THE HATCHING by Ezekial Boone... a review

An international disaster ensues when a strange species of spiders suddenly hatches in Peru and China simultaneously. This new novel by Ezekial Boone is old school and intense!  Who doesn't hate spiders?

Miguel was born in Lima, Peru, a city of seven million, but to stay close to a girlfriend he’s found a job leading “eco tours” into the jungle. His latest trip has been kind of a disaster because he hasn’t spotted any animals at all. His clients are complaining but Miguel is spooked. And then a bird simply falls out of the sky, And then the wave of spiders overwhelms one of the tourists in his party.  That’s a terrific way to begin a disaster story and the pace only picks up from there as we meet a beleaguered FBI agent in the US, a baffled seismologist in India, and a smart and tough spider expert who has a theory that the SPIDER glyph scratched in the Nazca plains of Peru is older than the other images there. And meanwhile…China sets off a nuke in its own interior.  This is a lot of fun, and it’s the start of a trilogy, so there’s more fun to come.

           

           

TBR: Duane Swierczynski's Canary

I am a big, big fan of DS and have been all the way back to his days on Details Magazine. I can't remember the first piece of fiction of his I read. It was probably Expiration Date. I am thrilled he's got a new book out (or at least new to me, I've had my head down for the last 18 months or so. This is definitely one for the TBR bookcase.

Not super crazy about the Canary cover though. Even though the book is from a traditional publisher, this looks kind of like a cover that an author with basic Photoshop skills came up with himself. It IS eye-catching and looks great as a thumbnail, so from a marketing standpoint it works, but the writer's writing is so good, I want the whole package to be great.

Two Actors, Four Movies that got Journalism right

I've just watched Spotlight and Truth back to back and both of them were intense and realistic and Sixty Minutes, no television news show had ever been profitable--and in Spotlight, the shadow of the internet hangs over the newspaper office -- literally. I used to be a reporter, starting off as a magazine writer and then becoming a freelance cityside reporter for an L.A. weekly paper, then freelancing for a a syndicated news service. I rarely wrote hard news but I took my job seriously and i did it with pride. My Great-Aunt Marie had worked for a Chicago paper during WWII and when she came home from the night shift, she noticed that one of her neighbors was always up and talking to someone who wasn't there. She did some investigating and then had a chat with the FBI, who arrested the guy. He was a member of the German-American Bund and he was broadcasting on a radio.  Yes, my newspaperwoman great-aunt caught a Germany spy!!!
well-done. Both of them are about the financial realities of news organizations--before

I grew up in a house where we read two papers every day, the Washington Post in the morning and the Evening Star at night. I don't even know if the Evening Star is still being published--afternoon papers were starting to die even when I was in  high school. On Sundays, my father would drive down to the bus station and pick up copies of the out of town papers.  So newsprint is in my blood and even though I've long since left the newsgatherine world behind, I'm still a news junkie.  And I love movies about journalists. I have a pretty short list of favorite movies in that genre and oddly, Robert Redford is in two of them and Michael Keaton is in the other two.

All the President's Men is a still my favorite of the four movies. It's beautifully acted, beautifully cast, written by the great William Goldman and directed by Alan J. Pakula.  the movie came out 40 years

The Fourth Sense is WIDE!!

Up until now I've been in Kindle Select with all my books written under all my pen names. But since the advent of "unlimited reads," my sales have just taken a nosedive. I decided to try my fortunes going wide using Draft2Digital to format my books for all the platforms. I'm leading with The Fourth Sense, an award-winning novelette, the first in a four-part series that combines a little bit of romance, a little bit of paranormal, and a little bit of suspense. (There are no werewolves or vampires here.) You can now find it on Amazon, Kobo, Scribd, and more coming soon!!! It's just 99 cents at the moment, so why not pick up a copy?? And perhaps leave a review??

Vampire Girl by Karpov Kinrade...a review

“I didn’t expect beauty. I didn’t expect magic. I didn’t expect love,” the Vampire Girl book trailer says. I didn’t expect any of that and to be honest, I didn’t really expect that good a book. (And you know what I means—some of the best-selling vampire books out there are barely readable.) But Vampire Girl by Karpov Kinrade (a husband/wife writing team) kept coming up on my “Also Purchased” and “Recommended” reading lists so I finally took the hint and bought the book.

And wow. Just … wow. 

Vampire Girl is a great read. The writers have given us a wonderfully relatable heroine, a blue collar girl who dreams of being a lawyer and works in a diner and worries about paying the bills. She lives in Portland, Oregon and her life is filled with friends, including her best friend, a transwoman whose boyfriend has a bit of the second sight. The book is written in a cinematic style with cliff-hangers ending each chapter and mysteries that pull us through to the next bit.

Slave Graves by Thomas Hollyday...a review

Slave Graves is currently free on Amazon and you might want to head over there right now to snag your Kindle copy. It's the first in the "River Sunday" series set in backwoods Maryland featuring a university archaeologist named Frank Light. (If this were a romance series instead of a mystery, "River Sunday" would be the name of the heroine.)

Frank is out in the mosquito-ridden marshes because real estate financier Jake Tennent wants to build a bridge right in the middle of what might be a significant archaeological find. Jake is a friend of the university that employs Frank (and his girlfriend Mello, who teaches some business courses) and when Frank and a ragtag team of students, scholars, and state archaeologists block his plans, he is not a happy man. (It's no coincidence that Terment comes across like a certain New York-based real estate mogul currently running for president.)

Something Different in a Shakespeare Book: The Shakespeare Stealer

This looks like a coming of age story set in Shakespeare's time The hero is a young orphan 9aren't they always?) who can write a symbol language. His cruel master orders him to steal Hamlet or ele, and it goes from there.

