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Fictionista, Foodie, Feline-lover

Showing posts with label paranormal romance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label paranormal romance. Show all posts

Friday, February 19, 2021

Sin City Wolf: HOWL by January Bain

 

This is the first book in a series and it is a sizzling debut.  The world of billionaire werewolf Cristaldo Luceres (the people who work for him call him "sire") is filled with luxury. There's his expensive single-malt and his personal helicopter. And his bespoke suits.  It's also a world filled with danger--constant threats from a rival werewolf clan, the annoyance of dealing with a card counter at his flagship casino, the Glitter Palace--and the constant threat of betrayal. Although his clan his tight--his twin brother Lucius works closely with him, and their younger brothers are in school in Rome--there are temptations and power struggles, and all sorts of ...hungers.

This story of Cristaldo's cataclysmic connection to a woman who seemingly is fated to be his mate fuels the story, which  starts out hot and only becomes more incendiary. Because  unlike most of the women Cristaldo has met, Everly is not going to be a pushover.  She feels the attraction, but she doesn't have a great track record with men and there's a restraining order out on her last (her first) boyfriend, a dangerous psychopath. 

Bain has done a terrific job of building the world of this story. The characters  have real connections to other people--Everly to her two best friends--bandmates in a group they call THE SIRENS--and Cristaldo has his brothers and Serge, his consiglieri, and  Sly, the charming majordomo who's been put at Ellery's disposal. But there are also the characters from the other clans--all of them descended from Roman royalty and all of them with clashing agendas. There are also vampires in this world and they have a very interesting role in the werewolf world.

The course of true love is never smooth, even if it's between a man and a woman fated to be "Forever Mates."

There's a lot of heat in the love/sex scenes, including a spectacular take on the whole "dream lover" trope.  And yet,  the prose never shades over into purple. It's streamy. It's  hot, but it's not the kind of out and out erotica that can turn some readers off. (You will definitely be turned on.) 

Check  out SIN CITY WOLF: HOWL now. 


Wednesday, January 22, 2020

New Project Demon Hunter book!! Reviewof Unmarked Graves



I’m a long-time fan of USA Today bestselling writer Christine Pope, and the Project Demon Hunters series is probably my favorite. (While I love paranormal romance, I really love urban fantasy, and these books hit my reading sweet spot. (They are a little darker, a little scarier, and a little edgier. Unmarked Graves is probably my favorite book of the series so far.
The pace is fast…and the story opens just moments after the last book ended with Will and Rosemary’s ill-fated encounter with the demon Caleb Lockwood. Will doesn’t know where he stands with Rosemary, the police are skeptical of the story they’re both telling, and worst of all, that missing Demon Hunters footage is in Caleb’s hands. If he destroys it…

All the characters we’ve met over the last four books are here, plus Rosemary’s mother Glynis, who is exactly the sort of supportive mother you’d expect to have raised her brood of witch daughters. She’s warm and has a sense of humor and I wouldn’t mind if she ended up with a book of her own.
As always in her books, Christine makes the locations come alive with details that let the reader know she has actually lived in the places where she sets her books. In this case, I have lived in some of the same places, and it’s a treat to relate her supernatural doings to the real-life places I’ve been.

Monday, December 2, 2019

Monday Excerpt from The Waking Dream

     The Waking Dream is a "new adult" paranormal romance that I think is a little different from the usual run of PNR.  I have always been fascinated by dreams, and this story grew out of an idea I had while reading about new sleep therapies. It's a quick read--roughly 21K words, which is a novella. Here's the first chapter.   
                                              


                                                   PROLOGUE

For in that sleep…what dreams may come?”—William Shakespeare

If you have a sleep disorder and you google “treatment” or “cure,” chances are one of the first links that comes up is the website of the Alviva Sleep Clinic (ASC), the revolutionary medical center run by Dr. Lauren Alviva and her two oldest daughters, Dr. Kitta Alviva-Fujiwara and Mira Alviva, Ph.D. It’s kind of a boring website—a homepage illustrated with stock photos, a contact page, an “about us” page. There are no links to social media, no auto-playing multi-media elements, no newsletter registration forms popping up.

