Our Books are Free this week (March 1 through March 7, 2026) at Smashwords
All of our books are FREE this week at Smashwords. We write in several genres, including romance, historical fiction, time travel, travel, mystery, murder mystery, and cozy mystery. If you enjoyed reading any of our books, please kindly review them at Smashwords.com and/or Goodreads.com
Here's a link for our books at Smashwords:
https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/lhathaway
Thanks!
In this supernatural murder mystery that takes place in New Orleans, a nineteen-year-old woman wearing a bridal gown is strangled in Saint Louis Cemetery in the middle of the night. Around the same time, a man in the poor section of town is murdered and the killer writes a letter to the newspaper, claiming to be the infamous Axeman, a real-life character who is part of the city's spooky past. Are these cases related? Along with spicy doses of gumbo, voodoo, witchcraft, ghosts, and all that jazz, female homicide detective Yvonne Dauphin investigates.
Amazon:
Apple:
Barnes and Noble:
Google Play Books:
Smashwords:
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1585990
Kobo:
A Las Vegas Cozy Mystery
This is an excerpt from my book about my trip to the Mob Museum:
Once my husband and I entered the museum, we felt as if we had traveled back to the infamous days of crime in Las Vegas and throughout the United States, starting from the 20s when prohibition had allowed opportunists, such as Al Capone, to make their fortunes satisfying the thirst of Americans who craved alcohol.
The first room we visited showed a simulated police lineup where visitors could pose, holding up signs that looked like license plates with unique numbers. Some teenagers posed in front of a back wall that showed a height chart. They had their picture taken by a professional cameraman supplied by the museum and had a hard time keeping a straight face because they kept giggling.
Next, we saw the blood-stained wall where the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre occurred in Chicago. Circles surrounded the bloody holes where Al Capone and his gang had mown down their rivals. My husband sat in a real electric chair and I took a picture, capturing the moment.
The teenagers caught up with us and one of them sat in the electric chair. His friend pulled down a nearby lever and, as he did so, his buddy on the electric chair twitched as if he were being electrocuted. It was cute to watch them having such a good time, especially at a museum.
Next, my husband and I walked into a room wallpapered with dollars. We read a sign that told us about the “skim” at the Stardust. It explained how profits were under-counted and under-reported to the IRS by the crime bosses. The owner at the Stardust, Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal, arranged for a bit of those profits to be skimmed off periodically and sent back to the mob bosses on the east coast. It was the basis for the movie Casino. I remembered watching how great Robert di Nero and Sharon Stone were in the movie.
Right next to the skim room was an exhibit my husband really enjoyed. There were two long and narrow halls that were fashioned to look like firing ranges and at the far end of each hall were life-sized paper targets shaped like men. My husband got a chance to touch, hold, and “fire" an actual Tommy Gun at one of the “men”.
The next room was the centerpiece of the Mob Museum. It was the real-life second-floor courtroom where hearings had been held to expose organized crime in 1950 and 1951.
We left that room and saw a film that showed the bloody remains of dead gangsters. Real members of The Mob had been interviewed in the film. We went downstairs and watched clips from Goodfellas and The Godfather.
For those interested in reading "The Salacious Scribes Mystery", it takes place in Las Vegas and is about a group of erotic romance writers who go to the Las Vegas Adult Entertainment Expo, and while they are there, their promoter is murdered. It's a fun whodunnit with multiple suspects. There is even a touch of later-in-life romance in the story.
The book only costs 99 cents and is available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble (online), Apple, Kobo, Smashwords, and Google Play.
Here is the Amazon link:
https://www.amazon.com/Salacious-Scribes-Mystery-Louise-Hathaway-ebook/dp/B074RYV4SZ
Here are some key features of the series:
1. Protagonist: Nancy Keene, a teenage sleuth, is the main character of the series.
2. Genre: The series falls under the cozy mystery genre, which typically involves amateur sleuths, minimal violence, and a lighthearted tone.
3. Target Audience: The series is primarily written for women baby boomers who grew up reading and loving the Nancy Drew series.
4. Settings: Each book in the series takes place in a different travel destination, making them travelogues as well as mysteries.
