Teaser Tuesday 6/11/13: “The Last Kind Words”

Since last week I featured a rejection letter from Tom Piccirilli’s old magazine “Pirate Writings”, I was inspired to get around to reading his book The Last Kind Words (currently available for the Kindle for $0.99). I haven’t read any of Tom Piccirilli’s work since A Choir of Ill Children, which is one of my favorite book names, though All Heads Turn When The Hunt Goes By still holds the position of Best Title Ever. But I digress.

The Last Kind Words is about a man who returns to his childhood home to investigate his spree-killer brother’s claim that he did not commit one of the crimes, and that the real killer is still on the loose and still at work. Is the brother telling the truth? I have no idea, since I literally just started the book. But knowing Piccirilli, I’ll be disappointed if anything I expect to happen actually does.

I’d come five years and two thousand miles to stand in the rain while they prepared my brother for his own murder.

Murder, execution — potato, po-TAH-to. Side note: Every member of the central family of thieves and burglars is named after a breed of dog. So far we have Collie, Terrier, Pinscher, Malamute, Greyhound, Shepherd, and Airedale. I’m still waiting to see if they have a Hungarian cousin named Vizsla. (The name of the actual family dog is, for some reason, “John F. Kennedy”.)

There’s evidently also a movie called “The Last Kind Words“, which as far as I can tell is completely unrelated to the book. The movie stars Brad Dourif, who may at this point be most famous for portraying Grima Wormtongue in “The Two Towers”, but who to me will always be Luther Lee Boggs from the classic X-Files episode “Beyond the Sea“. I don’t know what role Brad Dourif plays in the film, but I’m guessing it’s not “perfectly normal harmless guy who lives across the street”.

And of course here’s this week’s teaser from The War of the Ravels! Since we’re getting down to the end of the first draft (or rather, the first revised draft of the original final draft from close to 20 years ago), it’s becoming somewhat difficult to avoid …

But I’ll see what I can do!

The witch-queen must have her own affinity with the jewel; if Kihantroh reached out to it, perhaps she hoped to ride that conduit into the Heart and retake possession. Which, surprising as it was for Mercy to realize, could only be worse than letting Kihantroh retain it.

But what would be best would be if Mercy took it away from both of them.

You know how they say “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”? Turns out they’re wrong.