CAST THE FIRST STONE - David James Warren - One Free Book

Dear Readers, I have loved all the books of both Susan May Warren and James Rubart I’ve read, and they have been most of them. When I heard about this series, I knew I wanted to feature them on the blog. James is with us today.

I know that this is a collaboration. How did this series come about? The True Lies of Rembrandt Stone series was a long time coming. Ages ago (probably around 2012) Susie and I were on a short plane ride together from Asheville, North Carolina, to Atlanta. We started talking about someday writing a book together and our shared loved of time travel stories.

Then in mid 2016 Susie came up with the idea of Rembrandt Stone, called me, gave me a five second pitch, “An ex-detective goes back in time to solve cold cases … are you in?”  I laughed and gave the only appropriate response: “Are you kidding?”

Susie asked her son David to join the team and in February of 2017 the three of us gathered at my home in eastern Washington (after Susie and David battled a Seattle and eastern Washington snowstorm) and brainstormed all six of the stories. So yes, it took a while from conception to release, but it turned out to be the perfect timing.

Did you find it easy to work together on it? Yes, we did. I’ve known Susie since 2008 and we have this amazing brother/sister relationship. And I’ve known David since 2013.

How did collaborating with this team impact you? What’s great about working with two other partners is realizing how much more two other brilliant people can bring to a project. We all have blind spots and the others can fill them.

What is the hardest thing about writing as a team? Geography! While Zoom and Slack and email are great connectors, there’s nothing like being the same room together.

What are you reading right now? Vortex, Mere Christianity, The Universal Christ, The Dark Tower book 5, Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader, and Wildflower. Doesn’t everyone had five or six books going at the same time?

I usually have only 2 or 3. Would you want to work on another book together? What we’ve been dreaming about is having a film producer get interested in the series and turn them into a TV show. We have had some bites so stay tuned.

Keep me informed about the movie. I'm actually working on a film that should go into production by early 2022. What do you want to tell us about the book? It’s a roller coaster ride! Here’s more:

One case haunts him. One chance to fix the past. One mistake could cost him everything.
Ex-Minneapolis Police Detective Rembrandt Stone walked away from a career he loved—just the price of being sure he can come home to the wife and daughter he cherishes. But he can’t shake the deep regret over a case left behind.

When his mentor, the former Chief of Homicide dies and leaves Rembrandt with a box of cold cases and a mysterious watch, he finds himself thrust into a world he recognizes—a world from twenty years ago—the same world he’s woken from in a cold sweat a hundred times. But is it a dream, or some kind of twisted reality?

If he solves the case that plagues him, and justice is finally served, will it destroy the life he loves?
Strap in for a mind-bending, time travel thrill ride in Book One of this riveting new series, The True Lies of Rembrandt Stone. From the creative pens of USA Today bestselling author Susan May Warren*, award-winning author James L. Rubart**, and new voice, David Curtis Warren, writing collectively as David James Warren.

Please give us the first page of the book.

It’s the regrets that keep me awake.

The broken hearts, the lives ripped apart. The bitter finales.

The sense that, frankly, it’s not finished. I’m not finished, no matter how much I try to lie to myself.

With every crime, a clock starts ticking. A forty-eight hour fuse that ignites, chewing away at the evidence. It begins with the victim and from that moment, time gnaws at every scrap of evidence. Eyewitness memories fade, clues are scattered to the wind by the daily congestion of life.

The colder the trail grows, the lower the likelihood of finding the perpetrators. This accounts for hundreds of thousands of cold cases in dusty file rooms and backup databases around the world.

It also accounts for the fist in my gut every time I have to face the bereaved with a despairing update. And, for too long, it accounted for the indentation in a stool down at the Gold Nugget where Jericho Bloom started pouring the minute I darkened the door.

Days past, but the cases still haunt me, some waking me in the still of night, Eve’s  sleeping body like an anchor in the darkness, tethering me to the now. Sometimes she too, awakens, and knowing, finds me and urges the ghosts to quiet, tucking them back inside.

They never stay silent for long. The whispers always return.

What if? What if I could go back to the moment, the beginning of the forty-eight hour window? What if I had been smarter or faster? Maybe everything would be different.

But you can’t change the past. None of this is any consolation to the seven-year-old cherub standing in front of me. “I’m sorry. Gomer’s been missing over a month.” I’m using my most stoic, former homicide Inspector voice, despite the pull of those big blue eyes staring at me.

“I don’t have any leads—”

“But Daddy, you’re a detective.” My accuser has curly, golden blonde hair and the way she stares at me, hands on her hips, so much belief in her eyes, I am undone. “You know how to find things.”

I’m already loving this book. Where can our readers find you on the Internet?

* Susan May Warren—

Website:  http://www.susanmaywarren.com/  

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SusanMayWarrenFiction

Twitter: @SusanMayWarren

**James L. Rubart—

Website: https://jameslrubart.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JamesLRubart

Twitter: @jamesLrubart

Thank you, James, Susan, and David, for sharing this new book with my blog readers and me. I am eager to read this first book.

Readers, here’s a link to the book.

http://ow.ly/fOIn50GryvO

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