5. Tone: The series is known for its humorous and PG-rated storytelling.
6. Standalone Stories: All five books in the series can be enjoyed as standalone stories.
The series currently consists of five books:
1. Ghost in the Plantation
2. Buried Treasure
3. The Stolen Masterpiece
4. The Stolen Mask
5. The Missing Bachelor Farmer
All the books in the series are available at Smashwords, Amazon, iTunes, Barnes and Noble, Smashwords, Google Play, and Kobo.
Here is the Amazon link for the books in this series:
Books by Louise Hathaway:
All of our books are available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Apple Books, Google Play Books, Kobo Books, Smashwords and many other online bookstores.
Romance Novels:
High School Reunion: You Can Go Home Again
Torn Between Two Lovers: A Civil War Romance
Love Gets a Second Chance
Love Revealed
Watchin’ the Detective: A Mystery Dinner Romance
Five European Adventures
Honeymoon in New Orleans
Mysteries:
Death Among the Stacks: The Body in the Law Library
The Tustin Chronicles: A Detective Santy Mystery
The Murder at the Abbey: A Detective Santy Mystery
Honeymoon in Savannah: A Detective Santy Mystery
The Ghost in the Plantation: A Nancy Keene Mystery
The Buried Treasure on Route 66: A Nancy Keene Mystery
The Stolen Mask: A Nancy Keene Mystery
The Stolen Masterpiece: A Nancy Keene Mystery
The Missing Bachelor Farmer: A Nancy Keene Mystery
Fighting Demons: A New Orleans Mystery
Deadly Promises: A New Orleans Mystery
50 Shades of Dead: A New Orleans Mystery
Ghosts, Witches and Voodoo with All That Jazz: A Supernatural New Orleans Mystery
Murder aboard the Coast Starlight
Murder aboard the Queen Mary
The Salacious Scribes Mystery
Time-Travel Fiction:
Travelers in Time Aboard the California Zephyr
Travelers in Time: A Search for the Missing
The Summer of Love: A Trip Back to 1968
Historical Fiction:
Hell on Wheels: My Adventures
Miscellaneous Titles:
Our First Year Raising and Training a Jack Russell Terrier
(And Then Some)
The Forgotten Sister: A Sequel to Pride and Prejudice
England in the Footsteps of its Literary Giants
Chasing My Roots: New World Finally Meets Old World
Our Bluebird Family (free)
Planning a Vacation?
Why Not Chicago? (free)
These titles are literary essays:
Marriage in Pride and Prejudice.
The Oedipus Complex in D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers.
Nags, Sluts, and a Deep-breasted Soulmate from the Shining
City:
The Women in Thomas Wolfe’s The Web and the Rock.
About Louise Hathaway:
Louise Hathaway is the pen name for a husband and wife writing team. They write in several different genres including murder/mystery, romance, travel, time travel, and literary criticism.
Here’s where you can find them:
Email: lewishathaway2013@gmail.com
Facebook Page: https://bit.ly/2wrXtbE
Twitter Page: https://twitter.com/Lewis_Hathaway
Please visit their blog at: http://louisehathaway.blogspot.com
I’ve been hearing a lot
about artificial intelligence (AI) and creative writing, so as a fiction
writer, I decided to check out one of the more popular AI applications called
ChatGPT that some of my writer friends recommended.
I’ve never used artificial
intelligence while writing any of my 65 books, so I was skeptical about this
new technology, thinking that a computer could never write a story as well as a
human could, but I decided to go into the research with an open mind.
I was surprised by what I
discovered. More on that in a bit.
First off, I want to
explain how I used ChatGPT to generate fiction:
I brought up Chrome and in
the search line I typed “chat.openai.com” and up came a page for ChatGPT. It
prompted me to create a free account, so I answered a few basic questions and
got logged in.
On the bottom of the
webpage, there is a “send a message box” where you can pose all sorts of
scenarios for stories and get some interesting responses. For my search, I
typed in the message box, “Write me a story about” and then added the basic
plot of one of my books, “Torn Between Two Lovers: A Civil War Romance”, which
is about a wounded Yankee soldier and the Southern Belle who rescues him. My
book is already published on Amazon, but I wanted to see what the chatbot would
come up with. It came up with a two-page version of my 253-page novel.
