You Can't Please Everybody

One of the advantages of doing a promotion with BookBub is the big boost in reader reviews that come after the promo. My first experience was with Designed to Kill, the second book in my Greg McKenzie Mysteries series. After it appeared for three days as a freebie for the Kindle, reviews tripled to 63. Happily they include 33 5-star and 17 4-star entries.

My second BookBub promo was for The Marathon Murders, book four in the series. It ran free for three days during the last week in October. In a little less than two weeks, reader reviews have climbed from 20 to 33. Again, favorable reviews predominate, with 20 5-stars and 9 4-stars. Checking through the list, though, I found an interesting phenomenon.

As you have probably noticed, Amazon includes a line at the bottom of each review that says "Was this review helpful to you?" It's followed by "yes" and "no" buttons. By far the majority of reviews have nothing checked in that department. Of the 4 and 5-star ratings, only a handful had anything checked, with one 5-star showing 9 of 10 people found it helpful and one 4-star showing 8 of 9 people found it helpful.

But for the 3-star ratings (2), one listed 35 of 39 people found it helpful and the other 13 of 16 the same. For the 2-star ratings (2), one listed 20 of 25 found it helpful, the other 18 of 25. It would appear that some people just look for low-ranking reviews as an excuse for not reading a book, regardless of the opinions of the vast majority. What I found really striking are the contrasts between reviews that run next to each other.

Here's the first 2-star review under the heading "mediocre":

"This started out well, but it went on too long. After a while, the author's style became annoying. I did finish it, but I won't pick this author again."

The review that followed is a 5-star under the heading "Great read!":

"Very well written story. Hard to put down. Excellent read. The story moved along at a fast pace that made it a pleasure to read."

Here's the other 2-star that appears in the midst of five 5-star reviews:

"Picked this up thinking it might be a good read and quality characters to follow in his other books. I'm an avid reader of suspense novels (military, police, espionage and so on)and enjoy repeat characters in an on-going series of novels. This book (and the characters) failed to deliver. Marginal at best. The writing style was amateurish compared to what I normally read. It's as if the book was written for high school students as reading material. The chapters were kept short. The story plodded along and never gained any traction. Basically a 'simple' book. Sorry, but I wont be spending any more time with Mr Campbell."

I find it quite interesting the way different people react to reading the same book. Just goes to prove the old saying that "you can't please everybody." But as long as I'm pleasing 29 out of 33 (almost 90 percent), I'm happiy.

The Accidental Novelist

I suppose I should be called the accidental novelist. Unlike many of my writing colleagues, I never penned stories as a kid or spent hours at the library checking out children's mysteries. As a teenager I enjoyed reading fiction, but it was mostly short stories in magazines like The Saturday Evening Post and Liberty. My Nashville high school had a student newspaper, but I never had any interest in writing for it. The closest I came to being involved in the literary field was as co-advertising manager for my high school yearbook as a senior in 1943.

I first wrote about my accidental entry into the writing game when I updated my website several years ago. I wrote an article titled "Reflections on The Writing Life—My 60-year odyssey with the written word." In it I told how I volunteered for Aviation Cadet training in the Army Air Corps after graduation in June of 1943. I was called to active duty the following January after turning eighteen. With the air war in Europe going our way, they didn't need as many new pilots, bombardiers, and navigators as they did when I signed on. With the rank of Aviation Cadet, I was shifted about the Southeastern Training Command, winding up in the summer of 1945 at historic Randolph Field in San Antonio.

After first serving as a guinea pig in the School of Aviation Medicine, where I was probed and prodded by candidates for Flight Surgeon, I was assigned as a clerk in the Transient Bachelor Officers Quarters. Another cadet and I

Classic Spanish design of buildings at Randolph Field, now Randolph AFB.

mostly checked in and out pilots there for an overnight stop. We also served as cashier in the Officer's Mess that occupied another part of the building. My partner, a cadet named Wolfson, had spent a year at Yale before entering the service. While we were chatting one day, he said, "Ïf I had it to do over again, I'd study journalism."

That somehow struck a chord with me. Up to that point, all I'd ever wanted to do was fly airplanes. But with the war winding down, it didn't look like that would happen. The more I thought about it, the more I became obsessed with the idea. Journalism schools only dealt with upper class students, so after my discharge I immediately enrolled at the University of Tennessee, intending to transfer to some place like Wisconsin or Missouri in my junior year. But the accidental nature of my career still ruled supreme.

When my sophomore year began, the executive editor of The Knoxville Journal took a year's sabbatical to teach a newspaper reporting class at UT. I immediately enrolled.Then I learned the university was bringing in a new professor to start a full journalism curriculum the following year. By then I was working on the student newspaper and was in line to become managing editor of one edition. But shortly after school started that fall, The Journal editor, who had returned to his old job, called me and a couple of other of his former students and offered us jobs as reporters.

