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New story: THE WITCHES OF HARMONY

I am drawn to foreign locations. Some of you know that I’m an avid, lifelong student of foreign languages.

At the same time, travel involves many unknowns. There is a lot that can go wrong… especially if you encounter supernatural entities at your destination.

That’s the idea behind my Terrifying Travels series.

The most recent addition to the series is THE WITCHES OF HARMONY, which involves restless 17th-century spirits in the fictional Greater Boston town of Harmony, Massachusetts. Check it out on Amazon.

Amazon book description:

Some business trips are better left unbooked.

Bill Preston has spent years traveling the country for his job, working trade shows in convention centers from one coast to the other. So when he’s assigned to an industrial expo in Harmony, Massachusetts, he expects another routine week on the road.

Then a coworker warns him about Harmony.

He won’t say exactly what happened there. Only that he never wants to go back.

Bill soon discovers that Harmony is a picture-perfect New England town with a history no one wants to discuss. There are whispered stories about witches who escaped the Salem trials—only to meet a more terrible fate in Harmony.

There are warnings not to go outside after dark.

And there are things in Harmony that only certain people can see.

Bill considers himself a rational man. He doesn’t believe in witches, ghosts, or ancient curses.

But something in Harmony has noticed him.

And before this business trip is over, Bill may discover that some places never escape their past.

The Witches of Harmony is a supernatural horror tale of haunted history, business travel, and a New England town with a secret it has been keeping for more than three hundred years.

‘The Bywayman: Book 3 of Deadly Byways’ is now available

Today marks the release of The Bywayman, the third novel in my Deadly Byways series of crime thrillers set in southwestern Ohio in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

If you’ve been following the series, you know the basic idea behind Deadly Byways.

This is an ongoing story about crimes that unfold along the secondary roads, small towns, suburbs, and forgotten places of an earlier Ohio—the world before cell phones, GPS, security cameras, and the other technologies that now make it much more difficult to simply disappear.

And in The Bywayman, people are disappearing.

Three missing people—and almost nothing to connect them

A young hardware store clerk vanishes.

Then a jealous boyfriend disappears.

Then a college student goes missing, leaving her abandoned car beside an Ohio highway.

Detective Will Hayworth suspects that these disappearances are connected. The problem is proving it.

There are no bodies. There is no obvious common suspect. There isn’t even much physical evidence.

All Hayworth really has is a pattern—and the growing conviction that someone is hunting people along the roads outside Dayton.

Then the case changes.

A fourteen-year-old girl named Theresa Chapman narrowly escapes an attempted abduction on a lonely country road.

Suddenly, the police have something they have never had before.

A living witness.

Theresa can describe the man who tried to abduct her. She can describe his vehicle. She can work with a police artist to create a composite sketch.

For the first time, the predator has a face.

The local media gives him a name:

The Bywayman.

And the hunt begins.

But what if the police are hunting the wrong man?

That’s where The Bywayman becomes more than a straightforward serial-killer story.

One of the ideas that interested me while writing this novel was the enormous importance of information in a criminal investigation—and what happens when that information is unreliable.

A detective can be intelligent, experienced, and completely sincere. But every investigation depends upon what witnesses tell the police, what physical evidence appears to show, and what conclusions investigators draw from those facts.

Change one crucial piece of information, and you can change the entire direction of an investigation.

That idea lies at the heart of The Bywayman.

Will Hayworth knows that someone is out there.

The reader knows that someone is out there.

But knowing that a predator exists and knowing who that predator actually is are two very different things.

Sometimes a bad lead is worse than no lead at all.

A thriller set in the Ohio of the late 1970s

The historical setting is an important part of the Deadly Byways series.

The Bywayman takes place in 1979.

This isn’t the distant past, but it is a very different world from the one we inhabit today.

A teenager could leave a party and find herself walking down a dark two-lane road with no way to summon an Uber—or even call her parents without first finding a telephone.

