I'd planned to spend a couple of hours finishing up on Deadly Sting this morning. Karen finished her wonderful cover (below) a few minutes after I left for my Oklahoma City bridge tournament, so that was ready, and Michael Paulson had agreed to the final edits shortly before I left as well. As always, things take longer than they possibly could. Each format has its own little ideocyncracies--like the HTML conversion tool I use barfing over Word's condense elipsses (...) and having to do a search and replace. My scheduling wasn't helped by a real estate agent wanting to show our house (Karen and I walked out and got caramel sundaes while we waited for the showing to end). Still, at 6:30 this evening, I completed the process and electronically published DEADLY STING.

Karen and I went out to Fudruckers for date night. Maybe not the most romantic or highest class place, but we broke Da Vinci (the cockatiel)'s water feeder and Fudruckers is right next to Petsmart. We bought a water feeder a Wal-Mart last night, but Karen thought it was really designed for smaller birds and was concerned Da Vinci wouldn't be able to handle it very well. Anyway, now we have two. Afterwards, I wrote a review of T. Jefferson Parker's solid THE RENEGADES (www.booksforabuck.com/mystery/mys_09/renegades.html).

I'm going to make DEADLY STING the www.BooksForABuck.com. Private detective Deacon Bishop is back--charged with the easy task of following a woman from the airport to wherever she goes and then reporting her location to a shady lawyer. Bishop can't resist sticking his nose in--and discovered a web of murder, organized cirme, terrorism, and honeybees. Paulson always writes with a delightful hard-boiled style and DEADLY STING is a welcome addition to the Deacon Bishop series. For the next month, only (until June 19), it'll be on promotional sale for only a buck (regular price--$3.99). Available in HTML, Adobe Acrobat PDF, eReader (Palm Reader), Mobipocket, Microsoft Reader, Sony Reader and ePub formats. Here's the link: www.booksforabuck.com/mystery/mys_09/deadly_sting.html. Here's the cover (cover design by Karen Leabo:

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