SECRET BRIEFINGS
Vol. 7 No. 7 Apr. 8, 2025
WHAT I’VE READ
THE SUMMER GUESTS is book 2 of Tess Gerritsen’s Martini Book Club series about a group of ex-CIA who’ve moved to Maine. (The first one was THE SPY COAST.) They read books, accompanied by great food and martinis, reminisce about their former careers, and to the dismay of the local chief of police, chip in to solve murders.
Book 2 features both a current mystery—the disappearance of a young girl—and an old one when skeletal remains are found in a lake where summer guests have their summer houses. Turns out not only some residents are ex-CIA, but some of the summer people as well.
Having spent a good deal of time in New England with my ex, I know New Englanders’ love/hate relationship with tourists and summer people, those who come to small, quaint towns and stay for the summer. The locals love the money that comes in but bristle at the presence of so many strangers. Gerritsen has captured this authentically.
Plus, this is quite a twist-and-turn thriller, and the characters, especially the Martini Book Club members, are so great, you’ll want to join the book club. THE SUMMER GUESTS works as a standalone, but if you want backstory on the Martini Book Club members, you should read THE SPY COAST.
I’m looking forward to more of this series.
APRIL SALE BOOKS
Yes, that’s a lot of books: all four novels in my MEETING THE ENEMY series plus the eBook of the series’ reader magnets AND the paperback of the reader magnets, PROLOGUES.
April is my birthday month (We won’t say which one.), and I like to give presents for my birthday, so here you go.
The five eBooks (TERROR, REVENGE, TREACHERY, RENDITION, and PROLOGUES) are 99¢ each. The PROLOGUES paperback is 50% off—$7.99. You could get the whole bundle for under $13.00. Yes, I’m far too generous for my own authorship good.
This ground-breaking series about 9/11 and its aftermath tells the story of that particular time from a different point of view, and though it is fiction, it draws directly from real events I’ve researched, interviews I’ve conducted, and some of my own personal experience while working then for the FAA.
The sale is on until April 30, and you can find everything HERE.
SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT!
I’m always asked at in-person book events if my books are available as audiobooks. My answer is, “Well, two are.” Up to this point, I haven’t been able to afford ACX (Amazon’s) protocols. I also couldn’t afford to book a professional studio or a professional narrator, and I’d come to accept that the lucrative market of audiobooks wasn’t for me.
Then, I got an email about two weeks ago from Kindle Direct Publishing, the main distributor I use for my eBooks and paperbacks, along with the occasional hard cover. They invited me to beta test Virtual Voice, their AI-driven narrator. I’ve made it clear how I feel about using AI to compose fiction and nonfiction—I’m against it. However, I use AI to create ad copy and social media posts about book sales because I’m lousy at that kind of copywriting.
So, I checked out Virtual Voice. It offers quite a few different types of narrators, male and female, along with regional accents in American English, British English, and Australian English. And they sound almost real.
For a few years now, Alexa has been able to connect to your Kindle Library and “read” your purchased eBooks. The narration from Virtual Voice sounds very similar. However, with Virtual Voice, you can listen to how your book sounds before you publish and edit words that the computer doesn’t pronounce properly, an issue for me since I have a lot of Russian words and names. You can even switch narrators by chapter, if you want. And Virtual Voice’s algorithm takes into account punctuation and mood and attempts to infuse the narration with emotion. That works most of the time.
After a lot of soul-searching about using AI, mainly because Virtual Voice does take a job away from a professional narrator (which I can’t afford, remember), I decided to try one novel, LOVE DEATH. I was pleasantly surprised with the result after I corrected pronunciations.
You can purchase these audiobooks, which are clearly marked as being narrated by Virtual Voice, as stand-alones or as add-ons when you purchase the same eBook. I’ve tried to price the stand-alones between $4.99 and $6.99, and the add-on purchase is $1.99. All Virtual Voice audiobooks are available at Audible.
So, here are my “new” audiobooks available so far:
Up next will be SPY FLASH II and SPY FLASH III. After that? I’ll work my way through my backlist.
Oh, and if you’re a Prime member, you can listen to any of these for free. I wish you’d give one or two a try and tell me what you think.
WORK IN PROGRESS UPDATE
THE DEVIL PASSED BY, my spy novel about an early mission in Northern Ireland near the beginning of Mai Fisher’s and Alexei Bukharin’s partnership, is still with beta readers. I’ve gotten general feedback from two of them, and so far all is positive. Whew!
I hope to get more specific feedback by mid-May then get a self-edited manuscript to my editor by mid-June. So far, a late-summer or early-fall release is looking doable.
More to come!
FREE EXCERPTS!
Yes, the plural is correct. This week’s featured book from the April sale is book 2, REVENGE, and its reader magnet, PROLOGUE TO REVENGE. So, here’s a short excerpt from each.
PROLOGUE TO REVENGE
Chapter 8
Sergei lay beneath the light in a body bag unzipped to his waist. He’d been washed, his hair combed. His skin was stark white against the black of the rubber bag. He seemed to be sleeping, a common ascription to the dead. Alexei sat in a folding chair by the table. He wore a Soviet Arctic parka against the artificial cold and swigged from a bottle of vodka.
In death, Sergei looked much better than his living half-brother. Alexei hadn’t shaved in days, he was still unwashed and grimy, and his eyes looked sunken in black holes. She could smell that he reeked of sweat and dried blood. Bloodshot and bleary, his eyes looked at her and registered nothing.
The table with Sergei’s body formed a barrier between them, but her gaze was drawn to Sergei’s face. Sergei was handsome in a way different from Alexei; dark not fair, nothing Mongol about him, unlike Alexei’s eyes.
Death had wiped every care from Sergei’s face, made him look like a teenager, though he was only four years younger than Alexei. On the table also lay a Makarov pistol.
A scene, she decided, from a bad movie.
REVENGE
Chapter 1
But for his eye color and not speaking the language, he might have passed for an Afghani.
Bandoleers with grenades dangling like trophies criss-crossed his chest. A long-dead ancestor of his would have adorned his saddle with the skulls of his defeated enemies; a few centuries later, another would have worn black and had a dog’s head dangling from his saddle.
But he had no need for history right now. Now, he had but one enemy in mind whose blood would stain his clothes and hands.
He sat cross-legged, AK-47 balanced on his knees, his hands resting on it with familiarity. This was a gun he knew intimately from his time as a Red Army conscript. He had extra magazines for it slung in an old Red Army knapsack.
All this window dressing made him feel like a different man; in truth, he was not the man he’d been. That man had shared a home and a life with a woman he loved. That woman had been ripped from him, taking his soul with her. Not the first time he’d lost a wife. He’d lost his first one to Soviet negligence when he was nineteen. Nearly forty years later, he’d lost the second one, the restorer of his soul.
Never again would he love. The price was too high.