Next in the Dakota Stevens Mystery Series…

Back in late Novem­ber 2011 when I released A Real Piece of Work, I promised to release book #2 in the series, The Rich Are Dif­fer­ent, once book #1 sold 1,000 copies.

When I wrote that, I was con­vinced it would take me at least 10 months to sell that many copies (an aver­age of 100/month). There­fore, I would have plen­ty of time to give The Rich Are Dif­fer­ent anoth­er pol­ish and to for­mat it and pub­lish it on the Kin­dle plat­form.

As most of you know, over this past week­end I had a pro­mo­tion and sales bonan­za, sell­ing over 1,000 copies of A Real Piece of Work in three days alone. While I’m tremen­dous­ly grate­ful for the over­whelm­ing response, it does alter my planned timetable con­sid­er­ably.

And so I’m here, dear reader—dear fan of Dako­ta & Svetlana—to ask for your patience.

I want The Rich Are Dif­fer­ent to be every bit as good as A Real Piece of Work, and in order to ensure this, I need time—time to read it again (it’s lain in a draw­er for 2 years), time to revise it, and time to get it into the com­pli­cat­ed Kin­dle for­mat for pub­li­ca­tion. I also need time for my tal­ent­ed cov­er design­er, Elis­a­beth Pinio, to cre­ate the new cov­er.

Ulti­mate­ly I want every read­er to have as enjoy­able an expe­ri­ence with book #2 as s/he did with book #1, and I want every read­er to feel that The Rich Are Dif­fer­ent stands up—in enter­tain­ment val­ue and lit­er­ary qual­i­ty. Get­ting the nov­el to a lev­el of qual­i­ty where I’m thor­ough­ly sat­is­fied with it will take me any­where from a few months (for sum­mer release) to sev­er­al months (for hol­i­day sea­son release). The best answer I can give is that it will take as long as it takes.

As I get fur­ther into the process of prepar­ing The Rich Are Dif­fer­ent for pub­li­ca­tion, I’ll post updates on where I am.

When the cov­er design is com­plete, Elis­a­beth and I will release that in advance as well.

For now, I’ll leave you with what I hope is a tan­ta­liz­ing syn­op­sis of book #2:

The Rich Are Dif­fer­ent, the sec­ond nov­el in Chris Orcutt’s Dako­ta Stevens mys­tery series, explores the rar­efied world of a Long Island heiress and her mur­dered broth­er who owned an Old West resort in Mon­tana. Going under­cov­er as actors in a make-believe min­ing town straight out of 1885, Dako­ta and his asso­ciate, Svet­lana Krüsh, hunt down the man’s killers, dis­cov­er­ing a moth­er lode of a motive in the process.

Like bul­lets from a Gatling gun, the sus­pects come fast and furi­ous: eccen­tric heiress­es, aim­less par­ty girls, greedy CEOs, cat­ty thes­pi­ans, sexy hench­women, angry Native Amer­i­cans, mys­te­ri­ous mob­sters, men­ac­ing mer­ce­nar­ies, kinky house­wives and con­tract killers. It’s a clas­sic case of East meets West as Dako­ta and Svet­lana fol­low a trail of clues that takes the read­er from the urbane set­ting of The Great Gats­by to the for­bid­ding land of Pale Rid­er.

###

By Chris Orcutt

CHRIS ORCUTT is an American novelist and fiction writer with over 30 years' writing experience and more than a dozen books in his oeuvre. Since 2015, Chris been working exclusively on his magnum opus. Bodaciously True & Totally Awesome: The Legendary Adventures of Avery “Ace” Craig is a 9-episode novel about teens in the 1980s. It’s about ’80s teens, but for adults (in other words, it’s decidedly not YA literature), and he’s applied this epic storytelling approach to the least examined, most misunderstood, most marginalized narrative space in American literature: the lives and inner worlds of teenagers.

Comments (12)