Posts on Chained Birds Book

Some mysteries are buried deep, but they never truly disappear. For the past year, I’ve been immersed in the cold, hard details of a case that’s haunted me since I first started researching it three decades ago. Bringing The Jacklighter to life has been an exercise in reconstruction—sifting through old boxes of evidence, documents, and now ...

Episode 214 of Jim Harold’s CRIME SCENE podcast dropped today, and I’m delighted to share it with true crime fans and potential readers of Chained Birds. Jim is an experienced, top-notch interviewer, and his probing questions centered on the prison abuses and corruption I reveal in the book, as well as the failings in our ...

It was a busy launch day at Chained Birds HQ in Philadelphia yesterday, and I’m grateful to all my well-wishers—virtual and in-person—for making my book launch so special 🥹 Yesterday morning, my wonderful write-up from Independent Book Review went live on their site, and I’m happy to post the review’s permanent link. IBR also named Chained Birds ...

I’ve been waiting for publication week to post (and boast) about my glowing Midwest Book Review write-up, which just went live on the review site’s Bookwatch page. MBR Senior Reviewer D. Donovan highlights the snowball at the book’s beginning, which was the nexus that led to my involvement in a federal prison case and eventually to ...

This supplement appears at the end of Chained Birds: A True Crime Memoir in the print and eBook editions, but I am giving it a permanent place on my blog as a point of reference, especially for audiobook listeners. My sound engineer, who guided me through the audiobook narration process in the summer of 2024, said listeners ...

This is a big week for Chained Birds book reviews as they go live on their respective websites ahead of Tuesday’s November 12, 2024 launch. And this 4-star review by Literary Titan is the first in-depth write-up of the book’s “courtroom drama” component. From the second paragraph: This memoir stands apart from the typical true crime ...

In this final stretch before Chained Birds: A True Crime Memoir launches on Tuesday, I wish to thank a talented, generous group of fellow debut authors who formed an alliance and brought me into their fold. I’m speaking of the 2024Debuts. Long before I joined, some entrepreneurial authors with books coming out this year banded together ...

Who were we kidding? A woman of color to be the next U.S. President? No can do. That mountain of American racism and misogyny is just too steep. Pundits and others will debate and blame Trump’s assassination attempt, defecting Latinos, or lies about migrants eating cats that stuck and held. But it really just comes ...

Yeah. I’m gonna go there. I need to get this out of the way … In recognition of my wonderful BestThrillers.com book review going live on their website, I’m going to expand on one theme from its critique that no other reviewer has mentioned, and that is politics. But before I dive into that cesspool, I want ...