The Dead Man is REBORN

 

Reborn - A Dead Adventure
Reborn – A Dead Adventure

The “second season” finale of THE DEAD MAN, the series of action/adventure/horror novels that William Rabkin and I began two years ago, premieres on January 21st with REBORN, an action-packed, six-part Kindle Serial written by Kate Danley, Phoef Sutton and Lisa Klink. This story is big in every sense of the word… and if it succeeds, then THE DEAD MAN will most likely return in the Kindle Serial format for it’s “third season.” 

Here’s the story:

Tanis Archer is facing a miserable 25th birthday. She’s a part-time barista in her sixth year at Dallas Community College. Her life is going nowhere, fast.

Literally.

Because on her way to work, she loses control of her car and is killed in a horrific crash. That should have been the tragic end of her story. But days later, she wakes up on a cold morgue slab…and soon learns that miraculous resurrections have brutal side effects. For starters, there are people around her who look as if they are decomposing from the inside-out, victims of their rotting souls. Even worse, it’s no illusion. What she is seeing is real, a shadowy part of the world  where the bloody battle between good and evil is being fought every day by Matt Cahill, an ax-wielding “dead man” and his rag-tag army of supernatural freaks.

And she’s being asked to join him.

Obviously that’s not how Tanis wants to spend her after-life–she’d rather party with her new-found abilities–but an unimaginable horror is rising from the Black Sea, and she might just be the only person who can save humanity from an agonizing, never-ending nightmare…

 REBORN features a fresh, colorful heroine in an action-packed, darkly funny tale of adventure and terror told by an incredible dream team of award-winning, widely-acclaimed writers: USA Today bestselling author Kate Danley (The Woodcutter), Emmy Award winning screenwriter and novelist Phoef Sutton (Cheers, Boston Legal),  TV writer/producer and author Lisa Klink (Star Trek Voyager, Painkiller Jane)New York Times bestselling author and TV producer Lee Goldberg (The Heist, King City), and two-time Edgar-Award nominated writer William Rabkin (Monk, Psych).

 About six month ago, I gathered all the authors at my house and we broke the story the way we would in a TV series “writers’ room.” Like Bill and I, Phoef and Lisa are professional television writers…but this was a new way of working for Kate, but I think she liked it. We had a white board up on the wall, plenty of junk food, and only a general sense of where we wanted to go narratively. And then we brainstormed. By the end of the day, we had a story, which we divvied up into thirds for Kate, Phoef and Lisa to write. A couple of months later, when the three parts came in, Bill and I tied them together and smoothed out the rough edges, as we’ve done many times before on scripts on the various TV series we’ve produced.

We think REBORN send THE DEAD MAN series in an exciting new direction….and we hope fans of the series will agree!

 

 

The Mail I Get: Lee Goldberg Books in Chronological Order

I got this email from Lynn Donahue today:

I just discovered you while browsing on Amazon! I read an excerpt from  “Watch Me Die” and was amused enough to put it on my wish list. Which is a pretty big deal, really. It takes a lot to shove the mouse allllll the way up to the corner and click “add” when I’m smoking,  drinking coffee and coughing on cue when work calls. Whew! Luckily, I can multitask like an octopus on crack so you made it into my wish list!  However, before I start my Lee Goldberg journey, I’m wondering if there  is a chronological order to the books?

Not all of my books are series, so it’s not necessary to read them in chronological order. But here you go, Lynn, the Lee Goldberg Books in Chronological Order:

0316 Goldberg ecover JUDGEMENTThe Jury Series (aka .357 Vigilante) (mid-1980s).
Judgment
Adjourned
Payback
Guilty

Unsold Television Pilots 1955-1989 (1990)

Science Fiction Film-Making in the 1980s (with William Rabkin, Randy & Jean-Marc Lofficier) (1995)

Dreamweavers: Fantasy Film-Making in the 1980s (with William Rabkin, Randy & Jean-Marc Lofficier) (1995)

Television Series Revivals (1995) (republished in 2009 as Television Fast Forward)

The Charlie Willis Series
My Gun Has Bullets (1995)
Dead Space (aka Beyond the Beyond) (1997)

 

The Diagnosis Murder Series (2003-2007)
The Silent Partner
The Death Merchant
The Shooting Script
The Waking Nightmare
The Past Tense
The Dead Letter
The Double Life
The Last Word

The Walk (2004)

Watch Me Die (aka Man with the Iron-On Badge) (2005)

Successful Television Writing (with William Rabkin) (2007)

The Monk Series (2006-2013)
Mr. Monk Goes to the Firehouse
Mr. Monk Goes to Hawaii
Mr. Monk and the Blue Flu
Mr. Monk and the Two Assistants
Mr. Monk in Outer Space
Mr. Monk Goes to Germany
Mr. Monk is Miserable
Mr. Monk and the Dirty cop
Mr. Monk in Trouble
Mr. Monk is Cleaned Out
Mr. Monk on the Road
Mr. Monk on the Couch
Mr. Monk on Patrol
Mr. Monk is a Mess
Mr. Monk Gets Even

The Dead Man Series (2011-)

The Dead Man: Face of Evil (2011) (with William Rabkin)
The Dead Man: Hell in Heaven (2011) (with William Rabkin)

King City (2012)

McGrave (2012)

hollywoodThe Fox & O’Hare Series (with Janet Evanovich)
Pros & Cons (2013)
The Heist (2013)
The Chase (coming 2/2014)

Fast Track (2013)

Ella Clah: The Pilot Script (with William Rabkin) (2013)

