Swartwood is a sharp writer, his prose lean and mean as a razor blade. He notches up the tension from chapter to chapter like a master story-teller, keeping you reading long into the night." Thanks, Peter! Also, remember how I mentioned Joe Schreiber's new YA book Au Revoir, Crazy European Chick awhile back? Well, its release date is coming very soon, so Joe's publisher put together a book trailer for it. Now, I must admit I'm not a fan of about 99% of the book trailers out there. Most just show floating words and the cover of the book moving back and forth like a ghost across the screen while some strange muzak plays in the background. It helps when you have somewhat of a budget. And, well, Joe's publisher definitely had a budget. Enjoy, and have a great weekend.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehNufCJJ9CA
Catching The Reader Off-Guard
I have a guest post today at Mason Canyon's blog Thoughts in Progress. I talk about catching the reader off-guard and use an example from the great Andre Dumas. Check it out, and if you can think of any times you've been caught off-guard as a reader, feel free to share them in the comments section of either this post or that one.
Hint Fiction At Chestnut Hill Book Festival
Just a reminder that I will be at the Chestnut Hill Book Festival this Sunday afternoon at two o'clock along with anthology contributors John Cashman, Bruce Harris, and Minter Krotzer talking about Hint Fiction. You can view the entire schedule here.
The Serial Killer's Wife has been out for a few weeks now and I haven't really done much promotion on it. For The Calling I did a mini blog tour which helped spread the word. For The Dishonored Dead, I contacted a number of zombie websites about the book, and many of them were open to learning more. But for The Serial Killer's Wife ... there are just so many thriller and crime novels out there that this one sort of gets left behind. Not that it's not selling well so far, but it's difficult to make it stand out among all the rest like I was able to do with The Dishonored Dead. I am, however, stopping by a few blogs to promote the novel in the next couple of weeks, but nothing like I did back in April. I also hope to do another live reading here at this website, which will probably be sometime at the end of the month. In the mean time, look what I got.
One ...
CAIN HAD GIVEN her fifteen minutes to make it to the elementary school, but Elizabeth managed to make it in ten.
Only pausing through stop signs, making every traffic light except one, she was doing nearly fifty in a thirty-five zone when she came around the bend of the development that lead to the school and saw the fire trucks, ambulances, police cars.
The sudden salvo of so many flashing lights caused her heart to skip. She pressed down on the brakes so hard the tires screeched as her Corolla came to a halt. A horn blared behind her and a car swerved past her, its driver shouting at her in frustration.
She glanced in the rearview mirror, conscious now that she wasn’t alone in the world, especially on this street. There was a car farther back coming her way and she hit the gas again, pulling over to the curb.
Her hands shaking, her heart pounding, she turned off the car and got out and hurried toward the large group of mostly children fanned out on the soccer field. Teachers were circulating among the students, and there were a handful of police officers and firemen talking to each other and into radios.
Elizabeth came up to the closest teacher—a young man named Mr. Daniels—and said, her voice a little too rushed, “What happened?”
He stood with his arms crossed, holding a clipboard at his side. He glanced at her, glanced away, then glanced back when he recognized her as a school parent. He looked past her, as if what he had to say was completely confidential, before whispering, “Bomb threat.”
The school itself stood maybe two hundred yards away, all that brick and mortar and glass much too close in the event a bomb really did detonate. There was nothing here to protect the children, nothing at all, but Elizabeth reasoned that there wasn’t a safe place to take them, not here in the middle of this neighborhood, not to shield over five hundred children from an explosion.
“I’m looking for my son,” she said.
The young teacher uncrossed his arms, looked down at his clipboard. “What’s your son’s—”
She was moving before he could finish the question, having spotted Joyce Gibbons, her son’s teacher. Weaving in and out of children, some sobbing, some laughing, she noticed that Joyce was talking with Mrs. Ross, the assistant principal. Mrs. Ross holding the standard school-issue radio in her hand, a big black bulky thing, saying something to Joyce as she pointed across the field toward a row of newly developed houses.
They must have heard her coming, or sensed her, or maybe Mr. Daniels had a radio of his own and warned them of her arrival, because they turned simultaneously, their bodies shifting to greet her.
She said, breathless, “Where’s Matthew?”
The teacher and assistant principal glanced at each other for a moment, long enough for a look of exhaustion to pass between them, Elizabeth no doubt the first in a very long line of parents who would be arriving with demands to see their child.
Then Mrs. Gibbons, a plastic smile on her face, said, “He’s here.”
Relief flooded her at once, her eyes closing, her shoulders lifting as she took in a large gulp of air and released it. She wanted to drop to the ground, scream her frustrations and happiness into the grass, but she managed to stay on her feet, a smile creeping on her face, as she said, “Where is he then? I need to see him.”
Mrs. Gibbons lifted her clipboard, began shuffling papers, Elizabeth noticing from where she stood it was a list of the entire elementary school. Beside each name was a perfectly formed checkmark in blue ink, the pen of which rested in the crook of Mrs. Gibbons’ right ear.
As Joyce Gibbons flipped through the attendance her posture changed. A slight scowl formed on her face. She glanced up at Mrs. Ross, glanced back at the clipboard, then said to the assistant principal, “Maybe he’s with Clark?”
The relief that had so quickly flooded her now dissipated, leaving her dry and hollow, and before Mrs. Ross put the radio to her mouth and asked Clark (the school’s principal) if Matthew Walter was included in his group, Elizabeth knew why Cain had given her the extra time to make it here. He’d wanted her to see the fire trucks and ambulances and police cars, have another panic attack as her imagination threw its worst at her. Then, just as he had planned, she had dived into the sea of students, searching for her son, maybe finding a teacher who would tell her that her son was fine, safe, here with the rest of the students, and that the blessed relief she’d felt for only an instant would pour into her until, when she asked for her son, demanded he be brought to her, she would receive the answer he had known she would, the one that Mrs. Ross, having listened to the radio, now looked at her with just a glance that told her the whole truth:
Her son was missing.