ou are now entering the world of Brimstone, where you’ll get to know M. Ryan Seaver’s debut character, John Arsenal.
I have so much to share with you.
Check out the blurb.
Enjoy the excerpt.
Read my review.
Read the fun author interview.
And don’t forget to enter the giveaway.
let’s get to it!
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My Interview with M. Ryan Seaver
- Please tell us a little about yourself
I’m an author raised in upstate New York by a family of writers. I’ve spent the last ten years of my life in Boston, and recently moved to Chicago, where I spend every moment not spent writing exploring this enormous city, finding new places to eat and drink.
2) What did you want to be when you grew up?
Not a writer! My mother is actually a novelist as well, so I was constantly asked if I wanted to be a writer too, and I always said no, which I think was more of a kneejerk reaction than anything else. I changed my mind a lot about what I wanted to be as a younger kid, but as a teenager I finally settled on acting. I was in all the school musicals, and did acting camp during the summer. I ended up studying theater in Boston before I discovered that writing was my real love. I feel like I’m still acting, but in a different way. As a writer, I get to play all the parts as I’m writing the story. I get to play roles I would never be able to play in real life, which is a great feeling. I love being able to play some giant thug, or a really sinister bad guy.
- If you were granted 3 wishes, what would you wish for?
Infinite wishes! Just kidding. 1) A home with a beautiful state of the art kitchen, a serene little office, and enough rooms for all my friends and family to come stay. 2) The ability to eat what I like and not end up out looking like the stay puffed marshmallow man. 3) My sister just announced her engagement. I remember how absolutely overjoyed my grandmother was when I called her several years ago to tell her I was getting married, and how much she enjoyed the wedding. She’s since passed away. I wish she was here to see my sister get married too. She would have been absolutely beside herself.
- What genres do you like to read?
I’m a compulsive reader. I just devour everything. I really gravitate toward mystery, but love fiction in general, particularly if there’s a little something magical happening throughout the story (think The Time Traveler’s Wife, The Lovely Bones, In the Woods, The Night Circus).
5) Are you working on anything new and could you share a little with us?
I’ve just finished the first draft of the next book in the John Arsenal series. This one is a serial killer mystery, which is particularly interesting because of course in Brimstone, everyone is already dead. But as it turns out, when you’re killed in Hell, there’s something even worse than death waiting on the other side. It was a lot of fun to be able to follow John into this new chapter, because of course he had to go through so much in No Bad Deed, some of those demons are still hanging around for him, and will be for quite some time.
Five Fun Shorts
Just one? Sherlock. However I haven’t been able to get my Sherlock fix lately, since we’re between seasons, so Sleepy Hollow has been standing in.
In the Woods by Tana French. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve re-read that book. It has everything I love about mystery novels, but wrapped up in this gorgeous prose, and tied up with this cunning thread of something slightly supernatural.
- What animal would you like to be?
Any type of bird. Whenever I feel stuck or stressed I find myself thinking how nice it would be to be a bird. No bills, no deadlines, no drama, just flight.
- Print or eBooks for reading?
Both! But I do love a paper book, and my home is bursting with them. Paper books satisfy the collector in me in a way ebooks never will.
- Flip flops or high heels?
Flip flops. I try to limit my time in high heels as much as possible. They are oh so pretty, but the prettiness is often counteracted by my grimace as I struggle to stay upright.
A Dare
Tell us the first thing that popped in your head.
Breakfast. I’ve just returned from a trip, and there’s nothing to eat in the house. Most of the time if you ask me what I’m thinking, the answer will be food.
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MY REVIEW
He’s a gumshoe in Brimstone. A P.I. in Hell. He goes by the name of John Arsenal.
On a good day, no one tries to wave him and he doesn’t return the favor.
In hell, you’re already dead, so to wave someone is to erase them. “…something more terrifying than damnation.” To end their soul’s existence.
Arsenal knows she’s trouble the minute she opens her mouth. The sweet looking Mirelle Bissette. She wants him to locate her missing sister. Her identical twin, Sophie.
That’s a problem. You see, in Hell, no one knows what they did to wind up there. No one remembers their life before they died, or their real name. So how can she remember her real name, or that she even had a sister?
She claims she knew Arsenal before. Before Brimstone. And she uses that knowledge as leverage to get him to take her case. If he does, she’ll tell him how she knew him, what his real name was, and most importantly, what he did to get him sent to hell. That was too hard to resist and he takes the case. Begins the search for Sophie.
I knew I was going to love this book. A P.I. in Hell. I wondered what kind of cases he would have. What kind of clients.
With no money in hell, the author came up with some much desired, plausible, items in exchange for currency.
And what would hell be without some drugs to get you through the monotonous days. Switch is the new drug of choice. It does something that shouldn’t be possible. Could hell get any worse?
