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. 

A Vampire a Day...Misbegotten

Yes, it's shameless self-promotion day.  I have just released MISBEGOTTEN, which is a novella and the first in a series of books set in my L.A. Nocturne universe. This is a paranormal LA in which vampire family vie for position against the most powerful family, which operates out of Griffith Observatory.

There are werewolves and ghouls and fae. the book began with a short story called "Tired Blood" that appeared in John Donald Carlucci's Astonishing Adventures Magazine back in 2007. I found I really loved the characters and the world and in the decade since then, I wrote enough paranormal short stories to fill an entire collection:  L.A. Nocturne Collection: Tales of the Misbegotten.

My protagonist, Kira Simkins, is a crime reporter who specializes in paranormal crime. She has her own blog, which was originally conceived in the manner of Nikki Finke's "Deadline Hollywood," which really rose to promminence during the 2008 WGA writer's strike. It's called paracrimes.com and I actually own that domain name, though not sure what I'm going to do with it.

I was originally inspired by Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita blake series, which I remember embracing with the fervor of a religious convert. I had never read anything like her books (it was really before "urban fantasy" was a thing).  This first story deals with the uproar that occurs when the head of a vampire family dies under peculiar circumstances that may or may not relate to a series of vampire on vampire murders occurring in the Southland. I'm really rather pleased with the results.

Shemless Self-Promotion...MISBEGOTTEN

Years ago, when I published Dark Valentine Magazine, I wrote a story called "Tired Blood" that featured a vampire so old he'd contracted dementia. I fell in love with the characters and the world, which was set in a UF version of Los Angeles. I've been playing in that world, off and on, for a decade now. (I wrote enough short stories in the world that I have a whole collection, LA. Nocturne.)

I've been working on the novel-length story in the world for nearly that long and next month--yes, next month--it's finally coming out. It's on preorder for 99 cents and if you like vampires and werewolves who aren't sparkly or tattooed, you might like it.

Something new in urban fantasy ... Heartblaze 4I lo

I love urban fantasy and it's getting harder and harder to find something that spins the tropes in a new way. Something like Brotherhood of the Wheel doesn't come along every day. This book, though, the first in a new series, is something different in a good way. The author blends an authentic depiction of Viking  civilization with a dark Gothic dream of a supernatural world and the result is fantastastic. Yes, there are werewolves but so much more. (And that "more" includes a heroine is strong and tough and a villain who is as memorable as she is original.) Check it out here.

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.)

Are Gargoyles the New Vampires?

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That's what I'm hearing. The next "thing" in paranormal fantasy/romance is going to be gargoyles. I'm okay with that. I really liked Anton Strout's Alchemystic (A Spellmason Chronicle) and its sequels. I also am a HUGE fan of Strout's Simon Canderous novels. They're really first rate urban fantasy.

It really is time for something new and different in the paranormal world. I don't mind vampires--there's something primal about the whole vampire thing and I get it. But I've never been that crazy abotu werewolves, and when the whole "shifter" sub-genre exploded a few years ago--dragon shifters, bear shifters, dinosaur shifters--I was somewhat bemused. No one ever seems to get the whole thing about how an average sized woman can't transform into a cat without losing some mass in there somewhere.

I'm really curious to know what writers will come up with. And meanwhile--thank you Goodreads--there's this list of nearly 50 books featuring gargoyles in urban fantasy and paranormal romance.

L.A. Nocturne Collection--Urban Fantasy short stories set in Los Angeles

One of the first short stories I ever wrote for Dark Valentine Magazine was "Tired Blood," a tale of a vampire so old he'd developed dementia and forgotten he was a vampire. I liked the setting of the story so much that for the next few years, I kept writing stories set in my version of Los Angeles where the normal and paranormal co-exist. This fall, the novel based on that story, Misbegotten, will be published. (Better late than never.0 And as a run-up to that publication, I have released this colleciton of the "Misbegotten" short stories.

Some of these stories originally appeared in the collections L.A. Nocturne and L.A. Nocturne II, others have never been collected; a few were written just for this volume. I'm happy because the stories run the gamut. There are ghosts, shapeshifters (and not the usual kind), djinn, mermaids, sorcerers, demons, angels, and a were-bear. Also fairies. And unicorns and a centaur.

There are also vampires. Lots and lots of vampires. And a werewolf or two.  But not, I hope, your standard issue alpha wolf guys.  I hope you'll check out the collection. I had a great time writing these stories.

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."

Shameless Self-Promotion Saturday

This is the summer I finally get all the bits and pieces of writing up and out there. Joy Sillesen of Indie Author Services has created a great new cover for me as I collect all the L.A. Nocturne stories and add them to new ones as a "teaser" for my Misbegotten novel. (Urban Fantasy, set in L.A. There are vampires and werewolves and shapeshifters but no chicks with swords or tramp stamps.)