My Best Friend's Exorcism by Grady Hendrix...a review

The title of this book makes it sound like a bouncy YA  with a dash of horror--maybe something along the lines of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER. That is not this book. Instead, Grady Hendrix has whipped up a complex study of teenage friendship that' is brutally honest about class iand exceptionally sharp in dissecting the pecking order of a private high school in the deep South where the worst thing you can do to a dad is make him look like a Republican.

Abby, the book's narrator, is a kid whose life takes a downward spiral after her father, an air traffic controller, loses his job when President Reagan goes over his union for calling a strike. She's buoyed up by her freindshp with Gretchen, a rich girl who lives in the "nice" part of Charleston in a house that always smells of air conditioning and carpet shampoo. They are closer than sisters and then something terrible happens to Gretchen that changes everything.

As Gretchen goes into freefall she gives Abby plenty of reasons to simply walk away from their friendship but Abby will not do it. And because she will not, she pays a horrific price. The way Hendrix lays this out is very well thought out, and he final chapters of the story are genuinel tense, genuinely horrific, and terribly, terribly real. This is a book about love and loyalty and boundaries. And it will make you ask--how far would you go to save someone you love?

Heartblaze 2: Savage Steel by Shay Roberts...a review

If you were worried that author Shay Roberts might have fallen into a “sophomore slump” with this second book in the Heartblaze trilogy, worry no more. This book is a delight in every way, with deeper conflicts, richer emotions, and relationships that are layered and nuanced. He’s even deftly woven in references to the three novellas set in the Heartblaze world, a move that makes his fictional universe seem even more complex and interesting than it already was. As with the first book, the story unfolds in two different time frames—modern-day Providence and Tudor England—and involves heroine Emma Rue in a story that has epic consequences. Rowan, the mad witch behind Emma’s troubles in the first book, returns with an entire coven of witchly allies, and her tale weaves in and out of Emma’s story like a dark ribbon. Written in an almost cinematic style full of character cross-cutting and cliffhangers, this book is a fast read and a deeply satisfying addition to the series.

Picnic by the Lake of Time

Tor.com put out a call for novella-length stories about time travel this month and I desperately wanted to submit something. I love time travel stories and this "story bunny" has been drifting around for years. But as I started writing the story, I realized that it was just a story--that it had a finite beginnin and a finite ending and there was no way I could stretch the story out to 20K novella length.

At the same time, I saw this cover on Book Cover Designer and realized it would be a perfect cover for the story. And though I'm really, really trying to increase my output of longer work, I decided that sometimes a story is just a story. So by the Fourth of July, I'll have Picnic by the Lake of Time out in the world. The cover was designed by Ntasja Hellenthal of Beyond Book Covers. Find her here.

Butterly Bones by Savanna Redman, a review

Amanda thinks her life is fine—or at least as fine as it can be when she’s not following her dream of being an artist and is instead advising clients on what to do with their money. She thinks that that her life is fine except that she can’t seem to make her husband happy, and on top of that…she’s having premonition dreams. Her life is fine but she doesn’t have those dreams unless her life is a mess. And soon enough, real life catches up with her dreams.

BUTTERFLY BONES is a terrific novel about dreams, both literal and metaphorical. It is about a complicated woman living a complicated life. The genre straddles the line between chick lit and lit fic with a dash of paranormal thrown in and Savanna Redman makes it all work because her writing is just that good.

For one thing, from the opening page as Amanda experiences a lucid dream, we’re thrown into a multi-sensory world, seeing the shadow of black branches against a violet sky, hearing the buzz of insects, smelling the scent of honeysuckle, feeling the chill of cold dew om our bare feet. And from the first pages we also know that Savanna may long for a normal life but she is ANYTHING but normal.

A Shakespeare Mystery

This si the first in a series so if it's good, there are a few more where it came from. I look forward to reading this book and am also recommending it to my mystrey book club.

Another Cover Reveal!

Over at the Book Cover Designer, they're' going into their last week of a fabulous 20 percent off sale. (A new coupon will generate tonight at midnight PDT.) I've bought a number of covers for upcoming projects  and still have a pretty long "wish list."

I always try to steer my indie author clients toward BCD because they have a wide range of designers who offer covers for as low as $20. (They also have a few that are inexplicably in the $300 price range without, IMHO being worth it, but eye of the beholder and so forth.)

Later this year I have a whole series of novelettes coming out that are basically retellings of Shakespeare tales with a romantic/gothic gloss. Island of Magic (Tempest meets Beauty and the Beast), Cry, Little Sister (Hamlet), and two as-yet-untitled stories based on Othello and Macbeth.

This is the cover for Cry, Little Sister, my retelling of Hamlet from Ophelia's point of view. I liked the cover because I haven't seen the model, who is lovely, all over the stock photo libraries. The cover was designed by Serena Daphn.

Shakespeare Sunday quote

I've said before that the Taming of the Shrew is not my favorite Shakespeare play. And I was not much of a huge fan of the Heath Ledger, Julia Stiles version (10 Things I Hate About You) either. But I started thinking about it and realized that in many ways, the character of Petruchio was an outlier, a template for any number of "alpha-hole" romance novel heroes who are just nasty to the women who eventually come to love them. Sigh.  It's all Will's fault!

Here's a Sunday quote from the play.

A retelling of Swan Lake

I admit this book caught my eye when it came up in the "also boughts" section for Bride of the Midnight King. I'm always interested in fairy tale retellings, and especially interested when writers venture away from the same three or four stories that get told over and over. (Beauty and the Beast, I'm looking at you!)

I've never actually seen Swan Lake performend; probably the closest is watching Black Swan, but the story really does have all the elements. This one goes on the TBR pile.