Hello Everyone!
I hope you’re doing well. I’m slowly regaining my strength after getting my COVID shot a couple of weeks ago. Vaccines tend to knock me down pretty good, and this has been the roughest so far. As one of my friends (also dealing with a Lyme flare after getting vaccinated) said, “If this is the vaccine, I’d hate to have actual COVID!
Anyway, hopefully I have plenty of antibodies now, and can focus on other things. And I have been focusing on other things. I re-recorded Foreign Exchange, the prequel novella to the Doctor Rowena Halley series. The first recording was done with GarageBand, and the quality is…not of the best. And I’ve started doing character voices and accents since then. So I re-recorded it, and posted it on YouTube. You can listen to it for free here.
Foreign Exchange is set in Moscow, in the winter of 2013-14. It shows some of the backstory between Rowena, my heroine, and her ex-fiance Dima. In Campus Confidential, the first book in the series, she mentions Dima and how he broke up with her and is refusing to have anything to do with her. Foreign Exchange shows how that happens–and sets up a lot of the intrigue and double-dealing that Dima, an investigative journalist and member of the Russian opposition, is poking around in. While it’s fictional, it’s inspired by a lot of real-world crime and corruption.
I’m hoping to have it up on Bookfunnel soon, but in the meantime, if you want to listen to it on YouTube, here’s that link again. It’s completely free (other than the time it takes), and listening, liking, and subscribing all help me out a lot! I’m hoping to put up several of my books on YouTube, although so far it’s been a fairly slow project.
I’ve also been enjoying some other humorous/satirical mysteries set on college campuses. I recently listened to the audiobook of The Case of the Defunct Adjunct, which is too funny! My favorite line? “Of course it’s not personal! For it to be personal, they’d [senior administration] have to think of him as a person.”
And I read Ivy is a Weed earlier this spring. Written by a former university PR person, it alternates hilarious descriptions of university inner workings with a murder mystery.
What about you? Have you read anything interesting recently? Let me know!
Happy reading!
Sid Stark
Sid Stark, Academic Suspense Author 