Tag Archives: thriller

My close encounter with THE HOUSEMAID author Freida McFadden … actually, a Freida imposter! Plus, it’s ‘me me me’ all the way down in two new features

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Authors know that book-oriented scams are plentiful. Most of us regularly get emails or private messages on social media from people purporting to be literary agents or publishers or even well-known authors. Most of them are pretty easy to see through: No, James Patterson or Lee Child is not messaging you to offer input on your novel in the works.

Here’s the story of the time Freida McFadden private messaged me on Bluesky and tried to connect me with her publicist.

The whole scam would have gone a lot better but at the time … I had no idea who Freida McFadden was.

It was a couple of years ago and I got a message on Bluesky purporting to be from an author, Freida McFadden. Freida really, really wanted to talk about books and how great a job her publicist had done for her and how I should contact that publicist.

Freida’s pitch was that this publicist had made her career and could do the same for mine.

The biggest drawback to the scheme: At the time, I had no idea who Freida McFadden was. I’d never read one of her books and had never heard of her. If I were gullible, this would have been incredibly exciting.

So in my ignorance of Real Freida, I had no idea why it would have been such a big deal if the author herself contacted me.

No, it wasn’t my suspicions that undid the Fake Freida. It was that she was incredibly pushy.

I’d answer politely when Freida would cite her publicist by name and tell me in glowing terms how great he was.

“Okay, fine … thanks,” I’d reply, little realizing that I was blowing off a “bestselling author” who wanted to bring me into the inner circle of the publicist who had changed her career.

“No, you don’t understand,” Freida would come back, trying to impress upon me how important it was to hire this publicist. “He will make your career!”

“Okay, Freida, I got it,” I’d reply. I was being polite but had no plans to contact this publicist who worked for this incredibly pushy author.

“No, please you must understand …” Freida would insist.

“Jesus, why are you being so pushy?” I asked. “Is this some kind of scam?”

At this point, I hadn’t even googled Freida McFadden. When I did, I’d see that a movie was in the works adapting her novel THE HOUSEMAID.

That pretty much settled it. No way was someone who wrote books and had a movie development deal going to spend hours messaging me to insist that I should work with her publicist.

I didn’t delete the thread of messages, were of course not from Freida or even any publicist who’d ever worked for her but from some scam artist who just wanted me to believe that Freida had reached down from author Olympus to beg me to contact him.

Very quickly after, the Fake Freida account was expunged from Bluesky and, along with it, the details of the thread of private messages. I wish I could tell you the name of the publicist Fake Freida was so urgently recommending because that was almost certainly the person sending the messages.

Just their luck that they private messaged somebody who couldn’t be impressed that Freida McFadden was contacting them.

I thought of all this today because Sourcebooks, publisher of McFadden’s nest novel, THE SLEEPWALKER, would be coming out in March. Sourcebooks noted that McFadden’s 29 books had sold 90 million copies.

Confidentially, I heard she owes it all to her publicist.

By the way, the folks at Writer Beware have created an exhaustive list of book impersonators and scammers.

ON ANOTHER NOTE:

I’m all up in your email inboxes today, even more so when the subscribers to this post receive email notification of it. But you don’t have to wait until you get this notification to tired of me in your inbox, as I’m the subject of two features today.

Friend and fellow writer Andrew Careaga graciously allowed me to answer his Friday Five questions for today. Here it is.

And as part of the promotional tour for the great BAD INTENTIONS anthology, editor Michael Downing wrote about my story, “Sunset Stakeout,” based on the Warren Zevon song “Looking for the Next Best Thing.” Here it is.

Cold cases still pull at the heartstrings

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I was watching “Ballard” the other week – it’s a good series, by the way, and a very valid follow-up to the “Bosch” series and it’s own streaming sequel, “Bosch Legacy” – and it got me thinking about the cold cases I’ve written about over the decades.

“Ballard,” which stars Maggie Q as Renee Ballard, Los Angeles police detective who is featured in her own series of crime novels by author Michael Connelly, creator of “Bosch,” is about how the Ballard character is “demoted” to the LAPD’s under-funded and over-scrutinized cold case unit.

The unit, comprised of police officers and reserves and a handful of volunteers and interns, huddles in a cluttered series of rooms that look more like storage than an office. The cold case squad is the definition of an effort that is nothing like a priority for LAPD leadership but is an essential thing to the squad members.

Ballard is initially leery of the assignment – punishment, really, for daring to report another cop for assaulting her – but grows to find satisfaction in solving long-unsolved murders, bringing killers to justice and giving closure to survivors.

Along with my longtime writing collaborator Douglas Walker, I wrote about cold cases for many years for the newspaper in my hometown of Muncie, Indiana. The most notable cold case to many was the killing of two teenagers in Westside Park in 1985. Walker and I wrote about it in our third true crime book, “The Westside Park Murders,” released by History Press in 2021.

But our fourth book, “Cold Case Muncie,” released in 2023, is an entire book of cold cases, still-unsolved murders in the Muncie and East Central Indiana area.

We had identified more than 30 cold cases, some dating back to the 1960s or even earlier, during a regular series of newspaper articles beginning in 2010. We went back and re-examined many of those cases for the book.

We interviewed surviving loved ones of the victims and revisited the murder scenes.

We put an emphasis on soliciting any new information about the murders, including a point of contact for each of the police departments responsible for resolving those cases.

And we placed emphasis on the survivors. Many of the cases are illustrated by photographs I took of those people who, today, are still waiting for someone to bring closure for the killing of their loved ones.

I’ve noted before that closure is an elusive thing, even harder to achieve than it seems, and that’s pretty damn hard.

I’m glad “Ballard” has taken up the case of cold cases and I’m glad to have brought some attention to them too.