Adrienne Woods Crate full of goodies!

Do you know about crates? They're the best giveaways ever. PLAYING WITH FIRE, the boxed set of paranormal stories dealing with forbidden love is sponsoring a whole bunch of different crates this month and next. Check this one out here.  This is the crate sponsored by writer Adrienne Woods between now and the end of May.

Playing With Fire pre-order live!

 💕💕Romeo and Juliet. Lancelot and Guinevere. Edward and Bella. 💕💕
They all had one thing in common...Forbidden Love.
Discover twelve incredible new worlds from international and USA today best selling authors in this forbidden love themed box set. Playing with Fire is now on pre-order for only 99c. Free boxset with over 1600 pages with every pre-order.  Get it here, 

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.