Since The Journal was a morning newspaper, we could go to school during the day and work as reporters at night until the first edition was put to bed, as we journalists would say, around eleven o'clock. But it gets even worse...er, more complicated. While browsing the library near the newspaper office one day, I came across two books by Horace McCoy, They Shoot Horses Don't They? and No Pockets in a Shroud. I devoured them and became hooked on the mystery genre.

While going to journalism school during the day and working at the newspaper at night, I managed to squeeze in time on my little portable typewriter to write my first crime novel. I had filled in occasionally on the police beat and wrote a tale of a young reporter helping solve a murder. I gave it the title Time Waits for Murder, sent it off to a publisher, and soon had my first rejection slip.

I also wrote a spy story in the sixties, but it was 2002 before my first published book came out. My journey as an accidental novelist would take too much space to continue here, but if you'd like to read the full story go to my website where  you'll find the article I wrote in 2008. Incidentally, that 60-year odyssey is now up to 66.

Free Promo Does Well

That free promotion of Designed to Kill covered in my last post turned out well. It recorded more than 49,000 downloads, by far the best results of any such promotion over the last year. And while Designed to Kill hasn't set the world on fire as sales since the free deal went off, all of my other books have been doing well for the Kindle.

Secret of the Scroll (Greg McKenzie book 1) and Deadly Illusions (book 2) have been the best sellers. The other salutary effect of the promotion was a near doubling of reviews on Amazon for Designed. It now has 43 reviews, including 22 five-star and 12 four-star. So hopefully it will continue to do well in the days ahead.

I'm planning another freebie promotion in a few weeks and will announce the book shortly. Meanwhile, if you haven't read my new trilogy of post Cold War political thrillers, give 'em a try. The final book, Overture to Disaster, is a real tour de force, with parallel plot lines that take you around the world as one crisis after another piles up.

I've started work on the sixth Greg McKenzie mystery and hope to have it finished in the next few months. That is, provided I don't pull any more tricks like the one I did last week in Dothan, AL. If you haven't seen my Facebook post, I banged my head on a tile floor on the way to a vacation in Florida, resulting in seven staples pulling my scalp back together. We cancelled the vacation and came back home. I had the staples taken out today. I don't advise trying this trick.

Check my website occasionally to see what I'm doing. Saturday I'll be in a booth at Gallatin, TN Main Street Festival. Just click here: ChesterDCampbell.com.

Designed to Kill Is Free Today

If you're new to retired Air Force investigator Greg McKenzie, and his wife, Jill, here's your chance to get started for free. Today (Saturday, Sept. 14) through Monday (Sept. 16), the second book in the series, Designed to Kill, will be available in ebook format for the Kindle at no cost.

Don't have a Kindle? No problem. Download the free version to your Windows computer or tablet, Android phone or tablet, iPhone, iPad or MAC, Blackberry or Windows phone. Just go to the Free Kindle Reading Apps Page and pick your device.

Designed to Kill is a tale of greed that leads to murder. It involves a high-rise condo on the beach at Perdido Key, Florida designed and engineered by the son of Greg and Jill's best friends from the first book in the series, Secret of the Scroll. A party in the 15th floor suite celebrating completion of the project ends abruptly when the balcony falls, killing two celebrants.

The investigating sheriff's officer tells Tim Gannon his balcony caused two deaths. The next morning Gannon is found dead of a gunshot wound at the nearby Gulf Islands National Seashore. The deputy says "suicide" and the medical examiner agrees.

Tim's dad, Sam Gannon, Greg's best friend, disagrees. He asks Greg to go down to Florida and find out what happened. As Greg digs into the case, assisted by Jill, he finds lots of disturbing facts.There are plans missing, an obstinate contractor, a too-slick developer, and an inspector angry over a disrupted love affair.

When Mafia goons rough him up, Greg realizes it's time to target a murderer. But who? Jill's help with the case leads to a partnership that goes through the next three books. And there's another in the works.
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Right Out of Today's Headlines—Overture to Disaster

The last book in my Post Cold War Political Thriller Trilogy, Overture to Disaster, is now available for the Kindle. It comes out at a time when it sounds almost like something out of today's headlines. Chemical weapons...nerve gas...a plot to release it on a large crowd.

The second book in the trilogy, The Poksu Conspiracy, involved nuclear weapons. I decided to go to the other end of the weapons of mass destruction inventory for the final story, C/B or chemical and biological weapons. I did considerable research on the development of nerve gases and their use. The largest chemical attack on record occurred in the Kurdish section of Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war. It was carried out by Saddam Hussein's air force on March 16, 1988 and killed between 3,200 and 5,000 people.

