The first three episodes of Gary Ballard’s new Kindle Vella series, Hiss Whistle Dead, A Bridge Chronicles Mystery is now available to read for free on the Kindle Vella platform. As with all Kindle Vella stories, the 600-5,000 word episodes are readable on the Kindle app, on all platforms from desktop PC, to iPad and tablets, as well as mobile devices using the Apple OS or Android OS.

Hiss Whistle Dead is an experimental new novel in the Bridge Chronicles series of near future cyberpunk stories, set around the end of this decade. Releasing weekly as Vella episodes, Hiss Whistle Dead will total 15-episodes in all. It stars the character Shel Jonas, an Excavator, the kind of freelance hacker who specializes in examining the lives and assets of the recently deceased. After her only brother is found dead of a stroke, Shel vows to investigate his death, certain that they couldn’t have died of natural causes. Along the way she discovers the life her brother lived outside of her experience, an eye-opening mystery that promises to shatter her illusions about who they were. Hiss Whistle Dead is a story about life, death, grief, anguish, mental health, technology, AI, crypto-grifting and what all of this means in a digital world with the analog messiness of the human condition.

The Kindle Vella platform is a episodic format available on the Kindle app and the Kindle web store at https://www.amazon.com/kindle-vella. The first few episodes of every story are always free – after that, the reader must purchase Tokens and redeem them to unlock episodes. Tokens may only be used to unlock Kindle Vella story episodes in the Kindle app and on the web.