Over the years, publishers have sent us a lot of things in the mail besides books: T-shirts, fancy chocolates, earlier this year we even got a hand towel. But we were genuinely surprised to open the package that came from Minotaur Books yesterday and have a cell phone fall out onto the counter. So we stuck our hand in and pulled out the flyer, at which point we realized it was a promo for Evil at Heart, the third novel in Chelsea Cain‘s series about the twisted relationship between a female serial killer and the homicide detective who led the original investigation into her murders.
Once we figured that out, it all made more sense: We’d read Evil at Heart earlier this summer, and a cell phone does play a major role in the story—and, sure enough, the Virgin mobile phone they’d sent us had text messages from “Gretchen Lowell” that tied into the novel:”Have you missed me?” and so forth; calling “Gretchen” back led us to a voice mail message with the URL for the book’s online catalog page. We pushed a few more buttons, and we realized the pay-as-you-go phone had about 100 pre-paid minutes and 1,000 text messages—the boys in the mailroom were really excited about that when we handed it over to them, we can assure you.
(By the way, if any of you out there are already fans of Cain’s series, is this how you pictured Gretchen? We confess we always saw her at least five years older than the model in the photo above.)