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January news: French Fried hits the French bestseller lists! All those Christmas Kindles pushed French Fried to the number one spot at Amazon France for Travel books, number two for biography and number three for humour. It even entered the top 100 for all books (in French or English) sold there, reaching number eleven for books written in English.
Magical Crimes Number One at Amazon! Magical Crimes was the number one bestselling free short story AND the number one bestselling free Contemporary Fantasy at Amazon UK in December.
Great review of What Ho, Automaton! over at SFRevu. Read it here.
French Fried hits the international bestseller lists! It's now spent several months in Amazon UK's Travel, Humour and Biography bestseller lists and Amazon US's Travel bestseller list.
Work in progress: I'm currently working on a sequel to What Ho, Automaton! Next, I'm writing the second book in the Medium Dead series. And then I'm writing the second book in the DCI Shand series.
An Unsafe Pair of Hands is out! A baffling mystery novel with a detective pushed to the brink of a nervous breakdown. Which will break first - the case or DCI Shand? Available at BVC, Amazon US and UK for only $3.99.
 More New Books! - Medium Dead! A fun urban fantasy novel (think Stephanie Plum with magic and a touch
of Carl Hiaasen) available at BVC, Amazon US and UK for only $3.99.
What Ho, Automaton! Two Wodehouse Steampunk stories (a novelette and a novella) for only $2.99. More details here and at Amazon US and UK.
New editions of Resonance and Shift are available now. There are new covers and, for the first time, both books are available in Amazon's Kindle store. Resonance is $2.99 and Shift $3.99.
Not so new books: French Fried (the book that used to be called Nous Sommes Anglais) is available here from Book View Cafe for $3.99. It's also up at Amazon and Smashwords. The first two chapters of the new, polished version have been uploaded here. Other chapters will follow.
The first six chapters of International Kittens of Mystery have been posted for free at BVC. You can Meet the Kittens, Marvel at their Technology, and Be Entranced by their Awesome Superpower. If you liked my Kitten's Guide series you'll love International Kittens of Mystery - lots of pictures of cute kittens saving the planet.
Don't forget Magical Crimes, a fun CSI with magic story, available for only 99 cents as an eNovelette from Book View Cafe or here at the Amazon Kindle store.
Who is Chris Dolley?
- He's an English author of science fiction, fantasy and mystery novels (see Bio for more details)
- He's the man who convinced Fleet Street that Cornwall had declared independence (see Free Cornish Army)
- He's the man who should never have moved to France. See French Fried for the first eight chapters of a move to France that saw his identity stolen, his life savings seized and how, abandoned by the police forces of four countries, he had to solve the crime himself. Which he did in one of the most bizarre and comical investigations ever.
- His debut novel, Resonance, was the first book to be plucked from Baen's electronic slushpile. It was published in November 2005 and entered Amazon's US SF&F bestseller chart in December. (See Resonance to read the excellent reviews)
- He's a member of the author publishing collective Book View Cafe - along with Ursula K LeGuin, Vonda N McIntyre, Sarah Zettel, Katherine Kerr, Laura Anne Gilman, Pati Nagle... the list goes on.
- He was one of the first computer games designers, writing the most aggressive chess program ever and inventing the most dangerous game ever played - the Giant Wrigley's Spearmint Gum Cliff Top Relay. See Confessions of a Pioneer Computer Games Designer for the complete story.
- He's worked with Milla Jovovitch, Daniel Auteuil and Luc Besson. (See Confessions of a French Film Extra)
RESONANCE
  Don’t step on the cracks - everyone knew the sense of that. One of the first things you learned as a child. But too many people forgot. Or didn’t care.
Graham Smith cared. He knew that paving stones set the cadence of a street; that cracks regulated the stride length and set the resonance that kept everything stable and harmonious. Step on the cracks and the street slipped out of kilter. Imperceptibly at first. Minute changes around the edges, a new person living at number thirty-three, a strange car outside number five. Step on the cracks too often and … well, anything could happen. He’d seen houses turned into blocks of flats overnight. Parades of shops come and go. Terraces demolished, office blocks erected. All overnight when no one was looking.
The world was a far more fragile place than people realised. And every now and then a thread would work loose and something or someone would unravel.
