New Crime Fiction by Don Broma

I've got a new story out on Amazon.  Here's a link:
Coyote: A Border Crossing Thriller

And here's the blurb:

Mexico is in chaos. The government’s war on drugs has provoked a bloody power struggle between the nation’s most ruthless cartels. In less than a decade, more than 100,000 people have been murdered.

If Umberto Rodriguez is going to stay alive, he needs to get out of Mexico. And if he’s going to live well, the U.S. offers him his greatest chance. But crossing the border means surviving one of the harshest environments on Earth: a desert filled with sophisticated border control agents and lawless vigilantes who hunt men for sport.
 
He needs a ‘coyote’—a guide—and El Topo is the best guide in the business. But El Topo has a dark past, and hidden motives. Walking with him will plunge Umberto into the very heart of the struggle he’s trying to escape.
 
Can Umberto make the crossing, or is he doomed to become another border statistic?

Honestly, I had more fun writing this than anything else I've written in a pretty long time.  Coyote is full of menace and drama and blood, with a thematic backdrop that seems very rich to me.  In fact, the backdrop has so much dramatic potential that I'm hoping to write more stories in the same setting.

Where the hell is Zombie City: Episode 4?

Back in December I mentioned I hoped to have the fourth episode of Zombie City out by the end of this month. Well, the end of the month is here, but the fourth episode isn't. I'm still working on it, and have a long way to go before it's ready. Why so far behind schedule? Work and the flu, to put it plainly.

Anyway, I'm sorry I'm behind schedule, and I'm hoping that any readers waiting for Episode 4 won't hold it against me. At the risk of setting myself up for failure again, I'll offer a new tentative release date: I hope to have the fourth episode out by the end of February.

And to show my contrition is real, I'd like to make another offer: when the fourth episode is ready, you can have a copy of it for free. Sign up for my email list--see the white box farther down on the right side of this page--and when the episode goes live, I'll send out an email with a Smashwords coupon code for a free copy.

Sorry again about the delay.

Zombie City: Episode 1 is now available!

What would you do if all the hipsters turned into zombies?

Shane moved to San Francisco to write, following in the steps of his Beat Generation heroes. Twelve years later he's pushing thirty, flirting with alcoholism, and not writing at all. His life revolves around his dead-end job as a janitor at a tech startup, cleaning up after work-obsessed hipsters who dress like artists but think like yuppies. On the day Shane realizes he needs to get out of the City or give up on being a writer, a horrific infection breaks out amongst the startup workers, plunging San Francisco into a nightmare of cannibalism and murder.

San Francisco is dying. Welcome to Zombie City.

This is the first episode in what will be an ongoing horror-fiction series. It comes in at about 25K words (about 100 pages), and costs 99 cents. It's available now from Smashwords in pretty much every ebook format (including PDF, Kindle, Nook, and Kobo formats). It's also available on Amazon, if you want to buy from your Kindle or direct from their store.

The book should be available everywhere else (Nook Store, Kobo Store, iTunes) in a week or two. There are currently no plans of releasing the book in print format, but if you really hate reading from a screen, the PDF version at Smashwords is easy to print.

Thanks!

Blood Brothers on Kobo

Blood Brothers has been approved for Smashwords' Premium Catalog distribution, and they already made it available on Kobo. Click this link to go to the Kobo page.

Athemon and the Infernal Voice, a free short story excerpted from Blood Brothers, is also available on Kobo. Click this link to go to the Kobo page for it.

I noticed that both books are listed as "#358 in Sci Fi & Fantasy, Fantasy, Epic Fantasy". I'm pretty sure not a single copy of either title has sold yet, and I wonder if the #358 ranking shows that Kobo doesn't have very many Sci Fi or Fantasy titles. The little searching I've done on Kobo sort of gives me the feeling that it's mostly a bunch of weird porn. (Before a title with my name went up, a search for "M.F. Soriano" brought up all kinds of crazy results; the most memorable being "Bred by the Yeti".)

I've unpublished the Athemon and the Infernal Voice title from my Nook Press page because I didn't have the option of making it free. Now that that title has been given Premium Catalog status on Smashwords, I'm hoping it'll find its way to Nook through that channel, and that it'll show up for free. Hopefully it won't take Amazon too long to price match (Infernal Voice currently shows up there for 99 cents).