Friday, April 13, 2012

Now Available: NIGHT SPOOR

Okay, boys and girls, now for something completely (well, almost) different from yours truly ... In a nutshell, this is the tale of a cynical, methodical hit man hired to kill a vampire. In the beginning he scoffs at the whole vampire thing but, for the right price, he'll do a hit on anybody and if the person paying him wants to pretend it's a vampire he could care less ... until, that is, he is forced to face the fact there ARE such things as vampires! Then it becomes a matter of who is the deadliest killer stalking the night ...
 
I started writing this book about ten years ago. It was a pretty low time in (what I laughingly call) my writing career. I had a Joe Hannibal novel in the hopper that nobody seemed interested in, and wasn't feeling particularly motivated to put effort into much else.
Then, for whatever reason, I got the notion to try something totally different. Although I never got caught up in the subsequent TV series and so forth, I was always a big fan of the original NIGHT STALKER made-for-TV movie and the novel it was based on. I liked the hardboiled crime novel approach (through the eyes of Kolchak, a world-weary newspaper reporter) to the vampire-horror legend and thought it might be something I'd like to try. I give full credit to being inspired by NIGHT STALKER.
At first, I planned to use a hardboiled PI (something I felt comfortable with) as the protagonist going up against a vampire. Somewhere along the way, I forget exactly why, I switched to a tough, cynical hit man (named Pitcairn) getting hired to dispatch the bloodsucker. It picked up momentum from there. I wrote six or seven chapters that felt pretty good, but then lost interest and just left it hanging fire.
Jump ahead to late 2010, after I'd gone into retirement from my full-time job in the real world and thereby found my writing output and enthusiasm ramped up considerably. I dusted off the NIGHT SPOOR manuscript, read through what I'd written so far, and decided I liked it well enough to go ahead and complete it. The result is the Kindle (soon also to be in print) novel just released from Rebecca J. Vickery Publishing.
It has grittiness, action, suspense, a healthy dose of sex, and also a thread of enduring love and genuine romance at its core.
It's a change-of-pace for me, one I hope you'll give a try. If you do, I think you'll like it.
 
Persevere --- WD
 
P.S. NIGHT SPOOR also has one of the coolest covers of any of my books. As I was writing it, I envisioned a thirtyish Elizabeth Taylor (at her most beautiful and sensual) as Lenore, the vampire who is the main focus of the whole book. Laura Shinn, cover editor at RVB, did a great job of capturing my vision. Just to give you a better appreciation than the limited Amazon capture can convey, here is this:
 
 
 

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