Fantasy Freebie Giveaway

Looking for something to read while you wait for the next season of Game of Thrones to start?(Tomorrow. Squeee!)  Grab some freebie fantasy reads here.  And see you in Westeros tomorrow.

Moonlight Mist

This limited edition paranormal romance collection has been extended through the fall. Which is good news because it's a fantastic collection of work. (And I'm not just saying that because I'm one of the authors in the set. (My novella, Waking Dream, was written just for this set.)
You can get it on Kobo.
On Barnes & Noble
on Amazon

Here's the blurb:

The creatures of this alternate plane lurk beyond the mist. 
Searching.
Hungry.
Craving for what they need. 
Some may find it. Some might even curb that hunger. But a few will not.
Without knowing what it is they need to satisfy a primal need, they seek out something more. Something that will test their limits in search of something greater. Something powerful... Something everlasting. 

This collection includes:

PLAYING WITH FIRE on pre-order

I know, you've got boxed et fatigue. It happens! 
But you really want to check out PLAYING WITH FIRE, the set I'm in coming this fall.
It's a collection of tales themed to FORBIDDEN LOVE.

Get your pre-order here (iBooks and Amazon links are not yet live.)
Claim your freebie gifts!

My story is a version of the classic Arthur/Guinevere/Lancelot tale I call The Poisoned Cup. I had
A.S. Oren of Glass Crocodile make the cover and am quite pleased.

Deadly Southern Charm...a crime fiction collection

This new collection of crime fiction from Wildside Press features more than a baker’s dozen of stories about “steel magnolias”—strong southern women who “embody that legendary mix of femininity and fortitude. The contributors are members of the Central Virginia Chapter of Sisters in Crime and some “guest authors” and the tales run the gamut from period pieces like “Southern Sisters Stick Together” by Stacie Giles to the opening piece, “the Girl in the Airport” by Frances Aylor, a neatly done bit of airport noir.

The tone of the tales ranges from Lynn Calhoun’s Gothic tale “Cayce’s Treasures,” (with its references to the fad for wearing “lover’s eye” jewelry to the black humor of Libby Hall’s “Stewing” and the flinging around of dog carcasses to the hilarious send-up of country music songs (“”Take My Heart, Leave the Dog”) in Sherry Harris’ “Country Song Gone Wrong.”

A couple of stories touch on the supernatural—Ronald Sterling’s “Just like Jiminy Cricket” for one, and Brad Harper’s “Shadow Man.” Food comes up a lot and the reference to grilled bacon and pimento cheese sandwiches will make any reader’s mouth water. (K.L. Murphy’s “Burn.”)

Twist endings, unfaithful spouses, unreliable narrators, and lots and lots of southern local color—pick your poison (and yes, there’s poison here too). 

If you love crime fiction, pick up Deadly Southern Charm and enjoy. You can buy it on Amazon or directly from Wildside Press. For more Sisters in Crime anthologies with Virginia writers, check out the SinC website.

A review of Monkey Justice by Patricia Abbott

Patricia Abbott crafts stories like Cartier designs jewelry, one polished gem of a word at a time. And yet there’s nothing “precious” about any of these stories—gritty, gravely, raw stories about people and their worst impulses. Many of these stories take place on the margins, in the places between memory and the present. Things aren’t always what they seem, and if there is any justice to be had in the end, it is rough justice, vigilante justice, final justice.

Abbott’s stories are character-heavy, and dialogue-rich. Even the internal musings of the characters have substance. Her descriptions are precise, and immediately relatable, as when she describes the “gluey, mousey” smell of all used bookstores. “I thought only cops used the word vehicles,” one character muses, “but maybe prisoners and cops traded words like a cold.” It’s an offhand comment but it seems like the perfect combination of words.

Most of the stories here are dark, effortlessly noir-ish and strongly rendered slices of low-life pie. But there are also delights like “Bit Players,” which features the late, great character actor Jack Elam and a telling bit about the way casting directors work in Hollywood.

Feed your reader!

I love boxed sets, both as a reader and a writer. I love being able to sample work from writers I don't know and I love being a part of a group of writers putting together collections of work with a common theme. (You'll be hering a lot about PLAYING WITH FIRE in the coming months. It's a boxed set of stories about forbidden love and I'm reworking the Arthurian myth in my tale.) But Playing with Fire won't be up for preorder until next month. In the meantime, here's a set you can preorder.

CURSED LANDS. Twenty-two tales  where magic, danger, and romance lurk between the shadows and the light.  All the authors you love and more!

Delayed gratification isn't for you? No problem. Here are a couple of boxed set you might have missed. First, The Witching Hours, a collection of eleven noels about witches and witchcraft withbooks from Christine Pope, Stacy Claflin, Yasmine Galenorn, Sarra Cannon, Phaedra Weldon, and more. (Including me--my MAGIC IN THE BLOOD is included.) Get it here for FREE.

For 99 cents, you can snag another boxed set, FATED MATES. It's all about shape-shifters and their mates and if you're curious about what all the "reverse harem" hype is all about, there's that too. Here's the Amazon blurb:

Once Upon a Star, a review

Fiddlehead Press has a whole series of ONCE UPON A … sets of retold fairy tales and this newest one may be its best. The fourteen fairy tale-inspired science fiction tales are all fresh and inventive and lots of fun to read, from Sarra Cannon’s Matrix-meets-Robin Hood spin on the classic tale (“Loxley”) to Christine Pope’s “The Cyrano Solution,” which is an epic take on “The Princess and the Frog.” The “inspirations” for the stories run the gamut from a trio of Russian tales to “The Goose Girl,” and while there’s a Cinderella story, it’s quite unlike the classic tale. One of the best things about the set is that it doesn't fall back on the same old/same old stories that everyone seems to retell--Beauty and the Beast, Snow White, the Little Mermaid, but bring in a much more diverse set of stories.

The writers all seem to be having a lot of fun, but there are some lessons to be had here as well—revenge and redemption figure large in several of the stories.

There’s also nice world building. Some of the stories, like those by Anthea Sharp and Christine Pope, take place in between “episodes” of their long-running series, while others are “one-offs” the writers admit were a genre stretch. Moreover, while it’s possible to see some of the influences on the stories, the writers have augmented their ideas with other bits and pieces of lore and myth and folktale. And so, we have Grimm’s fairy tales coexisting with Pinocchio and Washington Irving’s Sleepy Hollow. Wrapping a science fiction skin around these old stories makes them feel as shiny as the titanium hull of a space craft.

If you like science fiction and fairy tales, this is a boxed set you NEED to get.  You can buy it here.