After reading the AI
generated version, I was surprised and impressed—not to mention a bit humbled
because although AI’s version was only two pages, it was very well-written in
some ways better than what I’d come up with.
I thought of more requests
I could type in the “send a message box” and wrote, “Write me a title for a
book that’s about a wounded Yankee soldier and the Southern Belle who rescues
him.” After seeing the AI suggested title "Love's Redemption: A Union
Soldier's Heart in Southern Arms", I had to admit that I liked my title
better.
“This is fun,” I thought,
so I wrote some more requests in the “send a message” box. I told it to write
an outline for my book and then once again I wrote a short version of my book’s
plot. ChatGPT came up with a nice outline that looked a bit like a script
showing “Act 1”, “Act 2,” etc. and ending with an “Epilogue.”
ChatGPT can come up with
themes for your story if you provide some basic information. All you have to do
is type in the send a message box, “Write me some themes for…” and then
describe your book’s plot.
I wrote a bittersweet love
story and got the idea to change it into a romantic comedy with the chatbot’s
help. So, in the send a message box I typed “Write me a story” and then
described my idea for a new plot line. I was pleased by the results. The bot
came up with several paragraphs of the new version from the beginning of the
story all the way to the ending. It was a whole new take on my story, and it
made me reconsider what I had written in my bittersweet love story. Maybe
someday I’ll rewrite my sad story and change it into a Happily Ever After
Romance.
I fiddled around some more
and thought about the next request I could write in the send a message box; so,
I asked myself, “What if I was writing a new story and hadn’t finished fleshing
out the main character’s traits.” So, I typed in the send a message box, “Write
me a description of” and then added a short description of my characters. It
came up with a few paragraphs of very detailed character traits that I could
focus on as I wrote my novel.
All in all, I was very
impressed with the dialogue it generated for my stories; basically, the
dialogue was well-written and sounded natural although I’ve heard some people
complain that the dialogue it comes up with sounds stilted.
I thought some more about
different scenarios for stories I might like to write and wondered would the
chatbot would come up with, so in the send a message box I wrote, “Write me a
story about a love triangle,” and it came up with two pages of a reasonably
good story entitled “Entangled Hearts”.
If you have Bing on your
computer or phone, it has an AI feature that writers can utilize while writing
stories. On the top of Bing’s home page, there is a box that says “Search the
Web”. On the right side of the box, you can click on the “Open Bing Chat” box.
Then, click on “Choose a conversation”. After that, click on the box for
“Style” and choose “More Creative.” There, you can pose prompts such as “Write
me a story about…” All you need to do ahead of time is come up with a basic
plot line. With Bing Chat, you don’t have to create an account since you’re
already using Bing as a search engine anyway. It’s scary how simple it is.
Some of the metaphors in
the AI-generated stories sounded trite and some were so bad that they made me
giggle. I felt smug, thinking, “Aha! I’d never put it that way in any of my
stories.”
Will AI-generated books
replace those written by humans in the future? I don’t think so. Fiction
writers can think of using Chat GPT and Bing’s chat features as starting
points, never the final products. As every student learns in Creative Writing
and English Literature classes, quality writers draw from several
sources—either their own feelings and experiences, books they’ve read, people
they’ve known, places they’ve lived, or dialogue they’ve heard. That kind of
creativity can never be replaced by a computer.
"Torn Between Two Lovers: A Civil War Romance"
Excerpt:
Here's a time travel story that my husband and I wrote:
Travelers in Time: A Search for the Missing
Description:
Two sisters find themselves back in the 1860s during the building of the transcontinental railroad in search of their missing parents who are on a time travel quest of their own. Equipped with only their wits and a vague idea where they must go, this story puts a fresh spin on time travel and the strong unmistakable pull of family ties. Come along and find out if they can succeed in finding their lost parents or become lost themselves.
One of the characters in our time travel story is a married history teacher who has bipolar disorder. When she agrees to go back in time with her sister and friends, she presumes that her husband will be traveling back with them.
