HISSMELINA Goes Live!

My newest novel, HISSMELINA has just gone live on Kindle. It's also available on Smashwords, etc.

The trade paperback will be available very soon. Basically as soon as the proof is approved as print-ready!

I think I've talked about the book's history here before. HISSMELINA was my first good novel. That is, I'd written novels before, but this was the first one where I had reached a point where I knew what I was doing. More than that, I'd created really good characters. My heroes were flawed--not completely good, of course, and filled with doubts. My villains here are not completely evil. Almost no one thinks of themselves as "evil", and I went out of my way to make sure that my antagonists were human.

The book attracted the attention of a major league agent when I was a young man and he came very close to selling it on two occasions. Alas, the deals could never be finalized and I was cut loose from the agency. But I'm not the type to give up. I'm the fellow who once sold a story that had been rejected for almost twenty years before it finally saw print in a major anthology. If I see merit in a work I keep at it.

So it was with HISSMELINA. I rewrote it a number of times, ending up with the manuscript that you will read if you purchase the book from Amazon in either of its formats. After almost three decades of journeys through various agents' doors, editor's hoops, and many revisions, at last it sees print.

"Smith writes with a brisk intensity that goes for the throat." Scott Nicholson, Liquid Fear