SHIFT
  Imagine a world where there's more than length, breadth and depth. Where there are other axes of movement. A true eleven-dimensional universe. And then throw in a discovery that the human brain protrudes into these higher dimensions.
Welcome to the world of SHIFT. A multi-dimensional thriller where the detective has to get inside the mind of a killer - the hard way.
A serial killer with multiple personalities. A born-again astronaut. A world on the brink of disaster. Only Nick and Louise can save the planet - if they live that long
 Magical Crimes is a fun CSI with magic and ‘a little something else’ story. The little something else being two foot long and lurking in the hero’s trousers. But don’t worry, the boinkwurst in this story is used purely for the purpose God intended – humour and crimefighting – not lustful titillation.
Seb Kemp is a psychic profiler with a problem. After a night out drinking some men wake up with an unexpected tattoo. Seb woke up with a floor-length boinkwurst and no memory of how, when or where it happened. To make matters worse, magic doesn’t work well with living tissue. The results are unpredictable. The spell might fade after a few days or ... something might drop off.
He needs help but, Pete, his forensic magician partner, is 3,000 miles away working on another case and Seb’s new partner is of the young and female persuasion. Not to mention extremely hot. The two of them are thrown together to solve a high profile locked room mystery where the utmost tact and diplomacy is required – not easy for a man with unpredictable trousers.
 In an uncertain world there is one organisation that stands head and small furry shoulders above the rest. Whenever the planet is in danger – be it from giant balls of wool or bands of renegade squirrels – only one group is guaranteed to answer the call.
The International Kittens of Mystery!
This is a journal of their stories. For the first time, cameras have been allowed into one of their top secret training camps – Training Camp Alpha. A camp where, under the supervision of pet humans, recruits are shown not only how to save the world but also how to manage their secret identities – how to blend in and infiltrate the human society that they alone can protect.
 Animals behaving badly, other people's misfortunes and the most bizarre true crime story ever. French Fried is the unfortunately true account of Chris Dolley’s first eight months in France and has been described as ‘A Year in Provence with Miss Marple and Gerald Durrell.’
Just when Chris and Shelagh think nothing more could possibly go wrong, they discover that Chris’s identity has been stolen and their life savings – all the money from their house sale in England that was going to finance their new life in France – had disappeared. A bank account had been opened in Chris’s name in Spain to take the proceeds.
Then they’re abandoned by the police forces of four countries who all insist the crime belongs to someone else's jurisdiction. The French say it’s an Irish crime as that’s where the money was held. The Irish say it’s French as that’s where all the correspondence came from. The British say it’s nothing to do with them even though forged British passports were used to open the bank account in Spain. And the Spanish are on holiday – and can’t even think about investigating any bank account for at least four weeks.
So Chris has to solve the crime himself. But unlike fictional detectives he has an 80 year-old mother-in-law and an excitable puppy who insist they come along if he's going anywhere interesting - like a stakeout.
 What Ho, Automaton! chronicles the adventures of Reggie Worcester, gentleman consulting detective, and his gentleman's personal gentle-automaton, Reeves.
Reggie, an avid reader of detective fiction, knows two things about solving crime: One, the guilty party is always the person you least suspect. And, two, The Murders in the Rue Morgue would have been solved a lot sooner had the detective the foresight to ask the witnesses if they'd seen any orang-utans recently. Reeves needs all his steam-powered cunning and intellect to curb the young master's excessive flights of fancy. And prevent him from getting engaged.
The book contains two stories set in an alternative 1903 where an augmented Queen Victoria is still on the throne and automata are a common sight below stairs.
 Medium Dead is a fun urban fantasy chronicling the crime fighting adventures of Brenda – a reluctant medium – and Brian – a Vigilante Demon with an impish sense of humour. Think Stephanie Plum with magic and a dash of Carl Hiaasen.
Brenda Steele is smart, funny and out of her depth. A Vigilante Demon called Brian wants her to find murdered spirits and help him track down their killers. But Brian doesn't just catch criminals, he likes to play with them first, and make the punishment fit the crime. As he tells Brenda, “if all you did was turn up, capture the bad guy then leave – century after century – you'd die of boredom.”
He's also reckless – his last partner died during one of his takedowns.
Along the way, Brenda discovers that Brian isn't as old, or as powerful, as he led her to believe. He might even be human. Whereas the murderer they're hunting, and the child he's holding prisoner, might not. |