I found the Soviet Union had a plant that produced C/B weapons at Kharkov in the Ukrainian Republic. This was also location of the army's 48th Division. I opened the book on a collective farm north of the Black Sea where a battalion of motorized rifle troops were bivouacked. A few artillery shells loaded with nerve gas and canisters of neurotoxins had been brought in for a demonstration of how to handle and dispose of highly toxic agents.

Rogue members of the KGB steal some of the C/B weapons and touch of an explosion to destroy all evidence of their crime, including the soldiers charged with storing the nerve agents. This plot thread continues a few years later in Minsk, Belarus, where the brother of a captain killed in the explosion is an investigator for the city prosecutor.

A parallel plot thread starts in Washington at the time of the weapons theft. It involves an Air Force Special Operations helicopter mission to penetrate deep into the Iranian mountains and bring out a defecting official. The pilot is unfairly charged with an oversight that results in the mission's failure.

The plots come together in Mexico when Chief Investigator Yuri Shumakov connects with retired Col. Warren (Roddy) Rodman. There is lots of action throughout the book, plenty of tension as things move one way and then the other. A complicating factor during the last half is the role of a shadowy organization called the Foreign Affairs Roundtable. Headed by international bankers and cartel capitalists, the leaders are out to control the world economy. Their support of dissidents in the old Soviet Union leads to the final cataclysmic confrontation.

Who Are the McKenzies?

I introduced Greg and Jill McKenzie to the fictional world in October of 2002 with publication of Secret of the Scroll. Since then the pair has garnered a long list of favorable reviews over four more books in the series. Whether you've been a fan of the McKenzies from the start or are new to the couple, here's a rundown on just who we're dealing with.

Greg was a tough, uncompromising law enforcement professional with a quirky sense of humor during his career with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. He grew up in St. Louis where his mother taught school and his father was a master brewer with Anheuser-Busch. After his parents were killed in a plane crash on the way to his graduation from the University of Michigan, Greg tried his hand at police work as a deputy with the St. Louis County Sheriff. He spent four years there before joining the Air Force.

Greg retired as a lieutenant colonel, the highest rank of a long line of Scottish military men he was descended from. It started with the first muster of the 98th Argyllshire Highlanders in 1794 at Stirling Castle, north of Glasgow. Sixteen McKenzies answered the call. Greg’s grandfather, Staff Sgt. Alexander McKenzie, was a member of the 1st Battalion, Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders Regiment, a descendant of the old 98th. He fought in the Boer War in South Africa and in Europe during World War I. A battle wound forced his retirement and led to his emigration to America when Greg’s father was fifteen.

Jill Parsons was born in Nashville, where her father was a highly successful life insurance salesman. She met Greg when she was a junior in the aviation program at Middle Tennessee State and he was on his first assignment at a nearby air base. They married after her graduation. Her father died a few years later, leaving her well off financially. She operated her own air charter service at times during Greg's OSI career.

When Greg retired from the Air Force, they indulged a desire to wander for a few years before settling in Jill's hometown. Greg soon became bored with retirement and took a job as an investigator for the District Attorney. He lost that job after his comments about a Murder Squad detective wound up on page one of the morning paper. 

That's where we find them when Secret of the Scroll, first book in the series, opens. All five books are available on Amazon in both paper and ebook. Next week, book two, Designed to Kill, will be only 99 cents for the Kindle.

Visit my website at ChesterDCampbell.com

Still Publishing on Paper

I can't believe I haven't written  anything here in six weeks, but dates don't lie. By way of explanation, I've been busily putting the final touches on the last of my Post Cold War Political Thriller Trilogy. The title is Overture to Disaster, and it should be ready for publication in a couple  of weeks. Meanwhile, I have news on another front.

The second book in the trilogy, The Poksu Conspiracy, is now available here as a paperback on Amazon.com. That makes all of my current nine mystery and thriller titles available both on paper and in digital format. If you like big books, this one is a monster at 532 pages, at a price of only $15. Actually, Amazon currently has it discounted to $14.25.

The Korean word "Poksu"is translated as "Vengeance." It's a tale of the destruction resulting from one man's oath of vengeance for the death of his father sixty years earlier. On one level, the novel is an amalgam of a spy story and a Korean police procedural. Burke Hill, the main character from the first book, Beware the Jabberwock, now directs the clandestine side of a Washington public relations firm that's a CIA spinoff. His task is to find the truth about a report that Israel is helping South Korea develop nuclear weapons. Yun Yu-sop, a Seoul Metropolitan Police Bureau homicide detective, has been tracking the assailant he believes responsible for several murders of leading citizens who have supported friendly relations with the United States.

Captain Yun's investigation leads him to a Korean assassin who has his sights set on both Yun and Burke Hill. Reviewer John R. Lindermuth's review concludes with:

"Campbell's tale is well-drawn with richly defined characters, enough action to satisfy even the most jaded of readers and an absorbing plot. Highly recommended."

If you prefer the ebook to the paperback, you'll find it here.