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Order Father of Mine for some post-Super Bowl reading

Football season ends today. It’s depressing.

But think of all the time you’ll have to do other things between now and Labor Day. Here’s one way to fill up a nice little chunk of it — my mob novel, Father of Mine.

It’s set in 1973, in the town where I grew up (Wheeling, West Virginia). It’s loosely based on the crew that ran the town at the time; my dad was on the fringes of it as a bookie.

I haven’t mentioned it here in weeks. Yesterday on X, I posted from the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas a photo of the pinball machine (Yukon) that one of the main characters is playing during a fairly important scene, with no link to the landing page on Amazon or even a pitch to buy it. And the sales shot up dramatically.

Ignoring for now the obvious value of more subtle and indirect marketing, here’s the landing page on Amazon and a pitch to buy it.

After Christmas, I dropped the price of the ebook to $3.99. The paperback is available for $14.99.

I’ve been stunned by the number of people who have ordered it, read it, and enjoyed it. (Critics liked it, too.) After the taping of our joint picks podcast the other night at the Mandalay Bay sportsbook, someone who brought a copy for me to sign started to talk to me about the surprise ending before I reminded him that others in earshot might want to read it.

Hopefully, you’ll want to read it, too. And if you have read or it eventually do, hopefully you’ll like the sequel. It’s currently being re-written to match the narrative style of Father of Mine, which tells the tale from the first-person perspective of several different characters.

The sequel has more action, and the plot is a bit more complicated, with three storylines unfolding two years apart (1973 and 1975) from Wheeling to Arizona to Las Vegas. Also, one of the supporting characters in Father of Mine becomes a major focal point of the sequel.

No more spoilers. Besides, one thing I’ve learned about writing is that everything is subject to change until you send in the final copy. Hopefully, that will happen later this year.

Thanks to those of you who have given my latest hobby a try, whether it’s Father of Mine or On Our Way Home or six or seven others in the pipeline (I’ve lost track of them all.) I’m used to getting plenty of complaints that my football reporting amounts to (fan) fiction, but I’ve gotten hardly any complaints about my actual fiction.

Maybe the universe is telling me something.