I’m posting some blurbs I’ve received from authors who read my new crime novel SEVEN ANGELS and were kind enough to give me a blurb to use in promoting the book.
We at Constellate Publishing will publish SEVEN ANGELS on June 1. It’s available for pre-order through all the usual outlets now.
I asked a few authors I know if they’d read the book and, providing they didn’t hate it, give me a blurb.
Claire’s blurb, as seen above, suggests the background she and I have in common: journalism. I was a newspaper reporter and editor in Indiana before I started writing fiction. Claire’s reporting experience was all over the United States.
I met Claire at Bouchercon in Nashville in 2024. She was the moderator of a panel I served on about true crime writing. It was a great group and I was really pleased to get to check in with Claire again at Bcon in New Orleans in 2025.
Sometime after that point, I asked if she’d read SEVEN ANGELS and she did and gave me that wonderful blurb. I was somewhat surprised she had time because she’s incredibly busy and prolific and her book history demonstrates that.
Yesterday the mail brought my print proof of my book SEVEN ANGELS.
And it looks so good.
I posted some video on Instagram and other social media to mark the occasion, so cruise over there if you want to see it in motion. But the photos here give you a pretty good idea.
The book comes out around June 1 from our imprint, Constellate Publishing.
I’m spending a couple of days reading through the book, looking for any issues, but Jill Blocker and I have pretty thoroughly gone over the book in the past few months. So no unpleasant surprises so far.
Here’s another in a series about the authors who so kindly read my new novel SEVEN ANGELS – out from Constellate Publishing in June.
Ken Jaworowski and I haven’t met but I feel like I know him, not only from his writing but also from interviewing him a couple of times for articles for the Daily Yonder. I was delighted to be able to read and review his novels SMALL TOWN SINS and WHAT ABOUT THE BODIES for those articles and had some illuminating interviews with Ken.
He was kind enough to read SEVEN ANGELS and, as a writer who writes masterfully about small towns and crime, give me the blurb above.
Ken’s work is thrilling and fascinating for how he writes about everyday people who are having the worst day of their life.
I’ve mentioned GHOST SHOW, my unpublished novel set in 1948, a few times on social media. I wrote the book between writing SEVEN ANGELS and THAT OCTOBER and I never expected it to be published. Why? Well, for one thing, it’s set in 1948, in the Midwestern town of Middletown, where THAT OCTOBER takes place (in 1984) and it’s about a family from Seven Angels, Tennessee, and their experiences in the big city.
It’s got a serial killer, a real ghost who’s haunting a theater, a sprawling family story with infidelity, abuse and coming of age as well as President Harry Truman and a traveling ghost show, or spook show, a live-action magic and mystery production that involves several members of the family.
It’s also more than 108,000 words long.
As it turns out, we might publish GHOST SHOW later this year through Constellate Publishing.
So I’m editing GHOST SHOW, a book I haven’t looked at in three or four years, and I’m thinking two things:
I like this story, which is very loosely based on the youthful adventures of my parents and my mom’s family before she was my mom. (Very loosely!)
And I’m thinking … man, 108,000 is a lot of words.
I’ll repeat this explanation before we get close to actual publication, but in answer to what is a ghost show, here’s an article I wrote for CrimeReads four years ago about what the heck ghost shows were.
I’ve got my hands on the blurbs from some of the authors who’ve read my crime novel SEVEN ANGELS – which we at Constellate Publishing will publish on or about June 1 – and I’m gonna share them here and on social media occasionally.
Julia Dahl is one of the coolest and most talented people I know. She’s a journalist and professor and editor and an amazing writer. I became a fan after I read her novel THE MISSING HOURS way back in 2021. It’s a spellbinding book about how a young woman’s life can change dramatically after one night.
At some point after that, she let me read a screenplay she wrote and I’ll tell you that it is a story and set of characters that cry out to be adapted as a streaming series.
I got to meet Julia at Bouchercon in Nashville in 2024 and she’s just as delightful in person as she is online.
Julia reading an advance copy of SEVEN ANGELS and giving me a blurb for the book means so much to me. She’s just aces.
When my friend Jill Blocker and I started talking about publishing my crime novel SEVEN ANGELS through the Constellate Publishing imprint, I knew how I wanted the cover to look:
Like the covers of novels by Robert B. Parker, a grandmaster of crime and mystery writing and one of my greatest influences.
I would never compare myself favorably to Parker, whose books about Spenser and Hawk, Sunny Randall, Jesse Stone and other heroes protecting people and confronting crime are still my favorite novels. (Perhaps tied with Dennie Lehane’s Patrick and Angie books.)
But I was thinking about Parker when I wrote SEVEN ANGELS in 2019. Like Parker’s protagonists at times, Gloria Shepherd isn’t so much a detective as a bulldozer. I always thrilled at Spenser and his inclination to push the bad guys until they crack and make a mistake or overplay their hand.
Part of what appealed to me about Parker’s characters’ direct approach is that it was reflected in the best covers of his books: Spare and vivid imagery that matched the spare and relentless push to resolution of Parker’s characters.
