Mark McNease

I’ve been singing Dave Hughes’s praises for several years now. His columns on retirement at RetireFabulously.com have been incredibly helpful and I can’t recommend them enough. Whether you’re retired, single, coupled, or planning this most enjoyable phase of your life, Dave has the experience and guidance that can help you navigate this sometimes stormy sea. Oh, and you’ll notice it was edited by yours truly! An honor and a privilege.

About ‘Smooth Sailing Into Retirement: How to Navigate the Transition from Work to Leisure’:

Smooth Sailing into Retirement will guide you from your last few months of work through your first year of retirement. It identifies the many ways your life will change and prepares you for the emotions you may experience along the way. At each step, you will receive strategies for dealing with these changes.

“… truly excellent — New Yorker-worthy, one might say. It was a perfect little Sunday-morning read.”

– Michael Craft, author of Inside Dumont and The Mark Manning Mysteries

I recently gave a complimentary copy of my short story, The Cat in the Window, to email subscribers as a ‘thank you.’ Now it’s available to anyone with just a click and .99 cents.

‘Tis the season to say thank you to over 1,600 email subscribers. Look for more new stuff in 2018, including Lee Lynch’s monthly Amazon Trail columns and book reviews from Terri Schlichenmeyer, aka ‘The Bookworm.’ For now, please enjoy this short story as a holiday bonus for subscribing. Not a subscriber yet? Just click here and look for your welcome email with with a stocking full of stories!

Lillian Bostwick hated the cat in the window. It taunted her, defied her, and finally taught her how to live again. 

“It sat in the fifth floor window all day long, season to season, morning to night, staring across into her living room. It would be there when she got home from work, positioned exactly where it had been when she’d left that morning. It watched her as if it knew everything about her, as if it just couldn’t wait to tell the neighborhood about Lillian Bostwick and all her little secrets.

Lucky number 13! I co-created the children’s TV program, ‘Into the Outdoors’, with Rick Rose 16 years ago, and wrote the first two seasons. Congratulations to the creative team behind the show as they continue to educate kids and bring home the statues!

INTO THE OUTDOORS TV SHOW BRINGS HOME 2017 REGIONAL EMMY™ AWARD
Wisconsin-based children’s TV show gains recognition for its science education efforts

Madison, WISC. – Into the Outdoors, a popular children’s television series dedicated to science education, won a 2017 Emmy Award™ at the annual Chicago/Midwest Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Science Emmy Awards Ceremony held recently in Chicago. Since its debut in 2001, Into the Outdoors has earned 17 nominations in the category of “Outstanding Achievement for Children/Youth/Teen Programming,” winning a total of 13 Emmy Awards to date. The show is produced by Discover Mediaworks, which is owned by St. Germain residents Mark and Lisa Rose.

I’m doing something completely new with the Marshall James series and having readers choose the main storyline for book #2. Ebook readers can now find this at the end of the book.

Below are two scenarios for a central plot. JUST FOLLOW THIS LINK to SurveyMonkey and vote for the story you’d like to see next. I’ll close the voting at the end of December and get to work on the next gripping Marshall James Novel in the new year, featuring the storyline readers most want to see in the second book. I’ll announce it at my website MarkMcNease.com, and do my damnedest to get it to you for your fall reading, 2018.

Without further ado, here are the options:

(1) BEAUTIFUL CORPSE: A MARSHALL JAMES NOVEL

It’s been a year since the Paisley Parrot murders. Marshall has moved on, now working at the Skylight, a gay bar in West Hollywood as far removed from the Parrot in atmosphere and clientele as it is in location. New, trendy, packed every night, and dangerous, the Skylight is at the epicenter of L.A’s underground drug culture. Marshall will have none of it: he’s newly sober and living with Mac McElroy, the LAPD detective who’d saved his life during the Paisley Parrot/Popper Jack killings.

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It’s that time of year. Thanksgiving is over and Santa’s tuning up his slay – I mean sleigh – just in time for a killer Christmas sale.

From now through December, all 7 mysteries and thrillers are on sale for just .99 cents each. Murder makes the perfect stocking stuffer!