A stranded motorist couldn’t pull out a smartphone and immediately summon roadside assistance.

There were no location-sharing apps. No text messages. No Ring doorbells recording everyone who approached a house. No ubiquitous digital trail documenting where everyone had been.

If you were alone on a country road at night, you really were alone.

And hitchhiking, while already recognized as potentially dangerous, was still something ordinary people did.

That combination makes the period particularly interesting for crime fiction.

The world was modern enough to be recognizable—but still isolated enough for people to vanish.

The roads themselves are part of the story.

I’ve lived in southwestern Ohio for most of my life, and I’ve always been fascinated by the contrast between the metropolitan areas and what lies just beyond them.

Drive a relatively short distance outside Cincinnati or Dayton, and the landscape changes.

The subdivisions give way to two-lane highways.

The highways pass through woods, farmland, and little communities.

There are stretches where houses are far apart and the road ahead disappears into darkness.

Today those places are less isolated than they once were, because almost everyone carries a communications and navigation device in their pocket.

In 1979, however, a breakdown on one of those roads could leave you genuinely stranded.

And a stranger who stopped to offer assistance might be exactly what he appeared to be.

Or he might not.

That uncertainty is part of the DNA of the Deadly Byways series.

The third installment of Deadly Byways

The Bywayman follows The Dungeon and The Bridge as the third novel in the series.

Although each book has its own major storyline, characters and events carry across the series, creating a larger narrative of crime and investigation in late-1970s and early-1980s Ohio.

With The Bywayman, that larger picture continues to expand.

Detective Will Hayworth is trying to understand a series of disappearances with very little evidence.

A frightened teenage girl becomes the most important witness in the investigation.

And somewhere outside Dayton, a predator is watching the police search for him.

He knows what they’re looking for.

More importantly, he knows they’re looking for the wrong thing.

The Bywayman (Deadly Byways Book 3) is available now on Amazon Kindle and is included with Kindle Unlimited.

**View THE DEADLY BYWAYS series on Amazon***

Ohiosaurus Rex: a strange encounter on an Ohio country road

There are places where the boundary between past and present may be thinner than we imagine.

At least, that is the premise behind “Ohiosaurus Rex,” my latest short story for YouTube.

The story begins innocently enough. A married couple sets out on a sunny September afternoon for an Amish quilt festival in rural Ohio. Before they leave, however, a coworker gives them a peculiar warning about the area.

Later, one of the Amish men at the festival gives them another.

If they see something strange on the drive home, he tells them, they should keep driving.

Naturally, they don’t.

A pleasant September drive takes a strange turn

On the way home, the couple spots something flying above a lonely two-lane country road.

It has wings, but it isn’t a bird.

It has an elongated beak, a strange crest, and the unmistakable appearance of something that shouldn’t have existed for millions of years.

A pterodactyl—or something very much like one.

That raises an obvious question: If one prehistoric creature has somehow appeared in modern Ohio, what else might be out there?

They don’t have to wait long for the answer.

What is a time slip?

The idea behind the story is the time slip: a supposed phenomenon in which a person briefly experiences another historical period as though the boundary between two different times has somehow broken down.

In a typical time-slip story, there is no deliberate time travel. Nobody climbs into a machine and sets a date for the past. Instead, ordinary people are going about their ordinary lives when the world around them suddenly seems to belong to another era.

Sometimes the experience lasts only seconds or minutes. Then normal reality reasserts itself.

That’s what makes the concept so useful for uncanny fiction. A time slip doesn’t require an elaborate science-fiction apparatus. It can happen on a city street, inside an old building—or on an otherwise unremarkable country road.

The frightening question isn’t necessarily “How do we travel through time?”

It’s:

What if different periods of time occasionally overlap?

And what if the boundary between them is permeable in both directions?

The strange possibilities of the Ohio River Valley

The Ohio River Valley has always struck me as particularly suited to stories like this. It is a landscape filled with old roads, wooded hills, small towns, farms, river bottoms, and layers upon layers of human history.

