Postcards From The Road

Wherein a debut author provides a few snapshots from his first-ever book tour:

Sunday, May 6

Lynda (my wife) and I depart at noon from our home outside Cortez, CO, pointing our Porsche southward toward Santa Fe, NM, the fabled City Different, where we lived from February of 2006 through January of 2012, and where Hush Money was actually written.  Our plan is to meet friends for dinner and spend the night at their home before reading and signing Hush Money at Collected Works Bookstore on Monday evening.

Our plans very quickly go awry. Continue reading →

The Unbroken Chain

One area in which book publishing and law share common ground, I’m happy to note, is in evidence at writers’ conferences and writing workshops that take place almost every weekend of the year at locations throughout the country.  If you attend any of these events, you will witness firsthand the sight of established authors – including some of the biggest names in the business – teaching craft, or providing inspiration, or patiently answering questions from new or aspiring writers of every stripe and skill level.

In law, we call this The Unbroken Chain – the quaint notion that those experienced in the practice owe an obligation to teach and train the next generation of lawyers, just as they themselves were trained by the generation before them. Continue reading →

News Alert: Self-proclaimed World’s Toughest Book Critics call HUSH MONEY “an auspicious debut”

The self-proclaimed world’s toughest book critics at Kirkus Reviews have called HUSH MONEY an “auspicious debut.” Read what they had to say here:

Greaves’ ebullient first novel asks who killed a beloved horse and how—and shows some interest in human casualties as well.

Because Jared Henley, the founder’s grandson who usually carries water for horsey Pasadena dowager Sydney Everett, is off on vacation somewhere, Henley & Hargrove’s director of litigation, Russell Dinsmoor, persuades Jack MacTaggart, who’s Of Counsel to the firm, to step in when Hush Puppy, Sydney’s Holsteiner stallion, dies suddenly and the pencil-pushers of Metropolitan Livestock Insurance decline to pay her claim. And no wonder, since Sydney made a tidy profit from the conveniently timed death of her injured horse Creole some years back, and veterinarian George Wells tells Jack that Hush Puppy’s death looks equally squirrelly. Jack tears himself away from the lawsuit he’s filed against the even less sympathetic insurer Hartford Allied on behalf of leukemia-stricken trash collector Victor Tazerian long enough to involve himself with Tara Flynn, stable manager at the Fieldstone Riding Club, and unearth an unholy paper trail leading right back to Henley & Hargrove. He can only wonder what Russ Dinsmoor would say about the whole mess, since Dinsmoor is as dead as Hush Puppy, brained by someone who evidently thought he knew too much about a densely layered scam involving blackmail, off-the-books medical research and serial equine murder. Don’t let all the legal shenanigans put you off: Jack, a highly unselective wiseacre, has a lighthearted anecdote for every occasion, including attacks on his own august person.

An auspicious debut. Jack would be welcome back in the winner’s circle any time.