novelette – Phil Slattery, Writer, Publisher

#Click Available on #FreeFictionFriday for My New Friends on Social Media

inside-og2-2-a — Official Author’s Photo from March, 2015

Within the last few days, I have made a lot of new friends on Twitter and Facebook. Therefore, as an introduction to my writing, I giving away the Kindle version of my highest rated work (5 stars), the action novelette Click on June 2. Click is available at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01N0F6Q2X. All I ask in return is that you please give me a quick review on either Amazon or Goodreads.

Check back on Fridays to see what other works I will be giving away.

Synopsis: Frank Martinez, a policeman with the Corpus Christi Police Department, has unintentionally shot and killed an unarmed man when called to intercede in a domestic violence case. To recover from the guilt while the incident is under investigation by the CCPD, Frank’s fiancée arranges for him to stay on a secluded island owned by her father’s former law partner. While dozing one night on a lounge chair in the yard, he awakes to find two hitmen slipping onto the island and breaking into the cabin. Are they after him? Are they after the cabin’s owner? Most importantly, how is he going to reach his pistol in his luggage in the bedroom?

Top Customer Reviews

A great suspenseful read and then a twist

By Charles Stacey on November 19, 2016

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

“Author has a wonderful ability to develop the characters using few words. Great foreshadowing to build suspense. And then a really outstanding twist at the end that left me smiling.”

Strong storytelling

By Amazon Customer on January 14, 2017

Format: Kindle Edition

“This novelette is a quick and very entertaining read. It opened with a grabber (“Tell me again whey we have to kill this guy…”) and kept pulling me in from there. Frank Martinez is a cop trying to recover from a shooting incident in solitude on an island off the Texas gulf coast. T.J. and Benny are the bad guys. Their hunt and chase on the small island kept me in suspense. It ends with a surprise twist. Slattery proves here he is a good storyteller.”

Three of My Works Now Available on Kindle!

Just a reminder for those seeking Christmas gifts at the last minute: I now have three works available on Amazon Kindle.

My novelette, Click, has received a five star rating from one reader, who stated, “Author has a wonderful ability to develop the characters using few words. Great foreshadowing to build suspense. And then a really outstanding twist at the end that left me smiling.” In Click, A Texas policeman, on a secluded island while recovering from the guilt of shooting an unarmed man, suddenly finds himself under attack by unknown assailants and caught up unknowingly in a web of intrigue.

Several of the stories contained in my two short story collections have garnered high praise from readers.

In my first collection of previously published and unpublished short stories, A Tale of Hell and Other Works of Horror, I offer a look into the minds of people who perpetrate horrors, from acts of stupidity with unintended results to cold-hearted revenge to pure enjoyment to complete indifference. Settings range from 17th-century France in the heart of the werewolf trials to the Old West to the present and on to alien worlds in the distant future.

In The Scent and Other Stories, another collection of short stories, I explore the dark, sometimes violent, sometimes twisted, sometimes touching side of love, the side kept not only from public view, but sometimes from our mates. Set in the modern era, these stories range in setting from forbidden interracial love in the hills of 1970’s Kentucky to a mother’s confession in present-day New Mexico to the callous manipulation of a lover in Texas

Both The Scent and Other Stories and Click are also available in paperback. A Tale of Hell and Other Works of Horror will be in paperback before the week is out.

While you’re surfing Amazon, don’t forget to check out my author’s page.

Publication Announcement: Click

I am proud to announce that just now I published my novelette Click on Amazon Kindle. It should appear there within twelve hours.

With Iced Tea, Farmington, New Mexico, March 20, 2015

Click is not horror. It is a tale of action and intrigue set on a small island along the Texas coast, where a policeman, recovering from the guilt of shooting an unarmed man, is attacked by unknown assailants and is unknowingly wrapped up in a web of intrigue. Like many of my works, it contains adult language and situations.

The story of the writing of Click is a short one that spans many years. I conceived the idea around 2000, when I was living in Corpus Christi and working on Padre Island. I have toyed with it over the years as my writing has developed. Sometimes I have gone years without writing a word, but it has always loitered in the back of my mind, waiting for the next fit of inspiration to bring it out of the literary ether and into being.

A month or so back, I submitted it to a magazine, which responded a couple of weeks ago, suggesting some revisions they would like to see before reconsidering it. I completed the revisions tonight, but decided afterwards that it would make a good novelette (hopefully making more money faster than I could with the magazine) to test out self-publishing on Amazon Kindle. Amazon Kindle is amazingly easy to publish on, but if you want to have a good-looking book to sell, do your research and know your layouts, formatting, front and back matter and so on. Because Kindle is so easy to use, it is also very easy to screw up if you don’t know what you’re doing.

If you like Click, tell your friends about it.