Steve Piasecki is Jack Ryan, Ray Donovan, Raymond Reddington, Dexter, Jimmy McGill, and Jessica Fletcher all rolled into one.

And Steve Piasecki is the star of my new series.

Steve’s a crime-fighter disguised as an aspiring writer who moonlights as an Uber driver to pay his bills. And one after another, his riders lead him into precarious situations he’s forced to resolve.

Steve’s first adventure comes in THE DEAD STRIPPER – already published and available at Amazon and many book retailers. Its capsulized promo reads like this:

Uber driver Steve Piasecki picks up an exotic dancer at a topless club in Philadelphia and transports her home.

But he’s thrust into the role of person-of-interest when the stripper’s found dead the next morning.

Steve’s next adventure will come in SÍ, HABLO ESPAÑOL – available soon. Its capsulized promo reads like this:

Uber driver Steve Piasecki picks up a rider at the airport and overhears a telephone conversation about 10,000 kilos of something.

His curiosity then thrusts him into the middle of a cocaine deal between a Colombian narc and a member of the Sinaloa cartel.

Steve’s adventures are murder mysteries, thrillers, and love stories rolled into one.

Where do these stories come from?

Well, let’s see.

To begin with, I was once an aspiring author disguised as a sales manager and schoolteacher. I struggled for two years trying to get my first murder story published in a magazine. It was a tremendous learning curve of experimentation and acquiring knowledge via trial and error.  

But after countless rejections from the Alfred Hitchcock and Ellery Queen mystery magazines, I finally succeeded. The men’s magazine Cavalier magazine published A TASTE FOR REVENGE – a crime fiction murder story.

My writing cherry was finally broken. Then less than a year thereafter I found an insatiable market for true crime stories.

This was before TV shows like Law & Order and C.S.I. existed. The insatiable market existed in detective magazines. Official Detective magazine published “Voodoo Slaughter” – a true murder story about a pair of beheadings on a beach on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas.

The editor-in-chief loved the story and told me she’d be interested in publishing any true murder stories I could find. So, over the next three years I found more than 100 true murder stories from coast to coast.

That made me a published writer. That was Step 1. Step 2 was establishing myself as a published author. You know, books. And that soon came. After more experimentation and acquiring information and knowledge via trial and error, Warner Books published BORN TO BE WILD.

The original publication date for this classic saga about outlaw bikers was 1992. Two years of research and one year of writing went into the project. Now here we are more than 30 years later and the book is still selling every day.

So I’ve been a freelance crime writer for more than 30 years. And as romantic as that may sound to some, to me, it means never knowing when that next major check is coming in. So it’s been 30 years of bartending, delivering newspapers and pizza, and now driving for Uber to create cashflow to pay my bills.

Uber’s been great for me. Make your own hours. Meet interesting people.

I ask my riders question after question, picking their brains and listening to their tales of trials and tribulations. The seeds of both THE DEAD STRIPPER and SÍ, HABLO ESPAÑOL were planted by riders – and many more Steve Piasecki adventures are already on the drawing board.

In fact, SÍ, HABLO ESPAÑOL is the first episode of my 15,000 KILOS series. Its based on the second-largest cocaine bust in U.S. history – May 2019 – when the feds seized 15,000 kilos of cocaine from the container ship MSC Gayane at the Port of Philadelphia.

I used sources developed over the last 30 years to trace the cocaine to where it was grown in the jungles of Colombia, processed in paste labs and crystal labs, and uploaded onto the container ship in the middle of the night.

From there, the stories are fictionalized to add flavor and drama – and love stories are introduced to make the stories more rounded. But everything comes from real life and rings true.

And for practical purposes, the stories are fictionalizes to prevent liability issues.

Just reduced price – THE DEAD STRIPPER now $14.77 – hope you enjoy it.

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