Many of the astute readers of this blog have tumbled to the fact that Thriller Guy often writes under the pseudonym of Allen Appel. Appel has written many books, both fiction and non-fiction, and he is proud to announce he has just published a Kindle edition of his heretofore unpublished novel, Abraham Lincoln: Detective. This novel is written from the point of view of Lincoln's law partner and biographer, William Herndon. It's based on a case that Lincoln wrote about himself, the Trailor Murder Mystery. Lincoln begins a letter to his friend Joshua Speed about the Trailor case thusly: Dear Speed: We have had the highest state of excitement here for a week past that our community has ever witnessed; and although the public feeling is somewhat allayed, the curious affair which aroused it is very far from being over, yet cleared of mystery. Because Lincoln was never able to solve the mystery, Appel has done so. The book is available to all you Kindle owners here.
Appel did a great deal of research on Lincoln for the last entry in his series of time travel books, In Time of War. During the course of which he discovered new Lincoln material that had never been made public. One item was a list of the 39 murder cases in which Lincoln was involved as the defense attorney. He lost only one of them (his client was hung) and some of them he was involved in only tangentially, but there were seven or eight that were very interesting that are virtually unknown. The most famous of these is known as the Almanac Trial, which many people have heard of, but there were others that had never been written about. Appel decided he would start a series of novels with Lincoln and Herndon playing the Holmes and Watson roles. Abraham Lincoln: Detective, is the first of the series.
Why Kindle? This novel is one of two that Appel's agent has been peddling around NY for some time. The last several years have been a terrible time to sell manuscripts. Publishers can be a cowardly sort, unwilling to try anything new, continuing to whine about the business while squeezing their a-list authors to produce books that are known quantities, no matter what the quality. They are content to rest their fortunes on a book-buying public the majority of which is perfectly happy with more of the same, no matter that the product is stale, off the shelf rehashes of what their big sellers and their imitators have been cranking out, year after year. Hence the scores of Da Vinci Code knock-offs that Thriller Guy has to wade through every month. So why not give Kindle a try? Just owning an e-reader puts an individual into a category of eager, intelligent book consumer willing to try something new. Sounds like a perfect market to TG.
If you have a Kindle, the link at the end of the first paragraph and again here will take you to Abraham Lincoln: Detective. If you don't have a Kindle you can download a free App that will let you read Kindle books on your cellphone, or even your PC or Windows computer. So now nobody has an excuse to not join the 21st Century.
You can also go to the Amazon Kindle store and browse around amongst the hundreds of possible good reads. Yes, much of the independently published work is crap, but as Theodore Sturgeon once famously said, while rebutting the naysayors who declared that 90% of science fiction is crap, “Ninety percent of everything is crap.”
TG says give the book a try. It's good. And when has TG ever lied to you?
TG's son has written in to say that TG used the wrong past tense of the verb hang. He points out that "Men can be hung, but criminals are hanged." Perhaps it is wiser to say that men are hanged and curtains are hung.
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