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.