Free (Kindle/iTunes CA) Dangerous Pursuits [PI Thriller w/Original+Author Cut/Notes]

[ATDrake]

Dangerous Pursuits by Scottish crime novelist Quintin Jardine (SYKM, Wikipedia), both is and isn't the 1st book in his long-running Oz Blackstone mystery/thriller crime series, featuring the eponymous private inquiry agent, free courtesy of publisher Hachette's Headline imprint.

This is a truly excellent freebie, IMHO, and it's unfortunate that many of you won't be able to pick it up, but perhaps some of you may consider it worth a future purchase on sale anyway?

As far as the actual story goes, I couldn't vouch for quality (though the author seems to have been popular enough to have sold a few dozen novels in ongoing series).

It's actually most interesting to me as an e-book which takes good advantage of the possibilities of the format to include special bonuses which would be impractical for a print version, and even if you don't care for the genre, if you're an aspiring writer of any sort, I think you'd want to pick it up.

This includes both the entire original 1996 version which was published as Blackstone's Pursuits under the name of "Matthew Reid", and the newly-written 2013 Author's Cut where according to the accompanying notes, he has decided to write an entirely new take on the original story, after noticing that his main character had quite a number of personality traits associated with the clinical description of sociopathy and pretending to have "discovered" the "real" manuscript that was censored for publication.

So you get this fascinating idea of the new novel as a "hidden history" of a now very-unreliable narrator and "what really happened", as well as the old one to compare it with.

I've only skimmed a bit so far, but for anyone interested in the creative process, this seems like a great way to get insight into how the various character and plot decisions you make can affect the resulting effect of the story⁑, not to mention you have pretty much a side-by-side comparison of a nearly 20-year evolution in a single author's writing skills on the technical level as well. I'd be all over that, deconstructing and analyzing it to observe and learn as much as I could, if I were you.

And he even tells you why he's done some of the specific things he's (re-)done!

There's only a handful of reasonably prominent similar works which have undergone this kind of alteration and are readily available for public viewing (i.e., Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which exists in the version she wrote as a teen, then revised as an adult, and the late Marion Zimmer Bradley's* Sword of Aldones/Sharra's Exile, another novel completely re-written from the teen-envisioned version) and IMHO, it's fascinating to see the similarities and the differences.

And you're getting this one for free! (Maybe. If you live in the right area.)

Currently free @ Amazon & iTunes (both only available to Canadians, but they'll be very happy Canadians for as long as it lasts). ETA: and now also Kobo (for Canadians, of course).

ETA: Now a repeat freebie for Canada at all the stores above and @ Google Play, and also free for the UK this time as well @ B&N UK, Amazon UK, Kobo UK, iTunes UK, and probably also Google Play UK (exists in a slightly different edition that the Canadian one, so I can't pull up a link for you, sorry).

And this has been the selected 3rd free ebook alert thread of the day. Enjoy!

Description
Fans and new readers alike can enjoy the first title in Quintin Jardine's Oz Blackstone series - originally BLACKSTONE'S PURSUITS - updated with new material, exclusive to ebook.

When private enquiry agent Oz Blackstone takes on the job of finding an insurance company's missing half million, he's hoping for a healthy finder's fee, not a life-changing experience.

But when he finds the corpse of the would-be embezzler with a knife in his back and no sign of the missing money, what had seemed like a routine job begins to look distinctly dodgy. Until the captivating Primavera 'Prim' Phillips arrives on the scene, wondering why she's been greeted not by her sister Dawn, but Dawn's dead boyfriend and a rather nervous-looking private eye.

For Oz, things are looking up. This is the kind of girl who's definitely worth pursuing. Especially if she knows where to get her hands on half a million pounds…

* Who, unfortunately, turned out to be a much more terrible person in private than previously suspected, a failing depressingly common among persons whose work one has enjoyed, and should be acknowledged as part of who they were and part of their legacy as well, rather than absolved by the quality and influence of their work (or conversely, destroying said quality and influence whose content may be related, though ultimately independent of what else they've done which also has had its lasting effects and taints their memory).

⁑ Of course, the idea of working out variations on a theme has been a core part of the Oulipo† literary/creative movement since Raymond Queneau's (Wikipedia entry) excellent and recommended Exercices de style (also Wikipedia entry), which has had two absolutely marvellous illustrated editions‡ from Éditions Gallimard which showcase not only the literary, but also the incredible artistic potential of storytelling from a single concept.

