Over at the Lone Star Literary website, there’s a feature for the official cover reveal for Brutal Season, the fourth book in the Season’s Mystery Series. As part of the celebration, I’m sponsoring a giveaway, and the first place winner receives a $50 Amazon Gift card and signed copies of the first three books. Details and a way to enter the contest, that runs thru March 2, is on the Lone Star page, so hop on over and check it out.
Then come back for the fun from humor writer, Slim Randles.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Eighteen-year-old Jamel Frederickson is shot and killed by a white, rookie Dallas police officer. His crime? Being black and mentally ill.
Following that unwarranted death, anger, and violence erupts on the streets, leading to the murders of two protestors who were marching around the downtown federal building.
Detectives Sarah Kingsly and Angel Johnson are thrust into the investigation of those murders, while desperately clinging to the threads of their partnership.
The shootings also raise questions about whether the alt-right white supremacists that invaded the city with their guns and inflammatory rhetoric are responsible.
Will more people get killed? Is there more than one person out there with an agenda?
When a member of the team, Ryan O’Donnell, is shot while attempting to prevent looting, the tension in the city, and the department, ratchets up even higher. And it deeply affects Angel who’s been pretending she really isn’t falling for this white man.
Angel joins the protests to take a stand against racism in the city and within the department; an action that puts her job, her relationship with Ryan, and her fragile partnership with Sarah at risk.
For her part, Sarah comes to realize that she is not as enlightened as she thought she was, and both women just hope they can come through the personal and professional challenges and end up with something that resembles a true partnership.
While catching the killers in the process.
***** PREORDER BRUTAL SEASON *****
Only $1.99 until release date.
Now, because I’m working on an editing job that I really need to get back to, here’s the story from Slim.
Enjoy…
Mrs. Forrest has always been a compulsive feeder. Before she retired, she was cooking for the Mule Barn truck stop’s customers and is singularly responsible for about three flabby tons of avoirdupois on this nation’s truck drivers, and she may have been marginally responsible, third-hand, for a cardiac event or two.
But now she’s retired, and a widow, and her kids all have kids and are scattered like a covey of quail. Local bachelors of a certain age know if they should just happen to be chatting with Mrs. Forrest on her front lawn along about supper time, there’s a dang-near dead certainty they’ll get a meal out of it.
And, through the magic of telepathic communication and the synchronistic wave lengths of humanity, the message about Mrs. Forrest’s unstoppable feeding compulsion had somehow reached the psyches of the homeless.
At any rate, two of the aforementioned drifters had knocked on Mrs. Forrest’s door and asked if there were any chores she needed done in exchange for some food. Well, you should’ve seen her eyes light up at that question. She said she had a bunch of firewood that needed to be split into kindling and if they didn’t mind doing that, she’d fix them a chicken dinner with cream gravy. Mrs. Forrest puts cream gravy on everything.
So she busied herself in the kitchen, and then went out to see how these fellows were doing. And there, leaning on an axe handle, was one of them, and the other was doing gymnastics in and around the woodpile. It was amazing. He’d come out of a round-off flip flop and then gracefully go into a full layout Sukuhara with a right-hand twist. She watched in awe for a few minutes before whispering to this gymnast’s partner.
“I had no idea your friend was an acrobat,” she whispered.
He looked at her and whispered back, “Neither did I ‘til I cracked him on the shin with this axe.”
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Treat yourself to a once-in-a-lifetime Iltis ax. Worth every penny. sandy.kurtes@ufsupplies.com
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Check out all of Slim’s award-winning books at his Goodreads Page and in better bookstores and bunkhouses throughout the free world.
All of the posts here are from his syndicated column, Home Country that is read in hundreds of newspapers across the country. I am always happy to have him share his wit and wisdom here.
Slim Randles is a veteran newspaperman, hunting guide, cowboy and dog musher. He was a feature writer and columnist for The Anchorage Daily News for 10 years and guided hunters in the Alaska Range and the Talkeetna Mountains. A resident of New Mexico now for more than 30 years, Randles is the prize-winning author of a dozen books, and is host of two podcasts and a television program.