ROBERT B. PARKER’S BIG SHOT, OUT 2.10.26

It’s been a while since I’ve bothered any of you with updates from my desk. I’ve been busy, or at least it seems like it in hindsight.

The big news is I’ve finished the next book in Robert B. Parker’s Jesse Stone series. ROBERT B. PARKER’S BIG SHOT will be available everywhere in print, ebook, and audiobook on February 10, 2026.

Here’s what it’s about:

They’re still working on the cover, but you can take a look at the manuscript in its raw form here:

Of course you can pre-order it now and get ahead of the crowd.

FRIENDS AND WELL-WISHERS

BENJAMIN by Ben H. Winters

First up, my friend Ben H. Winters has (yet another) great story for us, this time a comic series from Oni Press titled BENJAMIN. It’s about a cult sci-fi author (he’d hate every word of that description) who died in 1982 waking up one morning in a hotel room in 2025 Los Angeles. He’s better equipped to handle this than most people, but it’s still pretty weird. The series is off to a fun and fascinating start, and I really want to see where Ben takes it. So do a lot of other people. The first issue is already sold out and going into a second printing, so get your copy while you can on July 9th.

Ben was also nice enough to include me in the box of Carp’s books. (This is actually the second time I’ve appeared in a comic book. The first was in Beau Smith’s Wynonna Earp.)

ECSTASY by Ivy Pochoda

I got to see Ivy a week before her new book dropped at the UC Riverside/Palm Desert MFA program, where I was a guest lecturer again this year. It was 110 degrees and we held conferences in the pool, which was the temperature of soup. But Ivy was killing it as always.

ECSTASY is a modern horror retelling of Euripides’ The Bacchae. There’s always a lesson in mythology, but it’s rarely the one we think we’re going to get. I am not a classics scholar like Ivy, but one thing I’ve noticed about Greek and Roman myths is that their morality is very different from our modern concept of it. They are usually about reminding human beings of their powerlessness in the hands of fate, which is also what horror does. In both kinds of stories, the characters struggle against the inevitable, which comes for them anyway. It’s how they struggle that makes the stories interesting.

And Ivy, as usual, knocks it out of the park. Ecstasy is a propulsive, frightening ride all the way to the last page, as we watch the widow of a hotel developer deal with some very weird squatters on the beach of her late husband’s resort on a Greek island. Her son is determined to get rid of them before the grand opening, to live up to his father’s legacy. But they’re tapped into something far more ancient and powerful than he can imagine.

Ivy was featured in the New York Times this week, so I’m not the only one who’s singing her praises. I saw her read to a packed house at Skylight Books with fellow UCR/PD MFA guest lecturer Rider Strong. You can pick up a copy of Ecstasy from Skylight or any other bookseller.

LOVE, COFFEE, AND REVOLUTION by Stefanie Leder

I also got to see a new(ish) friend, Stefanie Leder, read from her new book, LOVE, COFFEE, AND REVOLUTION at Diesel in Brentwood this week. (I was behind a post and couldn’t get a good photo, so you’ll have to settle for this promo image from Stefanie’s Instagram feed.

LOVE, COFFEE, AND REVOLUTION is about a young idealist who runs off on an adventure to Costa Rica to promote fair trade coffee, and winds up caught between two men and their competing worlds: a rich son of a wealthy family and a dedicated revolutionary.

Stefanie is a funny, delightful writer, and another member of Tod Goldberg’s UCR/PD MFA Mafia. Anyone looking for a smart rom-com for the summer (or possibly a Netflix series adaptation) should get this book now.

That’s it for me this week. If you don’t want to get these emails anymore, just hit the unsubscribe link. And as always, thank you for reading.