ANDREW BISS

Today my new novella A Mouth Full of Ashes became available for purchase on Amazon's Kindle store. The book is something of a departure for me, so I'll be interested to see what sort of reaction it gets. The description is below. If you have a Kindle or Kindle App and would like a free copy, I'm gifting copies to the first 10 people who'd like one. Just send me your email address to info[at]andrewbiss[dot]com. Overview: A young student is brutally raped and murdered. Her parents, Tom and Christine, are now confronted with the daunting task of processing their grief and attempting to come to terms with the horror that befell their child. The paths they take in doing so, however, couldn't be starker in contrast. Christine has withdrawn into a deadened world of suppressed rage and bitterness that has left her incapable of seeing beyond the terrible tragedy that has visited her. Her husband, Tom, on the other hand, has taken the unusual step of publicly ann...

In a few days from now I’ll be releasing my new book “A Mouth Full of Ashes” and I’d like to share with you how this story came about. A couple of years or so ago, I came upon a news story that grabbed my attention in a way that many others don’t. It involved a murder, but of course we read about murder, death, and all manner of tragic events on a daily basis. We read them, lament them, and then move on. This one, however, had a different angle to it that gripped my imagination. In a small town somewhere in the Midwest (I believe) a young pastor was delivering his Sunday sermon to his congregation. A young man with no associations to either the town or the pastor drove into town that morning, walked into the church and shot the pastor dead in the middle of his sermon. It was one of those inexplicable, mindless, random and tragic events that defy reason. The pastor was married and had two young girls who would now grow up without a father. Fast forward just a week or two ...

If you don't, you can get one for just 99c (or about 64p ) in the Kindle Store. Yes, that's right, another short story release from the upcoming collection Strange Tales of the Curiously Uncommon is available now. Don't delay! The complete collection should be released before the end of the month, or early February at the latest. Now, one of my New Year's resolutions was not to shill my books so much on my blog, so having gotten that out of the way... Random thoughts: As of the 15th day of this New Year, we've had 22 murders here in the fair city of Philadelphia. We average around the same number of murders as there are days in a calendar year, so we're off to a bad start. To give some kind of comparison, London, with an urban population of around 8.5 million people has an average of 171 murders a year. The urban population of Philadelphia is about 0.5 million. Yes, it's that bad. There's a reason we have acquired the unfortunate nickname of Killadelp...