Most of the time, of course, a drive through rural Ohio is simply a drive through rural Ohio.

But fiction gives us permission to ask what if?

What if you turned onto the wrong country road at exactly the right—or wrong—moment?

What if something appeared in the meadow that wasn’t supposed to be there?

And what if, instead of you slipping into the past, something from the past slipped into your world?

That’s the situation at the heart of “Ohiosaurus Rex.”

And if an Amish farmer ever warns you to keep driving when you see something strange…

You might want to listen to him.

-ET

Amy Acton and the empty podium

Amy Acton is literally old enough to be Ramaswamy’s mom, yet she’s afraid to debate him because of “personal attacks”?

(Note: I’m not age-shaming here; Acton and I are roughly the same age.)

But this is a very bad look on her part.

Both of these candidates are political neophytes. Neither one has a track record in a major elected office. (We can thank both of Ohio’s two major parties for that.)

And as an Ohio voter, neither one of them looks like a stellar slam dunk to me. I keep waiting for the actual candidates to appear.

But a debate would help me decide which is the lesser of two evils.

Acton’s (ostensible) logic is that Vivek Ramaswamy is just too impure a candidate to share a stage with her lofty presence.  But Ramaswamy, whatever his flaws, is willing to show up and make his case. Amy Acton is not. 

-ET

Ryan Reynolds and the trashing of the 1980s

Actor Ryan Reynolds is drawing some criticism for his negative characterizations of the 1980s.

The remarks came Tuesday night, September 1, at the New York premiere of Mayday, his new Cold War comedy set in 1987. Reynolds was criticizing the tendency to romanticize the 1980s. Speaking to journalists, the Canadian-American actor said:

“When you get far enough away from a time period that’s quite distinct, there’s always a lovely feeling associated with it, almost like you pave over all the trauma with puppy dogs and ice cream.”

“The 80s was a brutal, brutal time for people. It was a fucking mess and people forget that.”

“It was a tremendous strife. Sociopolitical tensions everywhere. We were still pretty fresh off the Cuban missile crisis, which was only 15–20 years before. It’s a tumultuous period, but you look back at it now and you’re like, ‘Oh, yeah. Top Gun. Cocaine!’ Like, ‘No!’ It was really scary.”

Regular readers will know that I’m an unabashed fan of the 1980s. I’d take that decade back in a heartbeat. So Reynolds and I definitely disagree here. Continue reading “Ryan Reynolds and the trashing of the 1980s”

Medicare for all, or the Bell System solution?

The other day an older woman in my social circle mentioned that she had to finance unpaid charges from her dual cataract surgery. “Four thousand dollars per eye,” she said. “Eight thousand in total.”

This woman is not indigent. She’s a retired public school teacher on Medicare.  She also has supplemental Medicare insurance through Anthem.

This suggests that neither Medicare nor Anthem is all that great.

What options are available for those who are too young for Medicare? The Affordable Care Act (ACA)—aka Obamacare—insurance plans provide high-priced, privately available health insurance plans that come with high deductibles. And there’s another catch—many physicians do not treat patients on ACA plans.

The Affordable Care Act was enacted in 2010 in an effort to make health insurance more accessible to individual purchasers. But the ACA preserved the oligopolistic structure of the preexisting healthcare insurance market. This factor (combined with the inefficiencies of government planning) made ACA expensive and inefficient, despite the underlying intentions.

The typical ACA plan costs $650 per month, with a deductible in the $5,000 to $10,000 range, and a very limited selection of network physicians. This is not good health insurance.

“Medicare for all” has therefore entered the public debate space again this election cycle. DSA-backed Democrats like Abdul El-Sayed are advocating for single-payer public insurance, and this is taken as evidence of the Democratic Party’s sudden lurch to the left.

