N. M. Cedeño

2025 Publications!

My first story to appear this year came out in March. Editor John Connor of Murderous Ink Press selected my story “Murder by Alternate Facts” to appear in Crimeucopia: Chicka-Chicka Boomba! an anthology of stories by female authors. The story is set in small town central Texas and features a young woman named Arlene dealing with a town full of people judging what she should or shouldn’t have done one dark night on a country road when she came across a fatal car accident. When some people decide that their version of the truth of what happened that night is better than the facts, murder ensues.

2024 Publications!

In May 2024, Private Dicks and Disco Balls, an anthology of short mysteries set in the 1970s was published by Down & Out Books. Edited by Michael Bracken, this book contains my story “A Woman’s Place” and is a follow up to Groovy Gumshoes: Private Eyes in the Psychedelic Sixties (Down & Out Books 2022), in which my story “Nice Girls Don’t” was published. Both stories feature private detective Jerry Milam, an Austin-based World War II veteran and former cop who suffered a serious injury in a car wreck, leaving him with a limp and chronic pain.

Another anthology in which I have a story, Detective, Sleuths, and Nosy Neighbors was published in May 2024. My story entitled “The Ghostly Lady’s Curse” is the first story in the anthology! The story is about a young woman who knows nothing about her family history until she visits her father’s family’s ancestral home and discovers the place is considered cursed because of how many deaths occurred there. But were all those deaths accidents or were they murder?

My ghost story “A Lonely Death” is in the anthology Noncorporeal II from Inkd Publishing published in June 2024! If you like spooky stories check out this anthology. My story features a snake-bit cowboy ghost and the family whose house he inadvertently enters. Do the people see the ghost or does the ghost see the people, and why?

“Wedding Vibes,” a new short story in my Bad Vibes Removal Services series, came out in Black Cat Weekly #145 in June 2024. For those who’ve read the series, many characters from previous stories reappear in this new story, including a ghost with unresolved life issues.

“Galapagos People Watching” came out in Black Cat Weekly #164 on October 20, 2024. Two cousins on a trip to the Galápagos Island of San Cristóbal ponder their futures, leading one of them to realize that he has a gift for noticing people and that the people he’s noticing might be up to something illegal.

“Predators and Prey” was selected by editor Rusty Barnes at Redneck Press, and was published on his website on October 21, 2024. This story features a young orphan who ends up jumping from the frying pan into the fire when he attempts a smash and grab and ends up doing forced labor in an illegal wild cat breeding facility. To read the story for free, click HERE.