Much to her dismay, she finds herself without him, stranded on the railroad tracks during the 1860s. Unfortunately, her psych medicine did not travel back in time with her and she has to find a way to cope throughout all the time travel adventures that she will be experiencing.
Ultimately, she manages to cope quite well and even has some fun along the way.
Luckily, her husband travels back in time and finds her and together they attempt to find their way back home.
Purchase at Amazon for 99 cents. Also available in paperback at Amazon.
eBook link:
Paperback link:
Also available at Barnes and Noble, Apple, Smashwords, Google Play, and Kobo.
Purchase links:
Barnes and Noble: https://bit.ly/3RvKzh1
Apple: https://apple.co/3B5b8V1
Google Play: https://bit.ly/3TxJPtK
Smashwords: https://bit.ly/3Q7FiLI
Kobo: https://bit.ly/3cGyeYP
When we tell our friends and family that we write and
have published paperbacks and eBooks, some have answered, “I’d rather listen to
an audiobook.”
Well…we’ve heard you and have recently published
several of our stories as auto-narrated audiobooks. Auto-narrated? “What’s
that?” you ask. Well, in our case it means using Google’s text-to-speech
technology which creates amazingly realistic voices. And it’s free for writers to use.
Amazon requires writers to hire a professional narrator for a book. It costs a bundle of money. For indie writers such as us, we simply can’t afford to shell out thousands of dollars for narrators. So now, we are creating audiobooks for our titles on Google Play.
Google allows writers to choose from several different
narrators: Male or Female Americans, British Male or Female, or Indian Male or
Female. We were surprised by how natural these voices sounded. We were also
able to change the speed and pitch of the voices.
You can use one narrator for the entire book or choose
a specific narrator for each character. It’s as simple as that.
We are also able to edit the pronunciation of words. For
example: words like “Live and Live” have two different meanings. We could
choose which pronunciation was the appropriate one.
As readers, would you like to know how to find and listen
to our audiobooks? Here’s a quick how-to:
- On the device you'll want to listen to the audio book (iPhone, Android, etc), go to play.google.com/store/books.
- Find the book you'd like to buy and pay for it
- Go to the Google Play App on your device and sign in with the same account you used to buy the book. (You can install the Google Play App from the App Store)
- Your book should be there waiting for you!
Our audiobooks are all priced under $3.00 which is cheaper than most audiobooks.
Here are all our audiobooks currently available in the
Google Play Store:
Travelers
in Time Aboard the California Zephyr
We love riding on trains and have written 5 stories that take place on them.
Two are time travel stories that take place in the 19th century:
Travelers in Time Aboard the California Zephyr
Amazon Link: https://amzn.to/3IxMLSt
Travelers in Time: A Search for the Missing
Amazon Link: https://amzn.to/41tULwi
One is a cozy mystery:
Murder aboard the Coast Starlight
Amazon Link: https://amzn.to/3Iug9Jf
One is a love story:
Love Gets a Second Chance
Amazon Link: https://amzn.to/3EDCXVI
One takes place in the 19th century and is about an 18-year-old girl's adventures when she lived in railroad camps during the building of the transcontinental railroad.
Hell on Wheels: My Adventures
Amazon Link: https://amzn.to/3KHCEgy
We hope you'll be an armchair traveler and take a look at any of these books. Thanks.
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Hell on Wheels: My Adventures
We're almost there. If my husband and I sell 5 more of the books we've written, we will have reached a grand total of 4,000 books sold in our writing careers. That's a big deal to us.
Please help us reach our goal this year and consider purchasing one of our books. We write in several genres including cozy mystery, murder mystery, romance, historical romance, and science fiction. Some of our books are available in paperback and would make good Christmas presents.
Here's our Amazon author page where you can see all of our books:
Our First Year Raising a Jack Russell
Terrier (and then some)
Have you ever wanted a Jack Russell Terrier like the ones from the TV shows Wishbone and Frasier or the movies Mask and My Dog Skip? Do you think you can handle such a high-energy dog?
If you believe that you're up to the task, come along with us as we follow our new Jack Russell puppy through his first year and watch him learn and grow to become part of our world.
