It’s always football season.  Some people don’t realize that fact, but they just haven’t looked around them.  If there aren’t football games on TV, there are people talking about the coming season or seasons passed.  They are discussing recruiting efforts and seeing how their favorite teams are shaping up.

About this time last year, I had finished the Revelation Trilogy and The Sickle’s Compass and was considering my next project.  As a change of pace, I decided to try my hand at what I call “the football book.” That novel became MONEY IS THICKER THAN BLOOD, Murder in the SEC.  (By the way, for the uninitiated, “SEC” means Southeastern Conference, one of the major collegiate football conferences in the United States.  It is not the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is another blood sport in the U.S.)

And, just to avoid any confusion about the sport in question, when I say “football,” I am talking about what people in the United States call football. It is not the game played other places in the world by people wearing shorts who kick a round ball from one end of the field to another.  The football in MONEY IS THICKER THAN BLOOD is a quasi-military operation, casualties included.

MONEY IS THICKER THAN BLOOD is a southern mystery/legal thriller about getting even.

Here is how one customer reviewed it on Amazon:

What could be more fun than a murder in broad daylight in front of thousands of fans at the biggest football game of the year? Nothing. Except following a great cast of characters as they unravel the mystery and solve the case. This is a fast paced page turner filled with memorable characters and great dialog. A fun read.

Another reviewer, Frank B. Miller, M.D., put a little more flesh on the bones in his review:

The description and gradually evolving portrayals of the various factions of the villians are very entertaining but also intriguing. Just as you think you have the assignations of guilt figured out, i.e., who did what and why, the author pulls a 180 degree NASCAR turn, reverses course, and you are left wondering once again, “Who did it?” and “Why?” As the book progresses this literary sleight of hand increases in mocking complexity as you revise again and again your own detective hypotheses to fit the abruptly contradictory revelations uncovered by the trio of detectives.

Near the end of the book as more and more starts to get a teeny bit clearer (at least you think it is…), the villains are divided into two camps, the good `bad’ guys and gals, and the really ‘bad’ bad guys and gals, as details come together like a foggy picture coming into focus more and more with each scene and illusory piece of clarifying evidence. By the end, one has a new empathy for some of the initial villains and views them entirely different to your own satisfied surprise.
By the end you realize you have only begun to get acquainted with the three heroes and hope that the author will further define them for us in sequels.

Since tomorrow is Father’s Day, I thought some of the dads out there might enjoy a little warm up to the coming football season.  So, today, Saturday, June 16, 2012, MONEY IS THICKER THAN BLOOD, Murder in the SEC is FREE on the Amazon Kindle store.

If you want, give dad a football book for Father’s Day, click here.

Happy Father’s Day to one and all.