Update: Trouble at Christmas Promotion at Amazon: 0,99 => 0,00 (For FREE)

For a limited time, you can buy Trouble at Christmas Kindle book for 0,00 USD (yes, for free).
From today April 13 until April 17 2014 the promotion is available.


If you liked Trouble at Christmas, why not check out "Troubleshooter", too? Also available on Amazon or all other eTailers.

Trouble at Christmas "Cracking" the top-ten!!!

Fantastic - the promotion for Trouble at Christmas catapulted the eBook into the Top 10 for short story mysteries! 

Out Now: Trouble at Christmas - a Troubleshooter Novella

A small experiment, a marketing vehicle and... a nice little story. A follow up novella of Troubleshooter is now out on Kindle / Amazon, available in all Amazon markets.

Price is 0.99 USD or local equivalents.

Former elite-soldier-turned-accountant Paul Trouble is prepared for a good time spent reconnecting with friends and family at his father’s ranch in Welcome, Montana. But very soon, Paul discovers that things are not what they seem and that a peaceful holy night is clearly not in the stars. A neighborhood feud is endangering the family, so Paul unwraps his trusted set of Marine Special Forces skills and sets out to investigate. 

Serendipendy - Brilliant Plan

A Barnes & Noble reader gave me a one-star review because he/she felt I ripped off my first book Calendar Moonstone's "A Brilliant Plan" from the works of an author called Marne Davis Kellogg.  I honestly had never heard of her and looked her up and read up on one of her story snippets published on her author-webpage.

 And indeed, the first installment of Mrs. Kellog's series is called "Brilliant" and the heroine is a part-time jewelry burglar with a regular job in the art world  (auctioneer?). 

Yes, so small the literary world is. But I can assure you guys, it is definitely not a rip-off! "The Brilliant Plan" Calendar Moonstone setup had evolved from three major influences:

• The Hitchcock movie "To Catch A Thief" - I loved watching this movie as a child, hot summer evenings and a great movie on the tube...
• Sydney Sheldon's "Tomorrow Never Comes" - Banker turned jewelry thief, hunted by insurance agent (wait! another rip-off) in a sort of Monte Christo revenge story (wait! Sheldon ripped-off Dumas!)
• Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum novels - this is probably the weakest link and the weakest developed but from a speed, humor and tone this is what I aspire with this series. Well, maybe one gear longer on screwball situations and one gear faster on story-twists.

Cover Preview "Trouble at Christmas - A Troubleshooter Novella"

And here the exclusive preview of my "Trouble at Christmas" cover. I will still fine-tune it as I am not happy with the alpha-channels of the Christmas tree branch; my evaluation copy of Photoshop ran out and Powerpoint's functionality is unusable for such fragile graphic with all the needles and their backdrop. Intention was to have a design compatible cover to the first "Troubleshooter" novel, the next one will then probably be black or dark blue.

"Trouble at Christmas" will continue Paul Trouble's adventures right from the point where "Troubleshooter" left off, with Paul visiting his Dad in the USA for Christmas holidays. It is not a full novel (if I remember correctly "Troubleshooter had about 70.000 words where "Christmas" has about 13.000) and it will be published under the "Novella" label that Amazon has used in the past for a lot of premium writer's short stories.  (My favorite one: The Second Son by Lee Child).

Right after the break - Updates

Been silent on the blog for a month, writing on more important things. I am still on my first pass for my German pirate story (mainly I write that one for my kids, and I want to be done with it while they are still in the right readers age). My train commute to and from work allows me to write on the less difficult scenes for 20 minutes each way. Those 20 minutes result in about 400 words of progress, twice a day.

The evenings had belonged the last month for the Troubleshooter backstory novella "Trouble at Christmas". Finished third review last Tuesday and shipped it off to the editor. If all goes well, I can put it up on Amazon KDP Select at the end of the month (main competitor for time is my tight travel schedule that will bring me into the three global centers of London, Paris and New York).