REVIEW: NO HERO by Mallory Kane Non-stop action, surprises, and sensual tension fuel this intriguing romantic suspense mystery, set in lovely but often worn-out New Orleans. Some vicious killer has targeted at-risk teens. Many stay at a hostel program at which Detective Gautier mentors. Some consider him a hero, but not his former girlfriend, who provided an expose on his exploits, and now must reunite with the man she scorns before many more troubled adolescents are murdered.
This book is so incredibly excellent!! I'M glad for its publication on November 30, so it'll be eligible for Best Horror in 2014. Very rarely do I discover a horror story with this depth of characterization; the only examples I can think of that are anywhere close are Joe Hart' s "Lineage" and Joe McKinney' s "Inheritance," but BLOODY, BLOODY APPLE beats even those most excellent novels. Howard Odentz delivers not one, but THREE highly dysfunctional family groups; but when, the entire TOWN is asylum material!! And then the KILLER ending!! I want to turn back to Page One and live it all over again!!
REVIEW: THE BURNING GIRL by Lisa Unger Second in The Hollows short story trilogy, THE BURNING GIRL finds Eloise Montgomery ten years on, a mostly silent partner in a private investigation firm run by former Hollows PD detective Ray Muldune. Once again Ms. Unger delivers perfect character studies wrapped inside taut plotting, and the story theme linked with the eponymous character will truly make your hair stand on end.
After years of guilt over a long-ago tragedy, Candace Morgan is finally poised for success. The CEO of her own women’s shapewear company, she’s about to launch a new swimsuit line—and make a fortune. When she is guilted into loaning her brother a huge sum of money for real estate, she believes she’s simply fulfilling a family promise. In reality, she’s enabling a devious sociopath…and now, she’s roped into the renovation from hell.
For years, Monty Carawan has envied his sister’s wealth. Spiteful and self-centered, he’s convinced that her success came at the expense of his own future. But when the housing market plunges and Candace attempts to disentangle herself from Monty’s mess, her brother’s malicious streak brings the family tension to a dangerous boiling point.
Revised edition: This edition of Underwater includes editorial revisions.
Review soon
http://www.amazon.com/Underwater-Julia-McDermott-ebook/dp/B00KGLV9RG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1416837450&sr=8-1&keywords=Underwater+julia
UnHappenings
Genre: Literary Fiction, Science Fiction, Science Fiction Romance
Publisher: Curiosity Quills Press
Date of Release: January 8, 2015
Cover Artist: Andy Garcia
Description:
When Nigel Walden is fourteen, the UNHAPPENINGS begin. His first girlfriend disappears the day after their first kiss with no indication she ever existed. This retroactive change is the first of many only he seems to notice.
Several years later, when Nigel is visited by two people from his future, he hopes they can explain why the past keeps rewriting itself around him. But the enigmatic young guide shares very little, and the haggard, incoherent, elderly version of himself is even less reliable. His search for answers takes him fifty-two years forward in time, where he finds himself stranded and alone.
And then he meets Helen.
Brilliant, hilarious and beautiful, she captivates him. But Nigel’s relationships always unhappen, and if they get close it could be fatal for her. Worse, according to the young guide, just by entering Helen’s life, Nigel has already set into motion events that will have catastrophic consequences. In his efforts to reverse this, and to find a way to remain with Helen, he discovers the disturbing truth about the unhappenings, and the role he and his future self have played all along.
Equal parts time-travel adventure and tragic love story, Unhappenings is a tale of gravely bad choices, and Nigel’s struggle not to become what he sees in the preview of his worst self.
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About The Author:
Edward Aubry is a graduate of Wesleyan University, with a degree in music composition. Improbably, this preceded a career as a teacher of high school mathematics and creative writing.
Over the last few years, he has gradually transitioned from being a teacher who writes novels on the side to a novelist who teaches to support his family. He is also a poet, his sole published work in that form being the sixteen stanza “The History of Mathematics.”
He now lives in rural Pennsylvania with his wife and three spectacular daughters, where he fills his non-teaching hours spinning tales of time-travel, wise-cracking pixies, and an assortment of other impossible things.
Find Edward Aubry Online:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Edward-Aubry/373173783220?ref=hl| Twitter | Goodreads
A new novel by International Amazon Best Seller Rickard B DeMille
Not all criminals are brought to justice.
Sometimes Justice must be brought to them.
The first victim preyed on young girls. Justice visited, and he fell prey to African Painted Dogs in a Texas Wildlife Park.
The last victim killed her baby with heroin. Justice administered that same fate to her.
