January’s Newsletter:

• How We Hope to Keep Your Attention

• Discounted Book: Stay Here: A Novel by Jason Costa- Only $2.99 for a limited time

• General Fiction Review: Lazarus Man by Richard Price

• Reader’s Digest Top 100 Review: A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

• Mystery Review: The Detective Up Late by Adrian McKinty

• Rideshare Story: How to Piss Off a Gorgeous Russian Model

• Link to a list of over 50 free E-books on Bookfunnel

• A Look Ahead to the February Newsletter

How We Hope to Keep Your Attention:

The purpose of this newsletter is to keep interested readers informed about what is going on with Bay Road Publishing, an independent publisher of mysteries, thrillers, and science fiction. But the newsletter will do more than just tout our own books. We want the newsletter to be something you look forward to receiving.

So every newsletter will have some or all of the following:

• One Discounted Book from Bay Road Publishing

• Three Book Reviews: 1 General Fiction, 1 Mystery/Thriller/Science Fiction, and 1 Reader’s Digest Top 100 Books to Read in a Lifetime

• True Stories from Driving Rideshare in Miami and Las Vegas

• Links to Free/Discounted Books

• Comments on Current Literary Affairs

• Behind the Scenes looks at being an independent Publisher in 2025

• Schedule of Upcoming Releases from Bay Road Publishing

Again, we want to do more than just sell you our books. We want to do that too, obviously, but we also want to help you find books you enjoy and to learn more about books and publishing in general.

A Note about discounted books: We regularly provide one discounted book from our backlist every month. If we don’t have a discounted book, there’ll be a section of an upcoming book or a short story available for download.

In the author’s note, you’ll find an explanation of where the idea for the book came from and a description of what kinds of reader will enjoy the book. We are extremely honest in our book descriptions because we don’t want you buying books you won’t like, but we do want you to keep engaged with the newsletter. Subsequently, we value your trust more than an individual sale.

We may be a small publishing house, but we generally have something for everyone who likes mystery, thriller, or science fiction, so if you don’t like the book featured this month, just wait until next month when a different book is on sale.

This Month’s Discounted Book:

Stay Here: A Novel

by Jason Costa

Only $2.99 for a limited time from major retailers

Only $1.99 if you buy direct from Bay Road Publishing

A group of friends has high hopes for the coming year, but dark secrets can be impossible to overcome.

Three women go into 2002 hoping to make some changes.

Aimee has finally met a great guy, but he doesn't know about her job as a prostitute.

Jane moves to Miami after a sexual assault and wants to find a man who makes her feel safe but ends up with a hyper jealous tattooist.

Jen just wants to survive a Christmas visit from her conservative Christian mother.

One of these women will die, and her death will ripple through their group of friends leading to drastic changes and unexpected consequences.

A Note from the Author About the Book:

I moved to Miami Beach in 1999 and lived in a hotel off of Collins and 21st that at the time was $600 a month but is now like $250 a night. I came home one day and the SWAT team was in the lobby because someone had been selling drugs out of the window of their room like a McDonald’s walk up. I guess they thought no one was going to wonder why all the crackheads were walking up to the back of the hotel. Needless to say, Miami Beach has changed quite a bit over the years, but Stay Here is about that grungy, gritty time.

The characters in the novel are the kind of people I lived with in that hotel, flawed individuals who would have liked to be better people but just couldn’t quite get there for a variety of reasons, mostly related to addiction or alcoholism or just plain old selfishness. I wrote most of Stay Here in a coffee shop in Nanjing, China crouched over a tiny Acer netbook. Not sure if my eyes could work on a screen so small again, but the nature of the characters and how the book was written make it a personal favorite of mine.

Readers who prefer well structured plots and books with heroes will not like Stay Here. This is a book for readers who like their fiction to be character and language driven, which makes it a good fit for a newsletter that features Richard Price and Jennifer Egan.

Buy Direct from Bay Road Publishing

A note on buying direct: Payment is via Paypal. Delivery is via a link delivered to your Paypal email address. The link allows you to download the book via Bookfunnel, the same way you joined the newsletter. Prices are in US dollars so there might be differences due to exchange rates.

Also available from these major retailers:

Amazon Apple Kobo Google

Retailer links are to the US store. You might need to change to your country’s store in order to complete the purchase.

This Month’s Book Reviews:

A note on book reviews- The review won’t tell you things you can find off of the back cover, but instead will explain why the book was picked and how the reviewer felt about the book and why. We try to be clear about our reasons because taste is very subjective and just because one person didn’t like a book doesn’t mean that you also won’t.

Also, Bay Road Publishing does not receive affiliate marketing commissions from any of these books. With our reviews, we are just providing honest opinions, not trying to make money. Reviews are done by the author whose book is on discount that month.

Lazarus Man

by Richard Price

I bought Lazarus Man, Richard Price’s tenth novel, because I’ve been a fan of the author for a while. I love how he combines literary quality writing and character development with realistic plots. His newest novel tells the story of four working class people in New York City in 2008, a police officer going through a divorce, the owner of a failing funeral home, a street photographer, and a survivor of a building collapse. I’d be more specific about the plot, but there really isn’t one.

