TBR: Flicker

This looks like a fun urban fantasy with fae instead of the usual werewolves and vampires. (Even though I write about vampires, I'm pretty tired of the same old same old.)

Freebie Fiction: Spite

My historic, horrific take on "Sleeping Beauty" is free right now. Get your copy of Spite, a longish short story.

Guest Post: Patricia Abbott

 Novelist Patricia Abbott, whose debut novel Concrete Angel is a nominee for the 2016 Macavity Award for Best First Mystery, discusses some of the thorny issues facing writers of crime fiction.

The Difficult Centerpiece of SHOT IN DETROIT

by Patricia Abbott

SHOT INDETROIT is the story a female photographer desperate to find artistic success. Through her relationship with a mortician, she comes up with the idea of photographing young black men who have died in Detroit over a six-month period. I wrote the character of Violet Hart as ambitious, a loner, a pest in getting what she wants. An artist in other words. She lives on the outskirts of conventional society--at least in her mind--reasoning that an artist is given license to bend societal norms. Or is she? Does Violet exploit the men she photographs or does she honor them? Is it somewhere in between? These are the issues I wrestled with in writing SHOT IN DETROIT. Both in creating a character who thought like this and in making her the book's centerpiece. And was I guilty of the same transgressions?

I set SHOT IN DETROIT almost totally within Detroit. It's a city often accused of exemplifying transgression: the murder capital of the world plunged into bankruptcy, suffering the lowest rate of high school graduation in the country, imprisoning the most black males, enduring the most extreme poverty. The art and literature coming out of Detroit was edgy, bleak, transgressive. How could it not be? To find a Detroit prompting a different story, I'd have to have set it much earlier. Even in Joyce Carol Oates' brilliant THEM, set in the fifties and sixties in Detroit, the plunge is well underway. 

Early readers of SHOT found Violet a difficult sell. An agent gave me this advice: change her name, make her younger, give her girlfriends, find her a best friend who isn't a gay Filipino who sells drugs. Make her more appealing to women: they buy the books. I took some of his advice. But each time I stepped farther away from the Violet in my head, the story felt off-beam. If the central premise of the novel was going to work, Violet could not be the sort of woman who sat on PTA boards or lunched with former sorority sisters.

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!

Sunday Sweepstakes: Nalini Singh

If you're a Nalani Singh fan--and who isn't a fan of the best-selling PNR writer?--you might want to check out  this chance to win ANY one of her books plus get entered in a contest to win other great giveaways. I'm way behind on my Nalini reading, so there are four or five of her books I wouldn't mind winning, including this one.
check out

Cover appreciation: Animal Farm

Everyone reads George Orwell's Animal Farm in school (along with Brave New World and Lord of the Flies).  As a result, each new version of the book seems to get a new cover. This seems to be the latest cover, and I like it. Srikingly graphic. Clean.

The cover of the edition I read was the one on the right.
 It's memorable enough that I can still pick it out from a gallery of covers the book has had over the years. Of the three dystopian novels every high school kid has to read, this one was probably my favorite, although I actually preferred 1984 to Animal Farm. I should probably go back and reread it. Somehow the current presidential election cycle seems to suggest it's time.

Review: Death of a Dyer by Eleanor Kuhns

Death of a Dyer by Eleanor Kuhns is the second of her Will Rees mysteries about a Revolutionary War veteran-turned-itinerant weaver.

They didn't have Facebook back in the 18th century so hearing unexpected news about an old friend rarely meant something good had happened. For Will Rees, learning that Nate Bowditch is dead is not only unexpected; it's unbelievable.

"Dead?” Rees repeated, staring at George Potter in shock.

“Dead?” A spasm of unexpected grief shot through him. Although he hadn’t seen Nate Bowditch for eighteen years, not since Rees had marched away with the Continental Army in

1777, as boys they’d been closer than brothers. “Are you sure?”

Potter put down his cup with a clink. “Of course I’m sure. His wife herself told me of his death.”

“I’ve never met her,” Rees said.

“After almost twenty years? He lives— lived on the other side of Dugard, not the Atlantic Ocean. What happened? You were such good friends.”

Rees shrugged; that story was too long to tell. “We . . . went in different directions.”