The other victims suffered equally fitting and brutal deaths. For rookie FBI Agent Dawn Johnson, her first case finds her in a "hate triangle" between a boss that wants her gone, a bigoted Texas Sheriff that doesn't want her at all, and a serial killer that taunts police, 140 characters at a time.
Rickard B DeMille, author of the International Amazon Best Seller HELLFIRE, brings us a new hero named Dawn Johnson, and a new villain called Justice. They engage in a brutal ballet of vengeance and death until . . .
Dawn joined the FBI for the wrong reasons, and her boss wants her transferred out. Rural county Sheriff Bubba Scates doesn't want anyone messin' with his investigation, especially a female, African-American, over-educated, caustic, independent FBI Agent. Dawn wants to get back to her private agenda, but no one gets what they want. Except Justice, who continues to execute people he feels have escaped justice from the courts. Justice gets his retribution, and uses social media to publicize his vengeance and taunt police.
However, once Justice has claimed his final victim, things really get interesting. Nothing is as it seems, and no one is certain to survive, as the manhunt concludes and the truth is finally revealed.
TWEET REVENGE is a delightfully convoluted, scary, Texas mystery, with an elusive and Narcissistic villain who believes in his own hype and manipulates social media to inflate his ego, and a complicated, "failed-hero" female protagonist, an FBI Special Agent with far too many investigative junkets of her own.
Interview with Elizabeth Haydon,
documentarian, archanologist and translator of Ven’s
journals, including The Tree of Water
Little is known for sure about reclusive documentarian and archanologist Elizabeth Haydon.
She is an expert in dead languages and holds advanced degrees in Nain Studies from Arcana College and Lirin History from the University of Rigamarole. Her fluency in those languages [Nain and Lirin] has led some to speculate that she may be descended of one of those races herself. It should be noted that no one knows this for sure.
Being an archanologist, she is also an expert in ancient magic because, well, that’s what an archanologist is.
Being a documentarian means she works with old maps, books and manuscripts, and so it is believed that her house is very dusty and smells like ink, but there is no actual proof of this suspicion. On the rare occasions of sightings of Ms. Haydon, it has been reported that she herself has smelled like lemonade, soap, vinegar, freshly-washed babies and pine cones.
She is currently translating and compiling the fifth of the recently-discovered Lost Journals when she is not napping, or attempting to break the world’s record for the longest braid of dental floss.
We had the chance to ask her some questions about the latest of Ven’s journals, The Tree of Water. Here is what she shared.
Certainly. Ven Polypheme, who wrote the, er, Lost Journals of Ven Polypheme, lived long ago in the Second Age of history, when magic was much more alive and visible in the world than it is now. His journals are very important finds, because they tell the story of ancient magic and where it still may be found in the world today.
In the first three journals we saw how Ven came to the mystical island of Serendair and was given the job of Royal Reporter by the king of the island, a young man named Vandemere. The Royal Reporter was supposed to find magic that was hiding in plain sight in the world and report back about it to the king. As you can imagine, this could be a fun but dangerous job, and at the beginning ofThe Tree of Water, we see that Ven and his friends are hiding from the evil Thief Queen, who is looking to find and kill him.
Amariel, a merrow [humans call these ‘mermaids,’ but we know that’s the wrong word] who saved Ven when the first ship he sailed on sank, has been asking Ven to come and explore the wonders of the Deep, her world in the sea. Deciding that this could be a great way to find hidden magic as well as hide from the evil Thief Queen, Ven and his best friend, Char, follow her into the Deep. The sea, as you know, is one of the most magical places in the world—but sometimes that magic, and that place, can be deadly.
The book tells of mysterious places, and interesting creatures, and wondrous things that have never been seen in the dry world, and tales from the very bottom of the sea.
Ven was an interesting person, but he really didn’t think so. He and his family were of a different race than the humans who made up most of the population where he lived, the race of the Nain. Nain are an old race, a little shorter and stockier than most humans, with a tendency to be on the grumpy side. They live about four times as long as humans, are very proud of their beards, which they believe tell their life stories, don’t like to swim or travel, and prefer to live deep in the mountains.
Ven was nothing like the majority of Nain. He was very curious, loved to travel, could swim, and longed to see the world. He was actually a pretty nice kid most of the time. He had the equivalent of a baby face because only three whiskers of his beard had grown in by the time The Tree of Water took place, when he was fifty years old [around twelve in Nain years]. He had a great group of friends, including the merrow and Char, who were mentioned earlier. It is believed that his journals were the original research documents for two of the most important books of all time, The Book of All Human Knowledge and All the World’s Magic.The only copies of these two volumes were lost at sea centuries ago, so finding the Lost Journals is the only way to recover this important information.