But the first Democrat to make such a proposal was Harry S. Truman. In 1945, just seven months after he took office, Truman made a written proposal for the creation of a national healthcare program. Universal healthcare was also an animating cause for the Democratic Party in 1992—the election that brought Bill Clinton to power. Neither Harry Truman nor Bill Clinton are widely regarded as wild-eyed left-wing radicals today.

America’s healthcare system is expensive, inefficient, and often unavailable—in practical terms—for anyone who is not insured under a top-tier corporate plan.

The linkage of health insurance to specific corporate employment is a longstanding flaw that is no longer appropriate in the age of the gig economy, entrepreneurship, or—for that matter—the family farm. Recent headlines indicate that large banks and other corporate employers are gearing up for massive downsizing because of anticipated AI-related efficiencies. The demand for health insurance not linked to a corporate plan is likely to increase in the coming years. Continue reading “Medicare for all, or the Bell System solution?”

Moral panic over Pattaya, and an innovative madam of World War II Honolulu

Betty Jean O’Hara (1913-1973) was a famed lady of the night and madam in Honolulu, Hawaii’s Hotel Street red-light district during World War II. O’Hara came up with a novel solution to cope with the demand of randy US sailors during the conflict.

O’Hara set up a Hotel Street brothel that combined sexual services with the assembly-line efficiency of a Ford plant. Each of O’Hara’s employees rotated between a series of three rooms. In one room a man would be undressing, in another a fellow would be engaging in an act of carnal knowledge. In a third room, a satiated sailor would be getting dressed. The Hotel Street red-light district of Honolulu lasted throughout most of World War II.

I never served in the military, but I have met many men who have. In the 1980s I met a man a few years older than me who was stationed in South Korea with the US Army in the late 1970s. He told me stories of “Miss Oh”, a local courtesan in Daegu, South Korea. Based on the gleam in his eye when he reminisced, Miss Oh must have been a proverbial firecracker.

One of my high school acquaintances was in the US Marine Corps during the 1980s. (I’ll call him Mitch.) Mitch also served in the Persian Gulf War of 1990-91.

Many years later, I ran into Mitch at a reunion and he told me some war stories.

While relating his experiences abroad, Mitch also mentioned a handful of experiences with professional women—mostly in the Philippines, where large numbers of US service personnel were stationed through about 1992.

I was somewhat surprised. Mitch had been the archetypical ladies’ man in high school: a handsome, charming, multi-sport athlete. Not the kind of guy one associates with sex workers.

Perhaps sensing my surprise at his revelation, Mitch explained: “You’re a young guy in a foreign country, working in a mostly male organization (the Marine Corps). There aren’t many opportunities for conventional dating and relationships.”

Things are different, though, in this enlightened 21st century. The USS Abraham Lincoln has just docked in Thailand. The aircraft carrier and its crew participated in US military operations against Iran, and stayed at sea for more than 260 days—almost nine months.

And what are people worried about? Some of the male members of the crew may visit prostitutes in Pattaya, Thailand, a city famed for its red-light district. Continue reading “Moral panic over Pattaya, and an innovative madam of World War II Honolulu”

“The Door-to-Door Man”: a short story set in the age of “stranger danger”

It’s an ordinary spring afternoon in suburban Cincinnati, 1980.

Eighteen-year-old Michelle Blevins is home with her younger brother when a stranger rings the doorbell.

The stranger is wearing a blazer, tie, and aviator sunglasses. He says he represents a local law firm. He says Michelle’s parents are in trouble.

And he really wants to come inside.

That’s the setup for “The Door-to-Door Man,” my latest original short story for YouTube.

Those of us who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s will remember that this was the era of “stranger danger.”

In some ways, the world was considerably less connected than it is today. There were no cell phones, doorbell cameras, GPS trackers, or Internet searches. If a stranger appeared at your front door, you couldn’t pull out your phone and immediately find out who he was.

At the same time, people were becoming increasingly aware that the world wasn’t necessarily as safe as they had once imagined.

