BESTSELLERS & BEST FRIENDS
My book publishing blog, with murder mysteries woven through it.
If this is your first visit, be sure to start with “1. Let’s do it!”
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Geez, as if things don’t suck enough, pissed-off-Einstein guy commented on yesterday’s posting: “Your joke sucks. I’d pay that loser writer $3,000 just to kill you.”
At times, pissed-off-Einstein guy does make me nervous. Like now, when every time I close my eyes, I see that bloody bookstore floor in Ligonier. Geez, just give the Einstein crap a break!
Anyway, I’m back to New York and I don’t know what to write!
My head spins.
I keep looking at the “Fuck you, Brallier” Post-it note I quietly pocketed. (Or, in other words, “I keep looking at the evidence I wrongly lifted from a murder scene.”)
Deep breath, deep breath.
Think about it. It’s insane!
There’s a once-every-50-years-murder in Ligonier.
My favorite bookseller is killed—maybe somehow because of one budget meeting in Boston 35 years ago that caused James Doyle to publish an imperfect book.
And how the hell do those things connect if there’s really a connection?
Me and...
a bookstore in a little town of 1,500 where...
I just happened to be for 48 hours to visit old friends.
Next to the murdered body are three books I helped publish decades ago,
plus a revised manuscript for a long-ago published book,
with a threatening note to me.
How does all of that somehow happen?
It’s gotta be James Doyle, right?
Those three books laying in Laurie’s blood—the very authors he screamed about at me outside Little Brown on Boston’s Beacon Street years ago.
On the Post-it, the same threatening words he cursed me with that day.
(Jackie, are you reading this blog? It’s all nuts, right? What do you think? DM me. Please.)
And there’s the “final draft” manuscript on display at Laurie’s bookstore. The very thing it was rumored Doyle was working on.
I’ve Googled for hours. Doyle seems to have disappeared after teaching a writing class at Butler Community College early last year. Butler is north of Pittsburgh. A very doable drive to Ligonier. Oh boy.
I make a stiff drink.
I want a cigarette, damn it.
How in the hell would Doyle know—
Hold on!
Tomorrow: Doyle must be reading this blog!