For this week only, during the Smashword's annual Read an Ebook Week, buy my ebooks at a 75% discount. Go to this site:
https://www.smashwords.com/books/search?query=lobathian+publishers

At checkout use this code
"REW75" 75% off

Also buy Gladys Whitlock's The Renovation for the same discount.

Midnight on March 4 is the beginniing of Read and ebook Week at Smashwords. Ebooks, already at bargain prices, are sold at discounts of up to 75% for this week only. Check out all Lobathian books including 3 by Joan Francis at http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/LobathianBooks 

Received a lovely phone call from one of my readers this a.m. He took my book Old Poison along on a trip to the rain forest of Costa Rica. As he read he realized part of the book was set on the same river as the cabin he was staying in. He showed it to the owner of the cabin and the owner read it and said he would keep the book there for others who stayed there. How fun to know my book on Costa Rica has a home in the rain forest.

"A woman emerged from a private office on the left. She was tall and slender with piles of thick, black hair beautifully coifed in an elegant, puffed Victorian hairstyle. She, I assumed, must be Dorica June Grizel. In my first view of her from a distance, I had thought that she was quite a beautiful woman. As she walked towards me I saw the hardness rather than the beauty. Two deep lines, like a set of parentheses, enclosed her mouth. They looked as if they had grown there by the pressure of constant anger or tension, or perhaps, by the vigilant guard over anything her mouth might say. When she spoke, her mouth opened cautiously at the center but held almost immobile at the corners, emphasizing her effort to tightly control every utterance. Her jaws bulged like overdeveloped biceps. She must have spent each moment, waking or sleeping, with her jaws tightly clenched. Her body looked as if it had never been indulged with a single ounce of extra flesh and her posture was as straight and as rigidly controlled as her face. A momentary smile almost succeeded in erasing the image of emotionless control, until you noticed her eyes. The smile, as controlled as everything else about her, stopped at her nose. Her eye lids were partly closed, hiding her eyes. As she spoke with Gunter, I realized she had good reason to shield those eyes. Only in her eyes did any excess show. Rather than shining with human warmth, they glittered like the eyes of an eager and voracious bird of prey."  Diana Hunter, PI
From new thriller:    Corporatocracy Rules      Coming soon

Yeabot, my robot always lightened my mood. Yeabot’s little white plastic body is about three and a half feet high and he looks like a cross between R2D2 and the Pillsbury Dough Boy. My friend Sam invented him while on government payroll and when he wanted to retire from the intelligence community he wanted his unfinished robot design to retire with him. Since that would not be acceptable to the federal government, Sam hired Hunter Investigations to help convince his bosses he had gone crazy and had nothing but unworkable nonsense in his robot plans. Though I had occasionally pulled a scam or two before, I was in over my head from the moment I said hello to Sam. However, despite the fact that this scam had to fool both real life foreign spies and the U.S. Government, we did get Sam and his robot out of the service. I have since wondered whether it was my "creative" solution or Sam’s expertise in black ops that won the day.        Sam retired with nothing but a modest pension and he will never be able to benefit from the robotics designs started on government time. He paid me for my help by making this robot for me and programmed it to be a combination of computerized secretary, database genius, waiter, and security guard. I love the little guy. In addition to Yeabot’s practical assistance, he delights my sense of fantasy. Because of his ability to talk to me, I named him for the Navajo talking God, Yeibichai. Sam could never remember that so he called him Yeabot and the name stuck.
DIANA HUNTER, PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR
NEW BOOK, CORPORATOCRACY RULES  DUE OUT THIS MONTH

RICHARD, DIANAS FRIEND, HAIR DRESSER AND DISGUISE MASTER

Richard’s Beverly Hills salon was of Moorish style architecture and had once been a Moroccan restaurant. He had chosen this building for a specific reason. Richard was, without a doubt, the worlds greatest fan of the movie Casablanca. He had refurbished the building into an elegant, luxurious beauty salon and spa with decor resembling Rick's Cafe Americain in Casablanca. You entered through giant wooden doors carved to match those in the movie. The waiting room was dimly lit by Moroccan lamps that were hand made of sheep skin stretched around wrought iron frames. Diffuse light shown through fine black lines that artists had punctured in the skin with a needle. A ceiling fan with broad rattan blades rotated slowly overhead. Clients were seated in fan-shaped rattan chairs arranged around tile-inlaid tables and were offered cool drinks while they waited to be called for their treatments. Occasionally Richard hired impersonators to appear at Rick’s as Bogart and Bergman or Sidney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre. Naturally he named place Ricks Coiffures Americain. Diana Hunter
COMING SOON---NEW DIANA HUNTER THRILLER CORPORATOCRACY RULES

"I backed into someone and turned to apologize. He was a tall, well-dressed man with no hair, a jowly, red face and a rotund body.

"Oh, pardon me."

"Not at all, my dear. Glad you could make it today. So nice to see you again."

Again? He did look vaguely familiar and for just a moment I thought maybe we really had met before.

He shook my hand with practiced ease and rehearsed sincerity, then brushed right past me and went on to the next ever so sincere greeting. As he did, I remembered who he was. It was Senator George B. Simpson, in the flesh. Lots of flesh.

Senator Simpson had been a U.S. senator for over twenty years and had recently resigned under a cloud of federal investigation. His career was bracketed by two major mortgage meltdowns, and he allegedly had unsavory ties to the fraudulent activities of both disasters." Diana Hunter

CORPORATOCRACY RULES

A NEW DIANA HUNTER THRILLER        COMING SOON