John’s search for Sophie takes him to the dangerous outskirts of Brimstone. It’s where “they” roam. The orphans or Brimstone. Mirelle says her sister mentioned them. Worried that they were left to fend for themselves.
Imagine it. Adults had time to mature. To choose to do whatever terrible thing it was that landed them in hell. What must the children be like. I shudder to think. They are frozen in time. Evil in small form. They’ll wave you just for the fun of it.
From first page to last, I was completely absorbed in this story. The writing is excellent, the story reads easily and quickly, and the characters are entertaining or disgusting, as they should be. And the world is incredibly creative and visually alive.
Bravo to the author. An excellent debut novel. Can’t wait to see where John lands next.
D@&n good reading!
5 Stars
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BLURB:
Private detective John Arsenal can’t tell you what terrible crime he committed to wind up in a sweltering urban hellscape, surrounded by thieves, drug addicts and murderers—only that it was very bad, and now he’s being punished. That’s because in Hell—or Brimstone, as the damned prefer to call it—your identity, your memories, even your name, are stripped away from you.
John is relatively comfortable in his damnation, working easy cases and making himself at home in the grimy squalor of the afterlife. That is, until a mysterious woman appears in his office, begging him to find her missing sister, and promising him the impossible in return—a glimpse of his old life, before Brimstone.
To track down the enigmatic Sophie, John must delve into Brimstone’s darkest recesses, where murderous children run wild in packs, and a strange and terrifying new drug promises to deliver the user to the heights of ecstasy, but at the risk of being snuffed out of existence altogether. All the while, John must grapple with the vivid nightmares that have haunted him since his arrival in Brimstone, and confront the thing he desires and dreads the most—the truth of what he did to deserve damnation.
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Excerpt
“How did you get in?” I said.
“Are you going to shoot me, Mr. Arsenal?” Her voice had the slightest hint of an accent. My eyes adjusted to the light, and I could see her more clearly. She was early thirties, maybe, with a heart shaped face, and huge, dark eyes. Tendrils of black hair sprang free from the messy knot at the back of her head and stuck to the nape of her neck, and I wondered immediately, like I always do when I see a pretty woman in Brimstone, what she could have possibly done to end up here.
“Don’t want to,” I said. “You going to tell me how you got in here?”
“Your front door was unlocked,” she said. “You should really be more careful. This city is full of lunatics.”
“Mm-hmm,” I said. “You one of them?”
She smiled and sat on the edge of my desk, and I cringed instinctively, thinking about the film of crud and ash covering everything in this apartment. Her dress was the color of cream, and I wondered how she kept the thing so clean.
“If I said no, would you believe me?”
“I guess not,” I said, and sat up. “Don’t you know it’s polite to knock?”
“I did knock,” she said. “You didn’t answer.”
“So you just let yourself in.”
“I didn’t think you’d pull a gun on me,” she said.
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AUTHOR Bio and Links:
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I was raised in Rochester, New York, in a house that was constantly full of writers. On nights when my parents and their friends were holding court in our living room, I would practice the fine art of evading the little kids in the next room, setting up camp among the grown-ups, and being quiet long enough that they would forget I was there, and that it was past my bedtime. All my best dirty jokes were picked up this way.
I studied theatre performance at Northeastern University, where I spent a little time onstage, and a lot of time reading plays. I fell in love with Sam Shepard, Arthur Miller, and Nicky Silver. Exposed to plays day in and day out, I honed my ear for dialogue, and learned firsthand that if the writing doesn’t ring true, no amount of brilliant acting would make it right. I wrote my first play (terrible, melodramatic, with characters whose names did absolutely nothing to mask the real people they were based on). I showed it to no one. It’s probably still on my computer somewhere.
John Arsenal and Brimstone came to me during a bout of unemployment, in between searching desperately for a job, and baking more bread than was sane or reasonable for my two person household. The idea came to me in my sleep, demanding to be written, and that’s how the prologue of the book came into existence: In my darkened apartment in Boston at one o clock in the morning, my eyes barely able to focus on the computer screen long enough to get the words down. Sleep has continued to be the place where John Arsenal and I meet up to put the pieces of his story together. I’ve never been prone to insomnia, but John, it seems, is, and has never cared much for my sleep schedule.
In my life before Brimstone, I’ve worked as a telemarketer (I’m sorry) administrative assistant, waiter (badly, briefly), clerk and occasional story-time reader in a children’s bookstore, and professional hawker of everything from magazine subscriptions to national television advertising. I was better with magazines. I now live in Chicago with the love of my life, and my snarling, seven-toed demon-cat, Clara. No Bad Deed is the first book in the John Arsenal mystery series.
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