Dead Cold

[Victoria Dougherty]

First and foremost, I want to thank all of my new followers.  Your kind words after reading my Freshly Pressed essay, “That Cursed Ruby Box,” meant a lot.  In return, I promise to try my very best to provide consistently great content that inspires you to laugh, cry, run screaming, hide under your bed, take a shot of whiskey, hunt down an old lover and all sorts of things – everything except feel like your time on Cold was wasted.

To that end, I want to tell you a bit about what’s going to be happening here starting next week. Throughout the month of April, Cold is going Dead Cold, as I’ll be hosting a mystery/thriller blog tour of that moniker.  Dead Cold will feature some of my favorite new or newish mystery/thriller authors and I’m so excited to be having them on.  I’m particularly thrilled because I’m having them on to do what they do best – which is write.

The task?  Write a (very short) story combining these four elements: A mounted swordfish A jug of moonshine A 1959 Zil-III Soviet-made armored A dead gypsy

The Players: Gerald Elias, Death and Transfiguration (Daniel Jacobus Mystery series, Minotaur) Jeff Cohen, Chance of a Ghost (A Haunted Guesthouse Mystery, Berkley Press – writing under the name EJ Copperman) Sam Thomas, The Midwife’s Tale (Minotaur) Sheila Webster Boneham, Drop Dead on Recall (An Animals in Focus Mystery series, Midnight Ink) A.B. Bourne, The First Secret of Edwin Hoff (Watch Hill Books) B.Y. Rogers, The Sin of Certainty

The outcome: A story from each author will run every week, so you get about six weeks of great, short fiction. 

I hope you’ll join me.

P.S. If you’ve got a few minutes, check out a couple of short stories I’ve posted under Victoria Dougherty Fiction.  There’s The Hotel Yalta and A Legacy or a Residue.  And yes, they’re very, very cold.