Category: mystery

Teaser Tuesday 4/30/2013: Toby Streams the Universe

~ James Viscosi ~ 1 Comment

This week’s free book is Toby Streams the Universe, by Maya Lassiter, in which a psychic (the titular Toby, looking like a PhotoShop mashup of Elijah Wood and Tobey Maguire on the cover) who is increasingly unable to control his visions attempts to help his private investigator friend solve cases, prevent his sister (also a psychic) from killing herself, find his missing father, protect his new neighbor from an abusive ex-husband, keep his family’s finances afloat by reading the minds of stockbrokers, change the dark future that awaits various friends, relatives, and acquaintances, and avoid going insane. All while living in New York City. So what have you done lately?

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Teaser Tuesday 10/23/2012: “Bad Juju and Other Tales of Madness and Mayhem”

~ James Viscosi ~ 1 Comment

So my quest to save money continues this week with Bad Juju and Other Tales of Madness and Mayhem, a collection of short stories by Jonathan Woods. It’s sort of like what you might get if Joe R. Lansdale, Elmore Leonard, and Carl Hiaasen spent the night together drinking and trying to top each other with crazy stories about life in an unnamed Caribbean republic. For some reason, the setting keeps making me think of a much, much seedier version of Catalina Island, probably because that’s the only island I visit on any sort of regular basis.

As Ariel’s hands grabbed my throat, I kneed him in the jewels as hard as I could. The next instant he was writhing on the floor like a dying insect.

Oh, ouch. I’ve got nothing to add to that one!

And, of course, here is this week’s excerpt from The War of the Ravels, my current work in progress:

The sun lay very near the horizon now, thick and red, coloring the sky with swirls of angry color. The bottom of the chasm became obscured by a thick layer of luminous fog that oozed up from the sea, as if someone had dumped a massive quantity of dry ice into the water and then lit it from below with flood lamps.

Hmm, that can’t be good …

Teaser Tuesday: 7/31/2012

~ James Viscosi ~ 1 Comment

It’s time for another Teaser Tuesday! I’m still in the middle of the Merrily Watkins mystery The Secrets of Pain. (I didn’t get a lot of reading done this week). Here, Merrily is visiting a bed and breakfast looking for clues to a mysterious death, as one does when one is the first female exorcist in England …

Liz took Merrily upstairs, where there were five bedrooms off the landing, the doors of all of them hanging open. A scent of fresh linen and a light musk from a dish of potpourri on a window sill.

At least it’s fresh linen rather than a face of crumpled linen this time.

And, of course, here’s todays bonus teaser from The War of the Ravels:

It was about the width of her hand, and taller than she was, with three horizontal openings at various spots along its length. If she could make herself thin enough, she could sidle through it, drop to the courtyard on the other side, and find her way out from there.

Like Wallis Simpson said, you can never be too rich or too thin. Especially when you’re trying to escape though an arrow slit.

Short Story: The Patter of Little Feet

~ James Viscosi ~ 2 Comments

No random rejections, reviews, or scans of early childhood scribblings this week — it’s the last day of my vacation! But rather than let Sunday go home empty-handed from Scribblings, here’s a randomly selected short story from the unpublished archives. Any resemblance to Night at the Museum is purely coincidental, as this story predates it by many years; any resemblance to the “Zuni Fetish Doll” episode of the old Trilogy of Terror television movie, on the other hand, is less coincidental, although I play the scenario more for comedy than for horror.

One interesting thing about this story is its reliance on the Internet for a few plot points, making it probably one of the first stories I wrote that did so.  Another issue that befell this story is that, as I used to do with all my books and stories, it was originally stored in Microsoft Binder format — a format that has since been abandoned.  Although there is an extractor that is supposed to be able to pull the contents of a Binder file out into their component files, it didn’t work all that well on this file, and I was forced to reconstruct it by looking at the binary (gibberish-filled) Binder file itself, and piece the story together that way.  I think I got all of it, but I’m not completely sure (although I do know that the ending that’s there is original and complete). The moral of this story is to be wary of weird minor proprietary file formats, or else to make sure you always keep (and can run) a copy of the original software that created the files.

And now for our feature presentation, “The Patter of Little Feet”!

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