It almost looks like something the doctors put up themselves using a Squarespace template and YouTube tutorials. The copy hasn’t been SEO’d. There’s no attached blog either.
It’s almost as if they’re not trying.

  But having a small digital footprint hasn’t hurt the clinic’s business. On the contrary, like a new restaurant that doesn’t publish its address or a club that opens in a new location every night, people “in the know” always seem to know where to find it.

The clinic’s unorthodox treatments for insomnia, sleep apnea, REM Sleep Behavior Disorder, narcolepsy, and sleepwalking are controversial but effective, and there’s a sixteen-month waiting list for the thirty-bed clinic tucked away in a picturesque valley in upstate New York.

The results ASC achieves are noteworthy and consistent. Former patients have left glowing testimonials on the website and rapturous reviews on Yelp. The local papers and lifestyle magazines regularly feature one—or all—of the Alvivas in articles that are as much gushing personality profiles as they are business stories. The various doctors Alviva have been featured in national print media as well, and Lauren’s expertise makes her a sought-after guest on cable and broadcast television. Everybody wishes they could sleep better.

The doctors are all extremely photogenic, all of them tall and Nordic blonde, like a group of Valkyries who decided to come to earth for a spa day and then stayed to open a sleep clinic. So that plays a factor in getting the word out as well, although Lauren Alviva discourages what she calls “the cult of personality” surrounding herself and her daughters and makes every effort to frame the clinic’s narrative as being a team effort.

It’s a big team. The ASC employs a fleet of psychologists and board-certified sleep specialists as well as nutritionists and personal trainers who work together in a holistic fashion, using everything from massage to sleep restriction therapy to tackle deep-seated sleep issues. The clinic offers seminars on stress management—open to the public as well as the in-patients—and provides customized vitamin and supplement regimens to combat insomnia and restless leg syndrome.

Successful as those therapies are, they are not the only source of the clinic’s reputation and the impassioned devotion the doctors Alviva inspire. The most enthusiastic praise for the clinic is a result of the program Lauren calls “Deep Dreaming.”

Thanks to the technologies and techniques she’s developed, Lauren and her oldest daughters can access their patients’ subconsciousness and participate in their dreams. This tandem dreaming makes it possible to access the deeper roots of sleep problems and other psychological factors that might be in play. The procedure is less invasive than it sounds, and often when the patient wakes, he or she has no memory of what happened while they were sleeping.

When the Alviva Clinic first introduced “Deep Dreaming,” it seemed like science fiction. To say the sleep science community was less than enthusiastic was an understatement. Most were deeply suspicious—suspicious to the point of paranoia.

North America’s premiere sleep specialist, Dr. G. Taylor Wells of the University of Toronto, was particularly vociferous in his opposition to the tech-assisted therapy, calling it “downright dangerous” and “criminally irresponsible.”

The patients disagreed. And they kept coming to see one or another of the doctors.
Each of them has a different area of specialization.
Lauren’s area of expertise is sleep-walking, sleep-talking, and night terrors--parasomnias all her daughters suffered in childhood.

Kitta, whose wife Mai Fujiwara was killed while working with Doctors Without Borders, specializes in helping people deal with PTSD and other conditions brought on by trauma. The Deep Dream treatments take a lot out of her and she can’t schedule more than two or three a month without suffering from PTSD by proxy herself.

Mika’s practice is almost entirely limited to those who want to change behaviors, whether it’s an addiction to drugs or overeating. The clinic offers a “money-back” guarantee for patients who relapse and most of them use the money to go through treatment again. The Clinic rarely must refund a client more than once.

If that’s all the clinic did, it would be enough to keep it in business for decades but there’s another treatment option that’s “off the menu,” so to speak, an option you won’t find mentioned on the website or in the brochures or even in the Yelp reviews. The clients seeking this unnamed remedy usually arrive at night, often by helicopter and nearly always in disguise.

