New Release - You Only Fall Once

YOU ONLY FALL ONCE by Bruce W. Most is out now as an ebook from Amazon 

Available with Kindle Unlimited

New York City detective Ray Sanford hates heights. He doesn’t even like to fly. When assigned to investigate a murder at one of the world’s tallest residential buildings, he’s freaked out to discover that the victim is a window washer hanging dead on the outside of the building—97 floors up!

YOU ONLY FALL ONCE, a Kindle-only novelette, is the latest mystery thriller from Bruce W. Most. To solve the murder in this short mystery, Detective Sanford must push aside his acrophobia to answer two baffling questions: Why would someone kill the window washer while he’s dangling outside the building? And how did the killer manage to commit the impossible murder and escape unnoticed when access to the high-security apartments involved a daisy-chain of elevators and restricted key cards?

Novelette Announcement: You Only Fall Once by Bruce W. Most

Black Beacon Books is pleased to announce that the second Kindle-only novelette for 2026 will be published on the 28th of April. 

Detective Ray Sanford dropped a five-dollar bill into the coffee can of a panhandler sitting by the 57th Street subway entrance on Sixth Avenue, and turned west onto 57th. Ahead rose his destination, one of the tallest luxury high-rises in the world. Supertalls they call them these days. He’d read that one in Dubai stood 163 stories. That’s nuts. The only way he’d be that high off the ground would be in a jetliner, and even that would require meds.

Thus begins this thrilling short mystery set in one of New York's tallest towers, the latest offering from Iowan crime writer Bruce W. Most.

Who would want to kill a window washer, and how did the murderer leave the supertall unnoticed?

This gravity-defying mystery will give even the most ardent crime readers a bout of vertigo. Recommended for fans of Alfred Hitchcock's films, Perry Mason and Columbo, and the fiction of Rex Stout, Ellery Queen, and Raymond Chandler. 

 

Three Crime Novelettes

Black Beacon Books is pleased to announce the three novelettes that will be published this year as part of our Kindle-Only Novelettes range. The idea of this range is provide an opportunity for authors to publish tales that sit between the short story and the novella in terms of length, because here at Black Beacon Books, we recognise that this a wonderful length for storytelling and yet one that is undervalued in the publishing world. These novelettes will be exclusively electronic; Kindle and Audible. 

The novelette acceptances for 2026 are... drum roll...

Laughing Matter by S. B. Watson.

An impossible crime featuring a disappearing elephant in the Australian desert.

Torched by Benedict J. Jones.

A fiery hardboiled romp across London.

You Only Fall Once by Bruce W. Most.

A New York City police procedural that defies gravity but not belief.

We'll be kicking things off with S. B. Watson's novelette, which despite the title is no laughing matter!

More news very soon.