The Benefactor is leaving this shop and going to Amazon. As of this morning the Kindle edition has been submitted to Kindle Direct Publishing and enrolled in KDP Select, which means that within about three days it will be on Amazon at $2.99 and readable free inside Kindle Unlimited. The paperback and the hardcover are built and waiting on Amazon’s own weekly limit for new print editions; they follow next week at $19.99 and $24.99.
The direct download that used to sit on this page has been switched off, because Select asks for exclusivity on the digital edition and a house that asks readers to trust it does not keep a side door open. If you bought the file here, it is still yours and nothing about that changes.
What the book is
Camille Devereaux orders half the menu at a struggling Savannah restaurant, and Marcus Bell, who cooks there and owns it and is quietly drowning in it, thinks his luck has finally turned. She comes back. She brings people. She becomes the family friend: the dinners, the weekends at the estate, the plane, and then the investment that saves everything he and his wife Renee have built. She never asks for anything. That is the part that should frighten you.
Because she has done it before. There is a man across the street who used to own a jazz club in Charleston, and he has been standing out there for three nights trying to work out how to say a sentence that will sound insane no matter how he says it. What Camille wants cannot be bought, so she has spent a fortune learning how to take it, and what she is taking is not a night with somebody’s husband. It is a seat inside somebody’s marriage.
When the design finally comes into view, the decision does not belong to Marcus. It belongs to Renee. Her answer is the one nobody sees coming, including the woman who has never once in her life been told no.
The daily habit behind it
One title a day, Monday through Friday, moves from this storefront onto Amazon in all three formats. It is unglamorous work, mostly bookkeeping: take the payment link down, verify it is actually down, rebuild the files, set the interior for print, wrap the cover to the spine width the page count demands, and only then upload. The writing is the interesting half. The other half is what keeps a small press honest.
The Benefactor — a Books By Barron suspense thriller. Nothing she gives is free.