The Last Second by Robin Burcell (
SYKM) is a tie-in novella to her Sydney Fitzpatrick series starring the eponymous forensic artist FBI Special Agent, this installment involving the FBI versus police corruption, free courtesy of publisher HarperCollins' Witness Impulse imprint.
Currently free @
Amazon (not available to Canadians, but free in the
UK),
Kobo &
iTunes (not available to Canadians, but both free in the US & UK)
If you happen to like this one, #2 in the series
The Bone Chamber, is currently marked down to just $0.99 across multiple US stores (sample linkage provided to
Kobo), which seems a bit of a non-intuitive choice, but props to HarperCollins for deep-discounting an actual novel in the series while running the tie-in novella freebie promotion.
And this has been the selected 3rd (non-repeat) free ebook thread of the day.
Because even though I actually think that Pagan Christianity church practices roots history book looks a lot more interesting than yet another Plucky FBI Agent vs Some Kind Of Terrorism And/Or Conspiracy And/Or Serial Killer Thriller, it's clearly a glitch freebie and aside from not making their freebie and the tie-in deals available to Canada and not being couponable in general, IMHO HarperCollins are doing the official publisher promo thing right with this one:
- offer a reasonably substantial free introduction to the series
- mark down all the other books in the series to a good price (#1 & #3-5 seem to be $4.99 for US persons; currently @ $7.99+ in Canada)
- make at least one of them really, really cheap to help entice people into trying by buying
- ???
- profit!
This is how you run a freebie tie-in promo with the intention of boosting your sales, and all the other publishers should take notes.
(Although it would be even nicer to have a 1st-in-series novel instead of a novella, but you can't have everything and this is a pretty decent offer. For people in the US. Because apparently the other books don't exist in the UK yet.)
Enjoy!
Description
Covert agent Zachary Griffin and FBI Special Agent Sydney Fitzpatrick are sidetracked from an ongoing investigation to follow up on a potential lead. In a small Arizona border town, gunrunning and drug trafficking into Mexico are a part of the landscape—but not when they're orchestrated by an officer in uniform. At least that's the story told to agents Griffin and Fitzpatrick.
But the dirty cop is now missing, and his sister says he's innocent, a victim of a corrupt police department. She is convinced they set him up to take the fall, then killed him, and she can prove it—with help from a highly unusual witness. Suddenly an open-and-shut case seems anything but, and the clock is ticking as Griffin and Fitzpatrick take on an entire police department in a deadly match that could go up in smoke at the last second.