The best description of a Richard Price book I’ve ever read said that the plot was just an excuse to hang out with the characters, but his best books (such as Freedomland) take on modern life with literary grace and a keen eye for how human flaws manifest into bigger issues. This book fails to do that. The characters in Lazarus Man are fully fleshed out, flawed and disappointing as human beings can be, but the book lacks a central problem to organize it. There’s no reason for the people to be there except because they exist, and their connections to each other are tangential which makes their interactions feel forced at best and meaningless at worst. 

So readers who like reading books without a central plot but full of complex failed characters will enjoy Lazarus Man, but readers who prefer to have a central problem pushing the protagonists forward will not.

My Take: Pass on this one and read Lush Life instead

A Visit from the Goon Squad

by Jennifer Egan

I bought the book because it won the Pulitzer. At the time I was living in Nanjing, China, and I read it while I was writing Stay Here. I loved this book because I was an east coast hardcore kid growing up, shaved head, nose and tongue piercing, tattoos, and I felt like when I read this book, I was reading about people I knew when I was young. But to call it a book is a little charitable. It’s a collection of interlocking stories about the same group of people over a period of decades.

Jennifer Egan has a keen eye for how quickly our ideals fade away as we get older and are faced with economic realities. Yesterday’s hippies turned into yuppies. And Gen X punk rockers turned into…. well whatever we turned into, it involved semi-normal haircuts and little to no facial jewelry. She also has a good understanding and ability to portray how even maturing doesn’t eliminate some of our most troubling flaws. Like great Raymond Carver stories, there is a sense of disappointment that underlies many of the characters as they look at their lives. Some characters overcome that malaise, while others are hopelessly weighed down by the past.

This book was number 100 on the Reader’s Digest top 100 books to read in a lifetime. It’s inclusion in the list feels both necessary and unexpected. These aren’t the types of characters you expect to find in high quality fiction. But the characters are interesting and enjoyable to spend time with. More than a few times I felt myself thinking that the characters were so realistic that not only did their actions feel right but also completely understandable, as if I was remembering situations just like that from my past. Some of the situations seem a little over the top, especially the later chapters but it’s a top ten book for me all time as far as pure enjoyment of reading.

My Take: Read it but you can skip the chapter that’s a PPT

The Detective Up Late (Sean Duffy Series Book 7)

by Adrian McKinty

I’m not sure how I found this book, maybe a Bookbub email. Usually, I like to read a series from the beginning, so it’s a little surprising that I read the 7th book first. I do know why I picked the book though. I like books that combine mystery/thriller with a location riven by complicated political situations, and this book is set in Northern Ireland in 1990, towards the end of the Troubles. Those years of Irish/British history are not something that I understand well, so this book was a good entry point.

The combination of mystery with political complexity will be enough to get me to buy a book, but there needs to be something more to get me to finish, and I truly liked the spare style of this writer. Parts of the book read like a screenplay, but it was an effective way to move from one location to another. There was a poetic feel to it, but a guttural, gritty poetry, not flying on the wings of a butterfly poetry.

The book’s premise is that the narrator, Police Detective Sean Duffy, is retiring and his last case is that of a missing fifteen year old tinker girl who may or may not have been a prostitute. The book has some twists and effective dialogue. At times it's overly wordy. There were plenty of situations/scenes that probably could have been cut, but the journey was enjoyable, and the greater political situation was effectively woven in. There were also several action scenes that were well drawn if foreshadowed a little too much. I ended up thinking that I probably needed to read the earlier books to truly understand one of the side plots, but this writer is worth reading, and I already bought book one so I could read the series from the beginning.

My Take: Worth a read but maybe start with the first book and move on from there.

Rideshare Story: 

A Note on These Stories: All of these stories are true. Sometimes the stories are a little off color. Sometimes a little tense. Hopefully most of them will make you laugh

Rideshare Story: How to Piss Off a Gorgeous Russian Model

She was tall and beautiful and Russian. I was taking her from a building in Brickell to a CVS in Little Havana. We hit it off, sometimes, your sense of humor just matches perfectly with another person. I’m very sarcastic, and so was she, and we were both laughing a good bit. Somewhere in there she mentioned that she was a fashion model and in the United States for a photo shoot.

She started asking if I was married. I wasn’t.

She mentioned that she was looking for papers, and she needed a husband. Made it very clear that not only would she pay me ten thousand dollars, but she'd also live with me, and be my wife physically for as long as the process went on for.

For those of you who don’t live in big cities, namely New York, Miami, or Los Angeles, being offered money to marry foreigners is pretty common, but normally, it happens because you know someone who knows the person. A friend approaches you. Tells you they have a family member who is looking to move and asks if you’d be willing to give them papers.

Being propositioned by a total stranger, not so common.

Being propositioned by a drop dead gorgeous model, extremely rare, like winning the lottery rare.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t tempted. But while she was stunning and fun to talk to, she was also like five feet ten inches tall. I’m barely five foot five, and I’m nobody’s idea of a hunk, and I told her, there’s no way they’d believe it was a real marriage.

She said, I’ll tell them you have a huge dick.

She literally put her hands up to show roughly how large this imaginary penis would be.

Incandescent is the only word that can accurately describe the rage of that woman when I told her no.

I’d be lying if I said a part of me still didn’t regret turning her down. Being married to her for two years probably would have been a hell of a time.