They’re not here to be treated by the famous Dr. Lauren Alviva or her equally famous daughters Kitta and Mira.

They’re here to see me.

Thursday, August 29, 2019

Playing With Fire--new over reveal!!

Check out the new cover for the Playing With Fire boxed set--Fifteen novels and novellas from award-winning writers and me!!! This new cover is bold and badass, and I'm very happy with it.

Dig into hours of forbidden love, lust, and heat as these heroes and heroines long for their beloveds, break taboos, and fight for the ones they never should have chosen—but could never resist.
99 cents on pre-order + free gifts  Click here..

Sunday, February 10, 2019

Summer Solstice is here!

Nicole Morgan's limited edition romance collection SUMMER SOLSTICE is now available for pre-order at all your favorite ebook retailers. Click here to snag yours for just 99 cents. This is paranormal romance with the sensuous summer solstice as a focal point. My fairy romance novelette, Soul Kiss, is in the collection and I'm excited to read everyone else's story.

Thursday, July 21, 2016

The Oldest Sense: Vetiver Quinn #2, a preview


Last year, at the urging of a friend of  mine who is a best-selling novelist, I dipped my toes in the "paranormal romance" genre. I didn't want to use one of the typical paranormal creatures--honestly, I'll be fine if I never see another shifter story--and I wanted my heroine to have the power, not just be "the girl" who gets dragged along on the adventure. (And I did want there to be an adventure. Straight-out romances don't really work for me.) I started thinking about the powers my heroine might have and I thought of Anton Strout's great books about Simon Canderous and Rachel Caine's "Weather Warden" series. They aren't cookie-cutter books and I didn't want mine to be a cookie-cutter story either.

I was writing an aromatherapy book for a client at the time and I started thinking about what it would be like if someone could "see" things in a person's olfactory aura. I know that sounds weird, but there are all those studies about memory being linked to scent and I decided to try. The result was a woman I called Vetiver Quinn, an aromatherapist who can read people that way. And then I came up with a story that involved a government agent named Peter Eliades who needs her help foiling a terrorist incident.  And then I found a group of pictures of the couple on the left and a couple of covers came together. The first book was The Fourth Sense (smell being the fourth sense in the sequence of five senses: sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste). 

The sequel is called The Oldest Sense. (Smell is the first sense we develop while hearing is said to be the lasst sense to leave us as we're dying.)  The storyline for the new book is a straight up mystery, and it's been fun to write. These books are just novelettes, and the idea is to eventually put them together in a boxed set.  Yes, I know, I really need to finish that novel. But in the meantime, I'm enjoying writing the shorter stuff.  Here's the prologue of The Oldest Sense written under the name Delia Fontana.

The Oldest Sense

“I want it to smell like an NFL locker room at half-time during the Super Bowl when the other team is winning,” my client said.
Yikes, I thought, but what I said was, “Okay. Man tang and musk. Notes of camphor and mentholatum.”
“And leather,” she added. “Sweaty socks and leather.”
“Leather?” I asked, because I wasn’t following her. “I don’t think they really make footballs out of pig skin any more.”
She gave me a pitying look. “The players are wearing underwear.”
Of course, I thought. The players’ leather underwear.
“And a hint of chlorine.”
“From the showers?”
Again I got the look, this time tinged with a bit of impatience. “The smell of fresh spunk,” she said. “It smells like chlorine.”

Monday, June 20, 2016

Cover Reveal: Deus Ex Magical

My alter-ego Kat Parrish will be releasing a new paranormal romance novelette next month called Deus Ex Magical. It's my first story set in the Pacific Northwest and my first foray into paranormal romance. The cover is by Serena Daphn and you can find a gallery of her covers (she does premade as well as custom covers) here.

I love the play of color and black and white. And that hot pink really pops.  I am very pleased with this cover!

Thursday, May 26, 2016

Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance Giveaway

Who doesn't like the opportunity to win some goodies? Books. Gift cards. And the opportunity to encounter new writers and new books. I'll be interested in reading the Dragon  Born Awakening series from Ella Summers that's part of the package. You can enter here.

