Hi, all. Yup, February has been awful so far. Thankfully there are only another two weeks, and then…dare we hope… spring will be around the corner? Let’s make it so.
Until that happens, though, I want to tell you about a couple of Valentine’s Day offers you might enjoy while you’re staying put. They’re both decidely historical.
War, Spies, and Bobby Sox: Stories About WW2 on the Homefront
Some of you know I’m an avid reader of WW2 books. I firmly believe that’s the last time we fought a war with such clarity. We knew who the bad guys were, and we were the good guys. It seems as if WW2 lit never goes out of style, so years ago when a friend asked me what I was going to contribute, I doubted I could possibly add anything to the incredible work that’s already been written.
Then one day I was in exercise class, and one of the women starting talking about a German POW camp that was only half a mile away. “What POW camp?” I asked, but my brain was already churning. That afternoon I visited the site – it’s part of the Forest Preserve now – but an idea came to me. After much research (there is a guy whose specialty is digging around the sites of POW camps in Illinois, which goes to show there’s always somebody doing research on something we writers need to know) I wrote “P.O.W.”
But that was a novella, not a novel. I’d written it to see if I could actually produce something worthwhile about the era. A week later another idea came to me about a German refugee forced to spy on the early years of the Manhattan Project in Chicago. That produced “The Incidental Spy,” another novella. Which also took a lot of research into splitting atoms and nuclear energy, but for me, that’s the fun part.
Since both stories were set on the “Homefront,” I decided to include “The Day Miriam Hirsch Disappeared” as well. Although it’s a prequel to the Ellie Foreman series, it’s really about WW2 in Chicago when the German Bund was popular.
I bundled them all together into a trio of stories called War, Spies, and Bobby Sox. Some of you might have read it; most of you probably haven’t. So the good news it’s that it’s reduced to 99¢ all week starting today through Friday, February 19. You can grab it on Amazon in the UK, Australia, India, or Canada. And the US, of course.
Wanna see the trailer? Here you go:
The Other Offering: Set The Night on Fire
Set the Night on Fire , originally published in 2010, turned out to be a much more personal thriller than I expected. The story takes us back, in part, to the late Sixties in Chicago. I was in DC but I know the times well. The premise is that a young woman is being stalked in the present. As she becomes more and more desperate to find out who’s wants her dead and why, she discovers information that her parents were not the people she thought they were. We then revisit 1968-1970 to find out who her parents were and why the secret was kept from her. It turned out to be part love story, part thriller, part historical novel.
A lot of my personal life at the time is woven through it. I was pretty happy with the result. Apparently, others loved it too. Lee Child blurbed it, and the reviews were excellent. You can see some of them in the book trailer.
It’s not discounted, BUT… I would love to have some honest reviews in the next few weeks, so if you’re interested in reviewing it, contact me at lfh@libbyhellmann.com
First come, first serve. I have a few audio codes also that work in the EU and the UK as well as the US. So let me know which format you want.
Finally, have a lovely chocolate-filled Valentine’s Day.
Libby