Richard Behrens is an old friend. I first got to know him in New York, in the early 1980s, when we were living the High Fidelity experience, hanging out in a record store, sharing our favorite new music. At the time, I set up a very small press called bogusbooks, and published a few chapbooks and a literary magazine, and I had the honor of publishing Richard’s first book, When Wise Men Crawl.
Richard has been writing a series of mysteries where Lizzie Borden is the character. He’s offering his latest book free on Amazon, in Kindle format, for three days. Here’s his blurb about the book:
The Minuscule Monk: A Lizzie Borden, Girl Detective Mystery, by Richard Behrens, is now on sale for FREE at Amazon.com for three days only. Take advantage of this great offer to download, read, and review the second in a series of mysteries starring the Girl Detective that the Fall River Historical Society has called “fearlessly cunning, charismatic, and thoroughly enchanting!” Shelley Dziedzic, editor of Lizzie Borden: Warps & Wefts has said of the series: “…so much fun, it’s nearly criminal!” The book also includes a great cover illustration by artist Marc Reed.
When a dead body mysteriously appears in the basement of her father’s furniture store, 15 year-old Lizzie Andrew Borden immediately takes on the case. Accompanied by an eccentric millionaire who campaigns to extend the vote to animals; a Boston terrier trained to sniff out crooked politicians; and a boy detective who believes the entire universe to be inside his own head, Lizzie follows a trail of taxidermy tools and Civil War bushwhackers to the Minuscule Monk, a legendary gunslinger whose mummified body will bring a punter’s pot to anyone who can deliver it to the New York gangster who has been hunting the Monk for decades. With such high stakes, everyone has a motive for murder, yet everyone seems innocent. Or perhaps, as Lizzie suspects after attending a dinner party with non-existent food and meeting a horse that has turned into its opposite, none of it is even real. Lizzie Borden, the Girl Detective of Fall River, is at her most spirited in The Minuscule Monk, a comic mystery that paints a portrait of Fall River at the height of its splendor and its most infamous citizen at the start of her most excellent career.
Richard Behrens is the co-founder of Nine Muses Books and author of the Lizzie Borden, Girl Detective series of mysteries. He is a contributor to The Hatchet: A Journal of Lizzie Borden and Victorian Studies and a regular lecturer on eccentric Victorian women and silent film comedy. Richard is a native New Yorker, now living in New England.
Get your free copy now: Amazon.com, Amazon UK.