Saturday, March 12, 2016

Aixa and the Scorpion--an excerpt and a freebie





I'll be giving away part one of my three-part urban fantasy series  (La Bruja Roja) for the next five days.  I originally wrote the series under the pseudonym Delia Fontana and over the year or so it's been available, Joy Sillesen has played with the covers, trying out everything from a neat grunnge graphic to the current trio of very paranormal covers. I've loved all the covers and wish I could use them all. This excerpt is from the opening of Aixa and the Scorpion. If you'd like to read more, go grab the freebie on Amazon. And I would LOVE a review if you like it.

   AIXA AND THE SCORPION

When you live in a place called Sangre de Cristo, it almost goes without saying that sometimes not-so-ordinary things are going to happen. In the years I was growing up here, Sangre was mostly just a sleepy little border town straddling the line between Texas and Mexico.
Americans crossed the border in search of cheap drugs and cheap booze and donkey sex shows and Mexicans traveled in the other direction looking for jobs and opportunities and green cards.
We didn’t get many tourists in Sangre de Cristo, so while we weren’t entirely immune to the problems faced by people in Matamoros or El Paso, we were mostly insulated from the bad stuff.
At least we were until 2006 when the drug wars exploded and the fallout left towns on both sides of the border radioactive with cocaine and machismo.
By then I was already living in Austin, taking classes at UT, and trying to figure out my place in the world.
I am a modern woman, but I am heir to an old, old tradition. And the power that I have skips generations. It’s why my mother, who was born in Brownsville, fled the U.S. in the final weeks of her pregnancy, determined that I should be born in Mexico so that I’d be a citizen of both nations. Both nations and two worlds.
She died giving birth to me, which is like something out of a 19th century novel. My father, who had loved her very much, never forgave her for leaving him and basically abandoned me in Sangre de Cristo to grow up in my abuela’s house.
For my 14th birthday my father sent me a present—a Bratz doll—and then two weeks later showed up in Sangre de Cristo knocking on my grandmother’s door with more presents and a sheepish smile.

Tuesday, February 9, 2016

A Valentine Witch for Valentne's Day

I'm a big fan of the novelette-sized story--I've written a whole series of novelette-sized fairy tale retellings--and I've been enjoying the paranormal romance novelettes from writer Shay Roberts. This one is set in North Carolina, where I went to college, and he totally nailed the perculiar vernacular of the local barrier islands. (Ocracoke Island was always one of my favorite places, but the local accent is hard to decipher. It's said to be very close to what Elizabethan English sounded like.)

I reviewed Valentine Witch (see my review here), and hope that the writer will come back to the setting and the characters later.

Tuesday, January 5, 2016

A Vampire a Day: HEARTBLAZE by Shay Roberts



I don't know about you, but if I see ONE MORE paranormal book where the heroine is a passive little twit, I'm going to throw up my garlic pizza. HEARTBLAZE is a refreshing change.
Right from the start, author Shay Roberts serves notice that this is not going to be an ordinary paranormal romance. Yes, there are vampires and werewolves in the story, but there’s also a richly detailed paranormal world, where there are rules and reasons for what happens. Then there’s the setting—Rhode Island, a place steeped in history that comes alive, particularly in the sections of the book set in Emma’s past life. That past life element is very appealing, especially since there are “real life characters” woven into the tale. (Watch for a great bit involving the birth of the national anthem.)
Written in a briskly cinematic style—we’re plunged right into the action as heroine Emma Rue finds herself acting in inexplicable ways for reasons she doesn’t understand—and told from multiple points of view across two timelines, HEARTBLAZE delivers on all levels. There’s a vampire hierarchy, complicated clan politics among the shifter characters, and a vengeful ghost who has an agenda related to the larger world. And there’s a romance that’s deepened not just by conflict, but by intelligence. Emma is not a silly little girl and her pursuit of the truth about herself, about who she was and who she is, draws us in. And bonus points for the spooky old mansion! Both Gothic and contemporary, this book is a treat for readers who are tired of the same-old/same-old.