Anthologies
Fedora III (2004)
Hollywood and Crime (2007)
Three Ways to Die (2009)
Double Impact (2012) (includes the novels Watch Me Die and McGrave)
Three to Get Deadly (includes the novel The Walk) (2012)
Top Suspense (2012)
Die, Lover Die (2012)
Top Suspense: Favorite Kills (2012)
Writing Crime Fiction (2012)
Double Header (2012) (includes the novels My Gun Has Bullets and Dead Space)

“The Walk” Kicks off Amazon’s New Matchbook Program

The_Walk_FINAL (2)My novel THE WALK, originally published by Five Star in the early 2000s, was a critical success but a commercial failure that went quickly out of print. I republished it on the Kindle in 2009 and it has become a bestseller, selling over a hundred thousand copies. As recently as last month, it was #1 again on Amazon. Today, Amazon is featuring the book in their announcement of the new Amazon Matchbook program.

Today, Amazon launched Kindle MatchBook, a new benefit that gives customers the option to buy—for $2.99, $1.99, $0.99, or free—the Kindle edition of print books they have purchased new from Amazon. Over 70,000 books are enrolled in Kindle MatchBook, with more being added every day. Now customers can visit www.amazon.com/kindlematchbook to see all of their print books that are eligible for the Kindle MatchBook edition. Customers can also see when a book is eligible for Kindle MatchBook on the book’s detail page.

The program was announced on September 3 with over 10,000 titles. Since then, thousands of popular books likeHeaven is for RealThe Things They Carried and The Way of Kings have been added from major publishers such as HarperCollins, Macmillan, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Amazon Publishing, Wiley, Chronicle Books, and Marvel, as well as thousands of titles from Kindle Direct Publishing authors like The Walk by Lee Goldberg and Falling Into You byJasinda Wilder.

“It’s been great to see the positive response to MatchBook from both readers and publishers,” said Russ Grandinetti, Vice President, Kindle Content. “MatchBook enrollment has grown from 10,000 to 70,000 titles in just a few weeks and we expect it will keep expanding rapidly in the months ahead.”

The New, Unimproved Monk

MMHH Cover

It wasn’t easy for me to walk away from writing the Monk books. After 15 novels over seven years, I’d become very attached to the characters. Monk, Natalie and the rest of the gang were always on my mind because I was always writing the books. But I decided it was time for a change (little did I know I’d soon be writing THE HEIST with Janet Evanovich!) And when I let my publisher know I was leaving, they told me they’d like to continue the series without me. They asked if I could recommend someone to pick up where I left off. I strongly recommended my friend Hy Conrad, a writer-producer on MONK and a terrific mystery plotter. He already knew the characters inside-and-out and had written some of the most beloved episodes of the TV series.  I knew the characters would be in very good hands with him, no matter what direction he decided to take the books. And that, of course, was the first, fundamental issue he had to deal with, as he explains in this guest post…

When it was announced I was taking over these novels, Monk fans started contacting me in droves, all asking the same question. Was I going to reboot the series, like a Batman or Spider-Man franchise, or just pick up where Lee Goldberg left off?

 To be honest, I never thought of rebooting. To me, the Monk characters are real. On the show, the other writers and I took Monk and Natalie to a certain place in their lives. Meanwhile, in a parallel universe, Lee continued to expand them, smoothing out little bumps and creating new ones.  I didn’t want to mess with that reality.

 In the new books, some things will naturally be different, because Lee and I are naturally different. For example, his Natalie knows a lot about architecture. Mine, not so much. His Monk is more obsessed with numbers and symmetry. Mine is a little more phobic.  I tried to insert some pop references into Natalie’s voice.  But the show never did many pop references and it doesn’t come naturally to me.

 In many ways, Lee strengthened the Monk franchise. For one thing, he knows San Francisco and the wonderful character of the town. We wrote the show in Summit, New Jersey, and, while we did have a San Francisco map, it was pinned on the far wall and no one wandered over there very often. I’ll try to do improve on our atmospheric quality, I promise.

 The same goes for forensics accuracy. Lee had called on a cadre of experts to make sure his details were right. Despite our own police consultant, the Monk writers tried not to burden ourselves with too many facts. At one point, the production team called to tell us our formula for bomb making was ridiculous. We replied, “Do you really want us broadcasting how to make a bomb?” That shut them up.

The good news is that we were sticklers for logic. We may not have known bomb making, but we insisted that the logic of every story always worked.  For example, when Monk was in a life-threatening predicament in Act Four, which he usually was, we knew we had to send Stottlemeyer in there to save the day.   In a lot of TV shows, the writers never ask, “Well, how did Stottlemeyer know Monk was in trouble?”  We did.  And sometimes it would take us a full day to answer the question.

 The other good news is that I was with the show from beginning to end, for all eight years. I was the mystery guy, while everyone else had come from the world of comedy. Along the way, I think I had some influence on the way Monk talked and interacted. In other words, he wound up a little bit like me, which makes writing for him a pleasure.

When I first told Monk creator/executive producer Andy Breckman that I was doing this, his response was, “Great. You can use some of the Monk stories we never got to do.”

Mr. Monk Helps Himself is one of those stories. I brought it into the writers’ room during season six. We played around with the idea until it morphed into something totally different—Mr. Monk Joins a Cult, guest-starring Howie Mandel. That’s how it happens in a roomful of writers. There are dozens of great plots, half thought through, buzzing around in our collective memory.

 I have to admit it’s nice to finally have the last word in what mysteries Monk solves and how he reacts.  I’ll try not to abuse the power.