Self-Publishing

#862: “All roads lead to death. Don’t let anyone tell you differently.” – The 5 False Suicides (2021) by James Scott Byrnside

/ JJ / 29 Comments

I haven’t pursued any Adventures in Self-Publishing, in which I read and review self-published works featuring impossible crimes, since October 2020. Well, the good news is that James Scott Byrnside, star pupil of the AiSP Academy, released his fourth book in December 2021, and so now we can saddle up the horse again and get adventurin’.

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#708: Adventures in Self-Publishing – Ill Wind (2020) by Jean Heller

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Recently, while recording an episode of the rightly-popular Shedunnit podcast, I was moved to lament the decline in quality represented by most modern attempts at the impossible crime in fiction (and, for all I know, in reality, too). Today’s self-published crime novel, Ill Wind (2020) by Jean Heller, perhaps demonstrates the reasons for that decline better than I’ve previously managed myself.

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#672: Adventures in Self-Publishing – Murder by Magic (2017) by Paul Tomlinson

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Murder by Magic

Typical, eh?  You wait years for a blog to talk about magic, and then suddenly three posts come along at once: the most recent In GAD We Trust episode with John Norris, and two self-published impossible crime stories — one this week, and one next.  Sure, that’s stretching the definition of “at once” to an Orwellian degree, but that’s how I apparently roll.

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#669: Adventures in Self-Publishing – Murder in a Watched Room (2019) by A.G. Barnett

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Murder in a Watched Room

My previous encounter with A.G. Barnett’s self-published impossible crime fiction was An Invitation to Murder (2019), which saw an interesting-if-cozy impossible battering in a locked room lose points for drawing attention to the one detail it then failed to explain.  But, everyone gets two books, and so we’re back, this time with a different series and a stabbing in a locked and watched room.

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#666: Adventures in Self-Publishing – The Thirteenth Apostle (2020) + ‘The Episode of the Nine Monets’ (2020) by Jamie Probin

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Thirteenth Apostle, The

There’s a quote attributed to Michaelangelo essentially stating that a statue already exists inside a block of stone and it’s merely the sculptor’s job to chip away the stone that isn’t part of the resulting artwork.  This came to mind a lot whilst reading The Thirteenth Apostle (2020) by Jamie Probin, because if you remove the excess of nervous repetition and tedious tone setting there’s probably a great book in here somewhere.

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