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Murder at the Paisley Parrot

The year was 1983. The bar was the Paisley Parrot, a gay, mob-run dive where people came to drink and few of them remembered the night before. Marshall loves his job as a bartender there. But one night, among the regulars, a killer arrives. Body by body, death by death, Marshall finds himself pulled into a web of murder, deceit and crime, with a psychopath waiting at the center of it all. Marshall falls for the cop who’s investigating him, not knowing if their relationship will survive or even if he’ll come out of this alive. Find out before last call comes around.

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Last Room at the Cliff’s Edge

Retired homicide detective Linda Sikorsky and her wife Kirsten McClellan head to Maine for a long weekend of rest, relaxation and rewrites as Kirsten finishes drafting her first novel. Bad weather alters their plans, forcing them to stop for the night at the Cliff’s Edge, a motel known for secrecy and indiscretion. Something murderous goes bump in the night, sending the women on a search for justice when a young reporter’s body is found dumped and violated on a back road. A road Linda must now go down, no matter where it takes her, or what it reveals.

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Kill Switch

n the 5th installment of the Kyle Callahan Mysteries, Kyle finds himself in therapy after ending the life of the Pride Killer, the most successful serial killer New York City has ever known. Putting an end to evil was the right thing to do, but it left Kyle in need of the services of psychotherapist Peter Benoit. Kyle decides the best way to re-engage with life is to do what he can’t stop doing: solving murders. Joined once again by his friend Detective Linda Sikorsky, Kyle takes on his first cold case, the murder of a teenager three years ago. Corinne Copley was killed on a Manhattan side street for nothing more than her cell phone. Or was that really the reason? Come along as Kyle delves into the murky undercurrent of New York City politics, pursues a crime boss who kills as easily as she breathes, and seeks justice for the father of a murdered child.

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Death by Pride

The Pride Trilogy concludes with ‘Death by Pride.’ It’s Gay Pride weekend, the most festive weekend of the year in New York City. Stalking the party is the most successful serial killer the city has ever seen. He claims his victims in threes and has just begun his newest spree. Detective Linda Sikorsky comes to town to visit Kyle Callahan and his husband Danny Durban. It’s her first Pride Parade and may well be her last. Harmless fun turns to terror in a frantic effort to stop the killer once the first body floats to the river’s edge. This time it’s personal, and this time one of them might not make it out alive.

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Death in the Headlights

It’s been six months since the Pride Gallery murders in Manhattan. Kyle Callahan and his partner Danny Durban head to rural New Jersey for a relaxing week with their dear friend, Detective Linda Sikorsky, recently retired and newly in love. Driving back from dinner with Linda and her fiancée Kirsten, they discover the body of Abigail Creek, run off the road on a bicycle wearing only her nightgown and slippers. Kyle and Linda quickly find themselves learning more than they want to know about the Creek family and the home they call CrossCreek Farm. In the words of Clara Presley’s grandmother, “Whatever grows there, grows in the shadows.” Come along as Linda and Kyle make their way into the shadows and enter the spider’s web, determined to find out who in this family of spiders is the deadliest one.

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Pride and Perilous

Manhattan’s Katherine Pride Gallery becomes the center of high art and low death in Pride and Perilous, the second of the Kyle Callahan Mysteries. Amateur photographer Kyle is about to have his first photo exhibit at the gallery, just as someone begins killing people connected to it. Bodies start to fall and Kyle realizes somebody wants this gallery closed forever. Joining Kyle and Danny are several of the characters from Murder at Pride Lodge, including Detective Linda Sikorsky from the New Hope, Pennsylvania, police force. She’s in town for the opening of Kyle’s show and to fill them in on the new woman in her life. No sooner does she leave the train at Penn Station than she finds herself joining Kyle in the chase to stop a killer as time ticks away. Can they do it before the clock strikes death again?

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Murder at Pride Lodge

Who killed Teddy the handyman – if anyone killed him at all? Was it Sid, one of the new owners of Pride Lodge whose past gets darker the closer you look? Was it the woman whose name was once Emily, when she witnessed the murder of her parents in a burglary gone bad, and who has waited thirty years for vengeance? Was it young Happy Corcoran, promoted to bartender only to vanish three days before Teddy was found dead at the bottom of the empty pool? Find out soon . . . as Kyle Callahan refuses to believe it was an accident, doggedly pursues the truth in his friend’s death and does his best not to join him.

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