For the graphic novel readers among you, artist Matt Madden (another Wikipedia entry) has done an inventive comic book riff on Queneau, which I also happen to own in two languages, and has put part of it up online for your reading delight: 99 Ways To Tell A Story (with, you guessed it, Wikipedia entry).

† Which happens to be my very favourite literary/creative movement ever. It's like the bastard lovechild of Dadaism and Arts & Crafts, and thus is made of many variations on the theme of sheer awesome.

‡ I own them both and can only give them the highest possible recommendation as creative art books in the truest sense. And not just because I'm a sucker for Bayeux Tapestry parodies.

The one done in the 70s has some nifty retro-typographical setting as well as a gallery of cultural/artistic parodies (i.e. the ancient Egyption version "chiseled" into stone, the heraldic coat of arms design, and the board game).

The one done in the 90s/00s is actually a flip book which splits the text/art into different sections above and below, so you can choose which set of illustrations to accompany the story.

Both are just brilliant and I in no way regret the $$ I spent to acquire them.

[Lynx-lynx]

Any reason that you haven't put this book in the existing Free/Bargain Mystery/Suspense/Thriller August 2014 thread?

[ATDrake]

Yes, several.

1. The only two actual written rules we have for posting in the Deals forum are "no self-promo" and "affiliate links disclosed and confined to a marked thread".

Everything else is up to the preference and discretion of the poster (subject to intervention by the mods if found inappropriate, of course).

2. Maybe it's just a personal thing, but if I were following a dedicated thread for notices, I wouldn't care to scroll past umpty pages of rambling and increasingly off-topic text for an offer I wasn't interested in.

3. This particular offer is very, very limited in being only available to one country that I've been able to find, so marking it upfront as being available for Canadians only with the "CA" in the title helps to draw people's attention to it if they happen to be Canadian, while warning non-Canadians off it so that they can avoid too much disappointment (and scrolling), without taking up too much visual space, comparatively, IMHO.

4. This.

Hope this answers things for you.

[koland]

Originally Posted by ATDrake

4. This.

Hope this answers things for you.

As you may remember, I actually prefer the single book/thread format. Easier to update for new formats (of course, no one bothers with that, anymore) and to bump if it comes up free again (sure, old hands don't care, but newbies do).

Thanks for the Attansio, btw, I would have missed that one.

[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by koland

As you may remember, I actually prefer the single book/thread format. Easier to update for new formats (of course, no one bothers with that, anymore) and to bump if it comes up free again (sure, old hands don't care, but newbies do).

I know, and I agree (and we're not alone, according to this old thread in the Lounge back when the megathreads were just getting started).

But we don't have a separate optional freebie-threads-only subforum that people can ignore, and we both know from the Feedback Forum that there are periodic complaints about too many individual book threads why can't you all just post in a single one/too many book threads at all I can't see my hardware deals/too many threads marked just for Kindle but sometimes they actually show up elsewhere/oh noes this free deal has expired why does it still say free/etc.

And it turns out that people who really, really don't want to see individual threads can't block seeing the ones I started even with the Ignore function, so 3 per day seemed like a decent compromise. If there's anything they would have liked which expires before the cutoff/or they didn't see it in time, well, too bad for them.

(Though starting today, I'm going to count 9 PM Pacific Time as "tomorrow" since that's when the B&N/iTunes CA/Kobo servers switch over and it'll give the non-UK Kindlers about 3½ hours to pick up something late in the day before it expires if it's a 1-day freebie, and not count repeats towards the quota.)

[ATDrake]

Guess what actually turned out to be free @ Kobo also (still just for Canadians, presumably), after all? Yay, easily strippable ePub copy I can put on my Sony to actually read!

If a mod happens to see this, requested thread title change that will fit:

Free (Kindle/iTunes/Kobo CA) Dangerous Pursuits [PI Crime w/Original+Author Cut/Note]

[peachiekene]

Originally Posted by ATDrake

(still just for Canadians, presumably)

Confirming - not available in the US.
Looks like such a nice offer too.

[ATDrake]

This is now a repeat freebie for Canada in all the original venues and now also free @ Google Play.

Also popped up newly free in the UK earlier this week (as noted in the Mystery megathread). All the relevant store links have been edited into the OP, and thread title request change about to be sent, since this is now available in more than just the one country.