Read about how we tried to prevent him chewing our walls and linoleum floor. Witness our horror after he almost overdosed on baby aspirin, caused a gas leak, and was in danger of being swooped up by a hawk. We hope that you learn from our mistakes and successes in bringing up this adorable, funny, intelligent, and always-entertaining breed of wonderful little dogs.
Available at Amazon:
$1.99 eBook
$4.35 Paperback
Also available at Barnes and Noble, Apple, Google Play, Smashwords, and Kobo.
This Nancy Drew parody was reviewed in The Sleuth: The Original Nancy Drew Fanzine in the Nov/Dec 2016 issue:
Title: The Ghost in the Plantation: A Nancy Keene Mystery
By: Louise Hathaway
Book Description:
Do you like Nancy Drew? Do you like New Orleans? If so, I hope that you will enjoy this humorous and PG-rated story about a teenage sleuth that especially targets baby boomers who grew up reading and loving the Nancy Drew series.
Nancy Keene, the teenage sleuth in this story, goes on vacation with her father and friends to the French Quarter. What starts out as a sight-seeing trip changes into a murder/mystery when a docent at Oak Alley Plantation is murdered while they are there. Part travelogue, part ghost story, this book mixes voodoo, ghosts, and bayous into a spicy gumbo of a whodunit.
Available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Apple Books and many other online stores.
eBook costs $2.99
Amazon Link for eBook:
Paperback costs $6.38
Amazon Link for Paperback:
Torn Between Two Lovers:
A Civil War Romance
by
Louise Hathaway
My historical romance novel entitled “Torn Between Two Lovers: A Civil War Romance” is loosely inspired by the story of my husband’s great-grandfather who fought in the Civil War and barely survived after the steamboat he was on exploded from a boiler accident on board. The accident was the worst maritime accident in US History. Thousands died in the accident. The steamboat was called The Sultana. My husband’s great-grandfather was thrown off the steamboat into the Mississippi River. As luck would have it, he landed on a coil of rope that was floating on the river. After he came home from the war, he became a doctor and had several descendants, including my husband’s grandmother.
In my novel, “Torn Between Two Lovers: A Civil War Romance,” my
husband’s grandmother inspired my main female character. I took some artistic
liberties with her story in my novel.
My novel is about a young woman who lives near Memphis and
has just lost her husband in the war.
When the story opens, she is so distraught that she tries to drown
herself in the Mississippi River. She almost succeeds but is stopped in her
tracks when she sees a man lying on a coil of rope that is floating in the river.
He is barely conscious, and she takes him home and tries to
help him survive and ultimately ends up saving his life.
His condition worsens and she takes him to the hospital. While
he’s recovering, he almost dies in the hospital, and she ends up falling in
love with his good-looking and wealthy young doctor.
She loves both men equally. Which man will she choose to
marry?
Find out in “Torn Between Two Lovers: A Civil War Romance” by
Louise Hathaway.
Are you interested in reading it? If so, it’s available as an
eBook and also as a paperback on Amazon.
To purchase the eBook for $2.99, here is the link:
To purchase the Paperback for $4.54, here is the link:
For those of you who don’t know, I write under the pen name “Louise
Hathaway”.
Thank you, friends and family, for reading this post!
Here's a 5 Star Review for "Torn Between Two Lovers: A Civil War Romance"
"This was a wonderfully done historical romance. The characters were what I wanted from this and they felt like they belonged in the time period. I had a lot of fun reading this."
Available on Amazon.com as an ebook and a paperback.
Buy the ebook on Amazon for $2.99.
Purchase Link: https://amzn.to/3H5WQ8a
Buy the paperback version on Amazon for only $4.54.
Purchase Link: https://amzn.to/3HavptD
She takes a scenic long-distance train trip aboard The Coast Starlight, where she once again sees Jay, her first love, and they pick up right where they left off and have a wonderful time in Seattle, where he proposes and gives her a whole new lease on life. How long does she have left to live? Readers will be pleasantly surprised.
Available at: Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Apple Books, Google Play Books, Smashwords, Kobo Books, and Scribd.
Amazon Links:
eBook $2.99 : https://amzn.to/3RJiaW2
Paperback $5.99: https://amzn.to/3ySeU1Y