I go to places where Ven went and try to find relics he left behind. Usually this is with an expedition of archaeologists and historians. I am an expert in ancient magic [an archanologist] so I don’t usually lead the expeditions, I’m just a consultant. It gives me the chance to learn a lot about magic and lets me work on my suntan at the same time, so it’s good.
Here’s the list, mostly from the archaeological digs where the journals have been found:
1] Cannibals
2] Crocodiles
3] Sunburn
4] Sand flies
5] Dry, easily cracking parchment pages
6] The horrible smell of long-dead seaweed
7] Grumpy members of the archaeological expedition [I could name names, but I won’t]
8] Expedition food [when finding and retrieving the journal for The Tree of Water,we ate nothing but peanut butter and raisin sandwiches, olives and yellow tea for six months straight]
9] When salt water gets into your favorite fountain pen and clogs it up. This is very sad.
10] Unintentionally misspelling a word in the Nain language that turns out to be embarrassing [the word for “jelly” is one letter different from the word for “diarrhea,” which caused a number of my Nain friends to ask me what on earth I thought Ven was spreading on his toast.]
Getting to write about a lot of cool magic stuff that used to exist in our world, but doesn’t anymore. And getting to travel to interesting places in the world to see if maybe some of it still does exist. Also getting to show the difference between merrows, which are real, interesting creatures, and mermaids, which are just silly.
I hope, in general, that it will open their eyes to the wonder of the sea, which takes up the majority of our planet, but we really don’t know that much about it down deep. There is a great deal of magic in the sea, and I hope that if and when people become aware of it, they will help take care of it and not throw garbage and other bad stuff into it. I have a serious dislike for garbage-throwing.
Probably the most useful secret I learned that I hope will be of use to readers is about thrum. Thrum is the way the creatures and plants that live in the ocean communicate with each other through vibration and thought. As Ven and his friends learn, this can be a problem if you think about something you don’t want anyone to know about when you are standing in a sunshadow, because everyone gets to see a picture of what’s on your mind. Imagine how embarrassing that could be.
Well, at least one. In the archaeological dig site where The Tree of Water was found was another journal, a notebook that Ven called The Star of the Sea. We are still working on restoring it, but it looks like there are many new adventures and different kinds of magic in it. The problem is that it might have been buried in the sand with an ancient bottle of magical sun tan lotion, which seems to have leaked onto some of the journal’s pages. This is a very sad event in archaeology, but we are working hard to restore it.
As for other books, it’s not like we just write them out of nowhere. If we haven’t found one of Ven’s journals, there can’t be another book, now, can there? We are always looking, however. We’ve learned so much about ancient magic from the journals we have found so far.
I like young readers better than adults. Everyone who is reading a book like mine has at one time or another been a young reader, but not everyone has been an adult yet. Young readers have more imagination and their brains are more flexible—they can understand magical concepts a lot better than a lot of adults, who have to deal with car payments and work and budget balancing and all sorts of non-magical things in the course of their days.
Besides, many adults scare me. But that’s not their fault. I’m just weird like that.
I think if more adults read like young readers, the world would be a happier place.
You can find The Tree of Water anywhere books are sold, online and in bookstores. There are several copies in my steamer trunk and I believe the palace in Serendair also has one. I also sent one to Bruno Mars because I like his name.
At the moment, I am on the beautiful island of J’ha-ha, searching for a very unique and magical flower. Thank you for asking these interview questions—it has improved my mood, since I have only found weeds so far today. I am hoping for better luck after lunch, which, sadly, is peanut butter and raisin sandwiches, olives, and yellow tea again.
All the best,
Dr. Elizabeth Haydon, PhD, D’Arc
The epic voyages continue in The Tree of Water, the fourth adventure in bestselling author Elizabeth Haydon’s acclaimed fantasy series for young readers, The Lost Journals of Ven Polypheme.
As Royal Reporter of the land of Serendair, it is the duty of young Charles Magnus "Ven" Polypheme to travel the world and seek out magic hiding in plain sight. But Ven needs to escape the clutches of the nefarious Thief Queen, ruler of the Gated City, whose minions are hunting for him. His friend, the merrow Amariel, has the perfect solution to his dilemma: Ven and Char will join her to explore the world beneath the sea.
As they journey through the sea, Ven finds himself surrounded by wonders greater than he could have ever imagined. But the beauty of the ocean is more than matched by the dangers lurking within its depths, and Ven and his friends soon realize that in order to save thousands of innocent lives, they may have to sacrifice their own. For everything in the ocean needs to eat…
“A delightful epic fantasy that will attract a readership both older and younger than the target audience.” —Booklist (starred review) on The Floating Island
