Ignore that Amazon E-Mail: My Thriller Has NOT Been Cancelled

Don’t panic, dear readers. My publisher has not cancelled the release of the Kindle version of  Fool Her Once, or any other version. Amazon simply sent out an email with slightly erroneous information this week. It was brought to my attention by my author friend, Eldon Farrell. He pre-ordered the Kindle version of Fool Her Once a while back. A few days ago, he received an email stating that Amazon was unable to deliver that order.

I, too, received an email from Amazon (below) cancelling my pre-order of the Kindle version of Fool Her Once (yes, I pre-order every version of my own book!)

No Cancellations By CamCat

The “item” that is, the Kindle version of Fool Her Once, was not cancelled by my publisher, CamCat Books. What happened was that on February 1, CamCat switched over to IPG, a new distributor, and according to IPG, Amazon was not able to switch the pre-orders over to them.

Yeh, me neither. I don’t understand it at all, but it doesn’t really matter since anyone who had his/her initial order canceled by Amazon also had the charge removed. As of February 1, however, readers can place a new pre-order with Amazon here. Like I did. (see below.)

Giveaways

The Goodreads giveaway ended last Friday. Two winners have already been selected from the 2,732 who entered. Congratulations! However, there is a second giveaway of two Fool Her Once ARCs featured every day on the Partners In Crime virtual blog tour. It will continue till the end of the month according to the schedule here.

I’m excited about the blog tour. As I commented on Instagram, clicking each morning on the blog of the day to read the reviews is a little like unwrapping holiday gifts: You don’t know if you’re going to get a diamond or warm socks!

Bloggers’ Reviews

So far, the reviewers have given me a couple of darn nice reviews. Margaret, on her website, The World As I See It, wrote, in part:

“This is one of those books that kept me guessing. Just when I thought I had the book figured out, something else would happen, and I would realize that I was wrong… The author also did a great job of making all of the characters seem like they were real people.” You can read Margaret’s full review here.

On the Books of My Heart book blog, Anne wrote: “Wow.  I really enjoyed Fool Her Once.  All along, I thought I had ideas and knew what would happen and kind of kept waiting for it and then no, it was something else. These characters were all flawed…”

Read more of what Anne has to say about Jenna, my protagonist, and about her husband, Zack  here.

My Guest Posts on the Blog Tour

This week, I wrote two guest posts for the blog tour.  The Truth About Tabloids appears on Author Elena Taylor’s Blog. I also analyzed the domestic thriller genre for the Mythical Books website.

This is what I wrote, in part, about that sub genre: “The danger in domestic thrillers comes from a person that the female protagonist knows, or  thinks she knows; someone with whom she is in a relationship. This person can be a bad spouse,  bad boyfriend, bad employer, bad mother, bad mother-in-law—even a bad child.”

Which, by the way, perfectly summarizes the predicament of the women who fell for The Tinder Swindler.

The Tinder Swindler

It’s the  drama of how a conman seduced women he picked from the dating app, then swindled them out of hundreds of thousands of dollars to finance his lavish lifestyle. It is currently a hit Netflix true-crime documentary.

The documentary focuses on three women, but chiefly on Cecilie, a 29-year old Norwegian IT executive who was living in London at the time that Israeli conman Shimon Hayut got his hooks into her and swindled her out of almost a quarter-million pounds. Posing as Simon, the son of real-life billionaire diamond dealer Lev Leviev, he set up a meeting for coffee with Cecilie at a London hotel.

As she tells it, she had already checked Simon out on his Instagram account which showed him flying on private jets, driving luxury cars, wearing designer duds, vacationing on exotic beaches on secluded Mediterranean islands.

So, by the end of their coffee date, when Simon invites her to fly with him on a private jet to Bulgaria, she doesn’t hesitate because she thinks she knows all about him. And, when he calls her in an “emergency” and asks to borrow money and for access to her credit cards, she doesn’t hesitate because he’s got the money to repay her.

A Real-Life Domestic Thriller

Of course, she googled him, she tells us. So, no, she never doubted his story about his father the “diamond king.” The documentary  shows she found  a photo of Simon with  Lev and his wife (Simon’s mother) online. But, the documentary suggests later that Simon “photoshopped” himself into the picture.

No surprise there. If I can “bookbrush” a copy of Fool Her Once  into the lobby of the fabulous Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach (below) then a conman like Shimon Hayut can, no doubt, insert himself into a photo to show he’s a billionaire’s son.

Which makes The Tinder Swindler a domestic thriller for our times: googling or instagramming a boyfriend or potential love interest is not going to protect you against a highly-motivated psychopath.There’s no way of really knowing anything about anyone even with all the transparency that the internet is supposed to provide.