Serial killers, violent crime, and mysterious disappearances regularly made the news. Parents warned their children about strangers. And yet it was still perfectly normal for unfamiliar people—salesmen, repairmen, deliverymen, religious solicitors, and others—to simply walk up to your house and ring the doorbell.

That combination provides the backdrop for “The Door-to-Door Man.”

I’ve been experimenting with writing very short fiction specifically for YouTube: complete stories that can be read or listened to in a single sitting, accompanied by atmospheric visuals.

“The Door-to-Door Man” is one of these stories. It’s a tale of suspense rather than supernatural horror. There are no ghosts, monsters, or paranormal forces here. Just an ordinary young woman, an ordinary suburban house—and a stranger at the door who may not be what he claims to be.

You can watch and listen to the complete story in the video accompanying this post.

If you enjoy “The Door-to-Door Man”…

You might also want to check out my DEADLY BYWAYS series.

Deadly Byways consists of six novels set in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Like “The Door-to-Door Man,” these stories explore the darker side of an era that many of us remember with nostalgia—but which had plenty of dangers and shadows of its own.

The books are available on Amazon and can also be read through Kindle Unlimited.

If you enjoy suspense stories about ordinary people confronting extraordinary dangers—especially stories set against the backdrop of America several decades ago—DEADLY BYWAYS may be for you.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy “The Door-to-Door Man.”

And remember: be careful who you open your front door to.

-ET

Rick Springfield, at almost my dad’s age, is in better shape than me

Rick Springfield is touring this summer, apparently. That alone is newsworthy, given his age. But the 77-year-old performer is also making headlines because of his physique.

There can be no hedging or prevarication here. This guy is in amazing shape for 77. He probably has good genes. But he also works at maintaining this degree of fitness. (I’ve seen some videos about his fitness routines on YouTube, and they’re definitely worth watching.)

From a personal perspective: I’m 58, and Springfield is three years younger than my dad. I can remember the girls in my junior high class, back in 1981, having crushes on him.

It’s all about maintaining good habits as you age.

One more personal note: I might be able to outrun Rick Springfield, but I definitely don’t have his degree of leanness. Now excuse me, while I head to the gym for an extra workout.

-ET

Who should get the half-staff flag treatment when they die?

Ken Adams, the mayor of Olive Branch, Mississippi, has balked at lowering the flag in honor of the late Dolly Parton—who passed away last Tuesday.

Adams acknowledged Dolly Parton’s universal appeal and good works in a social media post, while also challenging the appropriateness of lowering the flag in her honor.

According to Adams, “It should be reserved for our military heroes, fallen first responders, presidents and other major national leaders, or events that have had a tremendous impact on our country. If we lower the flag every time a well-known or beloved person passes away, I believe we eventually lessen the meaning of the gesture.”

Most recently, President Trump ordered the flag to be flown at half-staff for Senator Lindsey Graham, who died of natural causes in July. (Well, there are some conspiracy chasers who think the Russian FSB was involved, but we’ll table that discussion for the moment.)

And then there was the lowering of the flag for the assassinated Charlie Kirk last year. Kirk was a noteworthy but controversial celebrity/activist who divided public opinion.

On the other hand, no presidential order was given to lower the flag for Jesse Jackson, a civil rights activist and politician who died in February. Continue reading “Who should get the half-staff flag treatment when they die?”

Seth Godin, “the Amazon tax”, and pay-per-click battles to the death

Seth Godin has written an uncharacteristically scathing piece on the Hobbesian state of Amazon advertising. His basic thesis is that Amazon’s reliance on PPC ad revenue has created some perverse incentives.

The company used to focus on delivering the optimal product listings to consumers at the lowest prices. All of this was powered by Amazon’s internal search engine.

This process is known as organic discovery, and it benefited both buyers and sellers.

