Sam Reaves's Blog
November 3, 2024
Stalking Horse
Sometimes it takes a while…
Thirty years ago I was a young writer just trying to learn the business. (Now, of course, I’m an old writer still trying to learn the business.) In 1994 Putnam had published my first four novels, a crime series featuring a Chicago taxi driver named Cooper MacLeish. The first book, A Long Cold Fall, was never intended to be a series; I thought I was writing a stand-alone. Putnam asked if I could make it a series, and of course I said yes. Thus was born what has been called a hard-boiled amateur sleuth series. Cooper was a tough, jaded Vietnam vet with a hard core of integrity and a nose for trouble.
The four books didn’t set any sales records. Putnam didn’t want a fifth. Unfortunately, they didn’t tell me this until I’d put nearly a year’s work into that fifth book. Undaunted, I wrote it off and moved on, writing the first of my international thrillers under the name Dominic Martell.
That fifth Cooper novel has sat collecting dust (literally; all I had was a paper manuscript) for thirty years. This summer the light bulb finally went off above my head: why not self-publish it? I’d gotten the rights back to the first four books and brought them out as e-books in 2016; it was time to round out the series by bringing out the never-published Last and Final Cooper Book. I have done some editing (you do learn a few things in thirty years), but I haven’t updated it. The book is firmly set in the mid-90s like the rest of the series, still anchored in the pre-cell phone/internet world.
So here it is. Stalking Horse finds Cooper out of the cab and running his own private limo service, while his wife Diana is in grad school at U. of C. Her new best friend is classmate Isabel Albala, the wife of a high-powered corporate lawyer. A stalker is making Isabel’s life miserable, and of course, Cooper has to get involved. And we are off to the races.
The book is available on pre-order on Kindle and Nook, with a launch date of Black Friday, November 29. For those who are not familiar with the series, I’m offering the first book, A Long Cold Fall, for 99¢ up through the end of the year.
Thirty years ago I was a young writer just trying to learn the business. (Now, of course, I’m an old writer still trying to learn the business.) In 1994 Putnam had published my first four novels, a crime series featuring a Chicago taxi driver named Cooper MacLeish. The first book, A Long Cold Fall, was never intended to be a series; I thought I was writing a stand-alone. Putnam asked if I could make it a series, and of course I said yes. Thus was born what has been called a hard-boiled amateur sleuth series. Cooper was a tough, jaded Vietnam vet with a hard core of integrity and a nose for trouble.
The four books didn’t set any sales records. Putnam didn’t want a fifth. Unfortunately, they didn’t tell me this until I’d put nearly a year’s work into that fifth book. Undaunted, I wrote it off and moved on, writing the first of my international thrillers under the name Dominic Martell.
That fifth Cooper novel has sat collecting dust (literally; all I had was a paper manuscript) for thirty years. This summer the light bulb finally went off above my head: why not self-publish it? I’d gotten the rights back to the first four books and brought them out as e-books in 2016; it was time to round out the series by bringing out the never-published Last and Final Cooper Book. I have done some editing (you do learn a few things in thirty years), but I haven’t updated it. The book is firmly set in the mid-90s like the rest of the series, still anchored in the pre-cell phone/internet world.
So here it is. Stalking Horse finds Cooper out of the cab and running his own private limo service, while his wife Diana is in grad school at U. of C. Her new best friend is classmate Isabel Albala, the wife of a high-powered corporate lawyer. A stalker is making Isabel’s life miserable, and of course, Cooper has to get involved. And we are off to the races.
The book is available on pre-order on Kindle and Nook, with a launch date of Black Friday, November 29. For those who are not familiar with the series, I’m offering the first book, A Long Cold Fall, for 99¢ up through the end of the year.