Friday, January 1, 2016

A Vampire a Day: Daughters of Darkness: Victoria by W.J. May

There are a lot of vampire novels (or in this case, novellas) out there, and I realized I had about a bazillion of them on my Kindle. I decided to see how many I could read in a month. I'm aiming for one a day. Here's the first one.

This is a novella, which is exactly the bite-sized bit of story I was looking for today. I like the setup of the daughters of Vlad being scattered all over the place and so numerous that they don't necessarily know each other. That makes sense to me. After a couple of centuries, it would be easy to lose count of your progeny, particularly if you move around a lot.

The title character is a "hunter," and as the story opens, she's after a girl who's a witch. But complications ensue when she finds out that the witch is actually one of her (many) sisters. And then, it gets really complicated.

Victoria (or "Tori" as her hunting partners call her), is a tough chick in the obligatory skin-right black leather outfit. She doesn't have a lot of patience with humans or half-vampires who can't keep up. (But who does really?)

A lot of this feels like it's been filtered through the UNDERWORLD movie franchise (vampires versus werewolves), but that's not necessarily a bad thing.  I like adding the witch element, especially when we find out that the witch in question is untrained and having to "wing it" as her magic is activated with a heavy blood scent. I prticularly liked it when Tori corners her prey and the witchling's newborn powers seem to be fizzling out. Because you could see that happening!

Tori starts out with a little Katniss action (she's armed with a bow and arrow) and then switches to guns, but before the story's over, we get ultraviolet guns and gizmos. It's fun. The writer also gives us a sens eof a larger universe at work, with talk of "the Council."

Friday, November 6, 2015

#HEARTBLAZE--Twilight with a Bite!

If you're looking for something new in paranormal romance, you might want to check out Heartblaze 1: Secret Soul, the debut novel by Shay Roberts. the story mixes a contemporary tale about a troubled college student name Emma Rue with a past life adventure when she was a vampire aristocrat. And just to make things more complicated, there's a vengeful ghost trying to manipulate her, an anti-paranormal organization that's out to kill her, and a conflicted werewolf who can't decide between his duty and his feelings.

There's a real depth of world-building here--an element most paranormal romances skip over--and real stakes at hand. This is Twilight with a bite,  a story with some edge to its emotions.

Heartblaze is a great read, and it's available worldwide.

Tuesday, June 3, 2014

Darknight, Book 2 of the Witches of Cleopatra Hill by Christine Pope



Christine Pope’s new novel Darknight (the second in her Witches of Cleopatra Hill trilogy) takes up one page after Darkangel left off. Angela McAllister, newly minted prima of the McAllister witch clan is in the hands of a rival clan, and the only thing she knows for certain is that the consort she’s bonded with is the brother of her clan’s fiercest enemy.

It’s complicated.

For Angela, biology is destiny and she and Connor Wilcox are fated to be together despite decades of enmity between the McAllisters and the Wilcoxes, a feud that has affected every witch clan in Arizona. Connor is equally eager to let bygones be bygones, and as the yule season approaches, the bond between him and Angela deepens. But that doesn’t mean that their respective families are happy about it or ready to play Secret Santa with each other.

The plot thickens in this book and the danger and tension is ratcheted up several notches as a dire plot unfolds that could destroy the consort connection.  It’s not just witches that live in Cleopatra Hill and in this book we meet some shape-shifters and witches too. 

As always with Pope’s novels, the setting is just as important as the characters and if a reader ever visits Jerome, they could do worse than take the Darknight tour of local eateries (and wineries). With an engaging cast (both normal and paranormal), Darknight is a satisfying read and will whet your appetite for the concluding book in the trilogy. (And speaking of whetting your appetite, I defy you to read some of the chapters without your mouth watering from Pope’s vivid description.)

Pope has a number of giveaways scheduled for the book's launch. Here's a link to the contest running on GoodReads.