Organic discovery still exists to a certain extent on Amazon. But now there is something more nefarious and complicated in the mix. Amazon now makes about a billion dollars per week from search ads. PPC (pay-per-click) ads litter every available space on Amazon, including the top of your search results. Because these ads are now so plentiful and prominent on Amazon, anyone who sells there must engage in PPC advertising.

This of course includes new entrants to a particular market, but not only new entrants. Established players must also now invest substantially in defensive advertising on the platform.

Consumers don’t benefit from this excessive ad competition. On the contrary, they end up paying higher prices (because sellers must now recoup high ad costs in product pricing), as well as more limited and shoddier product lines. This is what Seth Godin calls “the Amazon tax”. “Amazon,” declares Godin, “is stealing from the customers they said they were here to serve.” Make of that what you will.

***

I’m an author/publisher. I therefore can’t really comment about how this might affect the electric snow blower market on Amazon. I can, however, say something about its effects on the book market. Continue reading “Seth Godin, “the Amazon tax”, and pay-per-click battles to the death”

Dolly Parton and what celebrity deaths really mean to us

As most of you will be aware, Dolly Parton passed away earlier this week. She was 80 years old.

Dolly Parton, born the same year as both of my parents, was already part of the pop culture landscape by the time I was born. As a result, she is one of those celebrities who has been around for my entire life.

I remember hearing her songs on the radio, of course. I also remember the spate of successful movies that she had in the 1980s: 9 to 5, Steel Magnolias, Rhinestone, and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.

Because of my generational identity—and perhaps because of my gender—I was never a fan of Dolly Parton in the same way that I was a fan of Rush and Sylvester Stallone. That said, I have enjoyed much of her output over the years. I even have at least two favorite Dolly Parton songs: “Jolene” and “Islands in the Stream” (her duet with Kenny Rogers).

At this point in life, I’ve lost too many people whom I actually knew to be profoundly saddened by the death of an octogenarian celebrity whom I never knew. I will admit my selfish inclinations here. Dolly Parton’s death represents a passing of yet one more part of the world in which I grew up, a world which I believe to be in many ways better than the one of the 21st century.

My personal perspective aside, Dolly Parton seems to have been a genuinely good person, and everything that she added to our culture was positive so far as I remember. Her presence will be missed. Dolly Parton, 80. R.I.P.

-ET

The Texas Roadhoax?

As far back as the 1970s, there have been rumors and urban legends about restaurant employees tampering with customers’ food.

I recall one such story from the 1980s, about a steakhouse employee who supposedly urinated on random customers’ steaks. That might just be enough to make even a sane, well-adjusted person go vegan.

One thing I noticed, though—these stories never stood up to scrutiny. How, exactly, did a single employee manage this urinary sabotage in a crowded kitchen environment, with other cooks, managers, and servers coming and going? Did the cook have a name? Well, no, not exactly… he was some dude who worked at X steakhouse. Continue reading “The Texas Roadhoax?”

Can marriage become a bad habit?

One of my childhood friends (we are both 58) recently got married for the third time.

No—before you ask—this is not a case of an older man trading in his same-aged wife for a younger model. All of my friend’s wives have been “age-appropriate”. None of the three were conspicuously attractive, or more conspicuously attractive than the other two. My friend has always been a man of average means and appearance who dated and married at his level.

Many celebrities have made a bad habit out of marriage. Zsa Zsa Gabor was famously married nine times. Mickey Rooney and Elizabeth Taylor both married eight times. Nicolas Cage has had five wives—including the late Lisa Marie Presley, who was married four times. (Presley’s father, Elvis, recognized that he was a bad fit for marriage, and married only once. That marriage ended after six years.)

I grew up Roman Catholic in the Midwest, during an era when “traditional family values” were still more than talking points in the culture wars. My parents had an occasionally argumentative—but basically sound—marriage, and I benefitted from that upbringing.

That said, I would argue that marriage is mostly a young person’s game, and that it should only be done once. Back to my friend. Why, exactly, does a man in his fifties, who has already been married twice (and who has two adult children from a previous marriage) need to tie the knot a third time? Marriage can be a wonderful thing; but it can also become a life-disrupting, expensive habit—for men and women alike.