There’s a scene in SEVEN ANGELS when Gloria, the coroner of Crockett County, Tennessee, pushes into the private office of a local corrupt businessman and confronts him and the Russian trafficker he’s working with. I was channeling Spenser the day I wrote that, for sure. Not sure if I was successful, but that’s what I was aiming for.
I told Jill what I wanted and she designed a cover that I loved immediately. This cover above will be modified some and authors’ blurbs will be added before SEVEN ANGELS is published this spring.
I can’t match Parker at his peak. Never will. But I can pay tribute to him.
Curious about Constellate Publishing, our company that’ll publish SEVEN ANGELS?
Last year I did an interview with the wonderful Gabby Sandefer for the Muncie Public Library’s Pages and Partners podcast. We talked about my years in newspapers and my other writing, including my novels THAT OCTOBER and SEVEN ANGELS.
I won’t pretend to sum up the weird state of small publishing here. If you’re been following the world of indie and small publishing, you know that 2025 has seen some small imprints go out of business – in some cases leaving authors unpaid – and others purport to try to fill that void.
I’m not sure that Constellate Creatives’ publishing arm, Constellate Publishing, the enterprise I’m affiliated with, will fill that void. For one thing, we can’t be all things to all people.
But as we started Constellate’s venture into editing – developmental editing and copy editing — and publishing and marketing a few months ago, it became obvious that somebody needed to be around to step in and catch a few worthy projects. Or maybe juggle chainsaws.
It’s making for a 2026 I’m really excited about. Constellate Publishing will publish my novel SEVEN ANGELS but there’s a diverse lineup of books on tap for the first two quarters of 2026, including a book of mindful self-help, a book of poetry, my novel and two by Jill Blocker, a reissue of her WHAT WAS BEAUTIFUL AND GOOD and her new novel, HAPPILY AFTER EVER. The latter is what’s increasingly termed a “new adult” book and will appeal to readers post-YA in their reading interests.
I’m proud to have noticed that every book besides mine is written by a woman and even mine has a cast of woman as protagonists.
And note the slide I’ve posted above: Constellate Creatives is offering editing, publishing and marketing services, or some combination of those, and at socially-responsible fees based on the regional wage in each writer’s local economy.
Some of us love to edit copy and help with developing your work. Others (raises hand) love marketing. Yes, I’m weird like that. We can’t promise that PR about your book will land on large market-share sites like KTLA, where our news release announcing our slate for the first half of 2026, was picked up. But we’ll be pitching your work and you won’t have to deal with the dreaded marketing.
There’s a button somewhere on the CC site that will lead you to a free consultation. We might be able to answer some questions for you.
I love a good mystery. Obviously, it’s what I write, at least a lot of the time. So as Constellate Creatives is putting together my novel SEVEN ANGELS for 2026 release, I’ve put titles to the novel’s 69 chapters.
Here are some. And yes, I deliberately tried to invoke the “say what now?” feeling of the cryptic episode titles of shows like STRANGER THINGS.
Looking forward to June 2026 publication of SEVEN ANGELS.
When my short story “A Fighting Life” was published in the past couple of weeks in the FIGHTING WORDS anthology, it contained the latest reference to the fiction worlds I operate in.
Since I wrote four or five novels back in the early 2000s – books that’ll probably never be seen, unless radically rewritten with what I’ve learned about writing in the meantime – I’ve enjoyed writing in a universe where, despite some timey-wimey variations, most of my characters and storylines play out in a shared world mostly consisting of the small city of Middletown, Indiana – based on my hometown of Muncie, Indiana, which was referred to in 20th century sociological studies as Middletown – and Seven Angels, a Tennessee town based on Jamestown, the small town my parents came from.
The early 2000s books featured Jack Richmond, a Middletown newspaper reporter, and a group of friends including Jess Peterson, an affable cop on the Middletown police force. There are lots of other characters too, including Luna, a topless dancer Jack falls in love with. By the end of the series of books, the two are married and have a son, Cody, and the final, still-to-be-completed book features Jack and Peterson’s desperate efforts to get Cody back after Luna’s ex brutally assaults her and kidnaps the boy.
When I wrote SEVEN ANGELS in 2019, my first crack at writing a novel in 15 years or more, I set it in the titular small Tennessee town with a side trip to Middletown and a pivotal appearance by Peterson.
My next novel, the also unpubished GHOST SHOW, is set in Middletown, but in 1948 and follows the Anderson family, who came to the big industrial town from the small Tennessee town of Seven Angels. No crossover characters, though.
My third novel, THAT OCTOBER, which was just published in June 2025, is set in 1984 Middletown and includes, among secondary characters, Richmond and Peterson at the beginning of their newspaper and police careers, respectively.
I won’t detail it all here, but I’ve returned to the Middletown and Seven Angels wells numerous times in short stories. The foul-mouthed, fightin’ siblings in “A Fighting Life” are pulled from GHOST SHOW. My very first published short story, “Independence” from the MOTEL anthology, is set in little Seven Angels, complete with the sheriff/main bad guy from the SEVEN ANGELS novel.
The seeding of characters from my earlier stories – like Butcher Crabtree, who I posted about here recently – throughout my fiction just goes on and on.
And so do I. To quote one of my (hopefully) self-deprecating quotes, “Enough about me. What do you think of me?”
keithroysdon 