Synopsis
Did you ever get so ticked off at someone you wanted to kill them?
Literally?
A spouse, perhaps?
An adversary?
A boss?
Well, K is ticked off. K’s blood is a-boil. K fully intends to commit homicide. More than one, in fact.
What’s it all about?
Love, sure.
Ambition.
Greed.
And let’s not forget revenge. Sweet revenge.
They took away K’s ability to survive. They screwed her over. They robbed her of what she needed to live. To breathe.
And for these sins they will have to pay.
Who will have to pay?
Well, Max, of course, K’s publisher.
And Renee, Max’s hatchet woman.
And perhaps Mary, K’s editor.
Careful Who You Cross, make no mistake, is a story first and foremost of revenge.
Revenge–a terrible human trait. If we could banish it the world would be a far more pleasant and carefree place. But we can’t deny reality. History shows us time and again that revenge lies deeply buried in the human psyche. When crossed we strike back.
K has decided to strike back, in a most ruthless and premeditated manner.
So hold onto your seats, the blood is about to splatter.
Careful Who You Cross–a novel for anyone who has ever wanted revenge.
Author’s View
I got screwed by some people at Bantam Books soon after the arrival of the New Millennium. They promised me the world and then, when their numbers didn’t add up, they threw me out on the street.
Careful Who You Cross is my rebuttal.
It’s a sick, twisted tale of premeditated murder and the day of reckoning.
In my early forties at the time, I had pretty much devoted my vocational life to the art of fiction. I had some nice success with Warner Books in the 90s, built a solid readership, garnered some favorable reviews for my chatty, character-driven novels. I didn’t want fame or wealth, I just wanted to write, tell stories, spin some good yarns.
The writing life. It’s an odd experience in living. You must be all at once both an intense participant and objective observer. No matter what you’re doing–climbing a mountain, greasing an axle, teaching your kid to ride his bike, making love, making art–the writer must immerse himself 100% in the moment to extract from that experience every ounce of its potential. But at that same time the writer must divide himself and find a way to remain aloof so that he can experience the event from as many different points of view as possible.
I have lived my entire adult life in this manner in pursuit of my art. So yeah, I fully admit it, I was plenty pissed off when a few individuals driven by money and ego destroyed my publishing career.
Instead of killing them, as I am not a psychopath but just a guy with a good imagination, I wrote a novel wherein my protagonist did the killing. It was very cathartic. I got my revenge and exorcised all the hate–well, almost all of it–from my system.
Unfortunately, no agent or editor would touch the material so the manuscript has been languishing in my drawer for years. But I’ve recently pulled it out, dusted it off, done some revision, and am now ready to add it to my oeuvre.
Yeah, I got locked out of the mainstream publishing biz over a decade ago, but in many ways it has turned into a good thing. I have kept writing, and I have pursued projects that I likely would not have pursued had I been under contract to write a variation of the same story over and over. I’ve been free to roam the planet and tell whatever stories I desire.
Along the way I have definitely concluded that revenge is bullshit. It solves nothing. It only destroys.
But that said, Careful Who You Cross is a slick tale about a crazy gal who I believe you will find very entertaining.
Let me know.
