My new novel, The Unforgiving Town, is officially out today, April 7. This book is my 18th, but the excitement of publishing has not lessened. Bring on the readers, I say with hope in my heart.
This book is a sequel to The Sacred Dog, one of my hilltown books. Many of its characters appear in The Unforgiving Town. A few don’t. There are new ones. And unlike the first book, the sequel is a thriller mystery.
I began writing The Unforgiving Town in late October 2023. I was feeling a little lost after sending Missing the Deadline, no. 7 in my Isabel Long Mystery Series, to my publisher, darkstroke books. So, I decided to get cracking on another.
I was intrigued whether people living in a small town could bring themselves to forgive a man, Al Kitchen, who committed a horrible crime and was recently released from prison after 17 years. No, of course, they couldn’t. The victim was a man they all liked.
Al had nowhere else to go but the same town where it happened. It didn’t matter that he had changed into a better person while he was locked up.
The story moved along. And then at 25,000 words, I realized I had reached an impasse. Huh? But I saw the book’s potential, so I put it aside and began Finding the Source, the eighth in the series.
Then sadly, darkstroke books, which published eleven of my books, announced in May 2024 it would be closing at the end of September. Bloodhound Books reached out to publish the first three in my mystery series but took a pass on the others. That meant I needed to republish eight books. I did it myself, learning how to format for Kindle and paperback— a valuable although time-consuming experience. My artist son, Ezra Livingston, became my cover designer. I also published three books: Finding the Source, The Swanson Shuffle, The Twin Jinn and the Alchemy Machine, plus the audiobook for Professor Groovy and Other Stories.
But The Unforgiving Town never left me. When I returned to it last year, I was again living among the residents of Holden, one of my fictional hilltowns of Western Mass. A big help was changing the first chapter into a far more dramatic start — Al’s dead body is found on a country road. In the second chapter, I go back a week to when he arrives home.
The rest of the book flowed into what I believe is a great read. I hope you agree.
Here’s the link to The Unforgiving Town. You don’t have to read The Sacred Dog first since both stand on their own, but here’s the link to that one. Thank you if you read one or both. Please leave a review if you are inspired.