Most of us are good at some things and not so good at others. We can spare both ourselves and others much grief in this world if we learn to recognize the things that we are not good at. A man who has already failed at marriage twice has demonstrated that he is not well-suited to the venture. Something is wrong with his fundamental process. Either he chooses poorly, or he is incapable of the deep, one-on-one interpersonal union that a successful marriage requires.

I wish my friend well, of course, in his latest marital venture. But I can’t help recalling that old saw about the definition of insanity: that it is the insistence on doing the same failed thing over and over again… yet somehow expecting a different result.

-ET

A disappearance in 1987

What if someone you knew in 1987 simply disappeared?

Not just physically.

What if her name vanished from university records? Her coworkers had never heard of her. Her boyfriend insisted she had never existed.

And you were the only person who remembered her?

In the summer of 1987, nineteen-year-old Steve Harris meets Mary Wilson while taking a biology class at the University of Cincinnati.

Mary is fascinated by a campus legend involving the deserted upper floors of Crosley Tower. She persuades Steve to investigate with her.

They find something up there.

And the next day, Mary is gone.

But Crosley Tower isn’t merely haunted.

Something inside the building has disturbed the boundary between 1987 and 2026—between one version of reality and another.

And Mary Wilson may not be gone at all.

She may simply be somewhere—or somewhen—else.

THE WOMAN IN CROSLEY TOWER

A supernatural mystery about memory, time, and a building where realities that should never touch begin to overlap.

Available on Amazon and in Kindle Unlimited.

Online book reviews and ratings: take them with a large grain of salt

About a decade ago, I read a review of Mary Miller’s 2014 novel, The Last Days of California, in a print magazine. The reviewer, a book critic whom I knew by name and trusted, highly recommended Miller’s novel.

I was skeptical. The Last Days of California is a teenage girl’s coming-of-age story. I was a middle-aged man. Not long before that, a young woman in my social circle had recommended John Green’s emotional teen novel The Fault in Our Stars. Against my better judgment, I had purchased The Fault in Our Stars and tried to read it. I was unable to finish—not because The Fault in Our Stars was a bad book, but simply because I was the wrong reader for it.

Nevertheless, I ordered The Last Days of California from Amazon. The book promised to be not only a coming-of-age story, but also a story about the dynamics of 21st-century family life with a little bit of the culture wars mixed in. I was intrigued.

I’m glad I took a chance on The Last Days of California. It turned out to be a wonderful story, even though this is the kind of book I rarely read. (My personal reading tastes veer more toward Michael Connelly and Lee Child.)

But the collective readership of Amazon and Goodreads does not agree with me—at least not the ones who are leaving ratings and reviews. At the time of this writing, The Last Days of California has a 3.5 cumulative average on Amazon and a 3.4 cumulative average on Goodreads.

If I had consulted the online peanut gallery, I would have skipped Mary Miller’s book entirely. Fortunately, by 2014 I already knew the truth about mass online review venues like Amazon and Goodreads.

The Last Days of California, by Mary Miller (Amazon product page, 8/25/2026)

In 2012, it was discovered that John Locke, a bestselling indie author famous for his Donovan Creed series, purchased reviews from review farms. He personally compensated some other reviewers.

Black hat practices like that are harder to carry out in 2026. (There was a widespread backlash over the John Locke scandal, and Amazon took some steps to penalize outright review scammers.)

But gray hat practices persist in the publishing industry. Major publishers and imprints retain lists of friendly reader-reviewers, who can always be counted on to give a particular author a 5-star review. Indie authors are not far behind. Most know better than to specifically compensate for reviews, but there are still indie authors who will raffle iPads for their reader-reviewers. That sends a message—and broadcasts certain incentives. Continue reading “Online book reviews and ratings: take them with a large grain of salt”