D.B. Henson's Blog, page 2

UNHOLY ANGELS by Karen Fenech

A while back, I read Karen Fenech's romantic suspense novel, UNHOLY ANGELS. This is a superbly intricate tale of greed, power, and murder. Karen expertly blends well-defined characters and a unique plot into a suspenseful and believable story that will keep you reading into the wee hours of the morning.

Product Description:

Liz Janssen's marriage was over long before she filed for divorce. There was no way her soon-to-be ex-husband committed suicide because of her. Yet that is what her teenage son, Will, believes.

Others in the small West Virginia town share this thinking. Others who are disciples of a homicidal Satanic cult her husband was part of. The disciples want vengeance for the death of one of their own and will use Liz's troubled, grief-stricken son as an instrument for their revenge. To save herself and Will, Liz must stop them - and she must do so without Doug finding out.

Doug McBride is the new town sheriff, the man Liz has fallen in love with, and the man she cannot trust.

Please note: Some content may be disturbing.

Karen Fenech writes contemporary and historical romantic suspense thrillers and suspense-mystery. Her novels have received critical acclaim and have been praised by New York Times and USA Today bestselling authors Kat Martin, Maureen Child, and Debra Webb. Her novel BETRAYAL has been translated into Japanese, and her short fiction has been translated into Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian.

Karen's titles BETRAYAL and GONE, originally released in hardcover by Gale under the Five Star Expressions imprint, are now available for Amazon Kindle and Kindle applications. Her suspense-mystery title, UNHOLY ANGELS, is now also available for Amazon Kindle and Kindle applications.
Karen lives with her husband and daughter. Visit her website at: www.karenfenech.com

CLOUD CRASH - A New Novel By Phil Edwards

Every day, I'm amazed by the new talent emerging on Kindle.  Here's a novel I believe will prove to be a winner.

CLOUD CRASH: A Cal Stevens Novel

They protect our data. But who protects them?

Recovering from a hangover in his San Francisco loft, journalist Cal Stevens gets a call: data centers across the country are being detonated. These data centers- which hold everything from Facebook accounts to YouTube videos- serve hundreds of millions of users. Their information comprises "the cloud"- and the cloud is crashing.

Cal must protect his employer's data from attack. Led by a cocky boy-CEO, the company runs hospitals, indexes genetic information, and holds the identities of thousands of people. Cal is partnered with the beautiful- and cryptic- Brianna Cowell, a PR professional with her own secrets. Together, they must stop the psychopathic attacker before he hits them first.

In a story that travels from San Francisco to New York, with stops in Napa and Area 51 in between, Cal and Brianna battle a driven and violent opponent who is always one step ahead. Unless Cal and Brianna can decode the puzzle and find the killer's next destination, thousands will die and the world's technological infrastructure will be crippled before they can uncover the surprising source of the attacks.

CLOUD CRASH is a fast paced romp that touches on the biggest issues of our time: privacy, government secrets, and how to recover from a hangover when you're busy saving the world.

Phil Edwards has been running Dumbemployed.com since mid 2009. The explosive growth of the site has kept him Twittering, illustrating, and doing Google searches for his own name ever since. His favorite stories about bad jobs, and favorite stories in general, usually involve children eating things they shouldn't.

He received his Bachelor of the Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a degree in English and History. His office experience includes hours of hiding magazine articles in Excel spreadsheets, taking circuitous routes to avoid office small talk, and replacing cans in the vending machine. He also maintains Fake Science, at fakescience.tumblr.com. His personal site and Twitter can be found at PhilEdwardsInc.com

Get A Free Copy of Shaun Jeffrey's Latest Novel

DEAD MAN'S EYE

A corneal transplant does more than correct Joanna Raines sight. It allows her to see something that doesn't want to be seen. Something evil. Something that threatens mankind. The only trouble is that no one believes her, and by the time they do, it might be too late ...

Seeing is believing. Now Joanna just has to convince everyone else.

To get your free copy, simply visit Shaun's website at shaunjeffrey.com and register to receive his free newsletter.  You'll receive a copy of DEAD MAN'S EYE in the ebook format of your choice.

Shaun shares a little bit about himself:

"I was born in 1965 and live in Cheshire, England with my partner, Debra and our fantastic son, Callum. Growing up in a house in a cemetery, my playground was the graveyard - perfect grounding for writing horror, and my early reading experience came from headstones! I have had over 40 short stories published, one collection entitled Voyeurs of Death, and three novels, Evilution, The Kult and Deadfall. The Kult has been optioned for film and shooting began in September, 2010. For more information visit www.thekultmovie.com

I try to write most days, but as it's not my fulltime profession, I'm afraid real life intervenes in the form of my day job, which is working on the railway as a Signalling and Telecommunication Engineer. Among my previous jobs, I've been a fitness instructor, made ammunition, and worked in a food factory, all of which gives me experience upon which to draw, or write, as the case may be."

Don't miss out on the opportunity to get this chilling novel for free!

Cute Christmas Video

I wish you all a wonderful Christmas filled with love and laughter!

Terrorlord - A Jason Dark Novel by Guido Henkel

Guido Henkel's new novel, Terrorlord , the ninth book in the wildly popular Jason Dark series will be on sale, tomorrow only (December 21), for 99 cents.

Conjured from the bowels of the abyss by ancient magic, the Terrorlord has one desire — to open the Seven Gates of Hell and unleash the horrors of the undead upon mankind.

Reliving the nightmares of his youth where an encounter with the Terrorlord left him scarred for life, Jason Dark must once again confront the powerful gatekeeper from Hell before his reach and power spiral out of control. With the help of Siu Lin, the ghost hunter will have to put an end to the Terrorlord's dark reign before he can devour our world in his evil blackness.

This is the ninth volume in a series of gothic horror adventures where Jason Dark, a fearless and resourceful ghost hunter, follows in the mold of a Sherlock Holmes combined with Randall Garrett's Lord D'Arcy. Written by Guido Henkel, the designer who brought Germany's famed "Das Schwarze Auge" series to computer screens, this series is filled with enough mystery, drama and suspenseful action to transport you to the sinister, fogshrouded streets of Victorian England. Your encounter with the extraordinary awaits.

Don't miss this one-day sale!

Brittle Shadows - A New Mystery by Vicki Tyley

One of my favorite suspense authors, Vicki Tyley, has just released a new book.  Brittle Shadows , an Australian mystery already rocketing its way up the Amazon best sellers list, is available for a limited time at a holiday price of only 99 cents.

When soon-to-be-wed Tanya Clark is confronted with her fiancé's naked corpse hanging from a wardrobe rail in the upmarket Melbourne apartment they share, her life is torn apart. Two months later, distraught and unable to cope, she drowns her sorrows in a lethal cocktail of alcohol and prescription drugs.

On the other side of Australia, a grieving Jemma Dalton struggles to come to terms with the suicide of her only sibling. Despite there being no evidence to the contrary, Jemma refuses to accept Tanya had intended to kill herself. Not her sister. Then the coroner's report reveals that at the time of her death she had been six weeks pregnant. The will, too, raises more questions than it answers. How did a young woman on a personal assistant's wage amass shares worth in excess of $1,000,000?

In a desperate bid to uncover the truth, Jemma puts her own life at risk and starts to probe the shadows of her sister's life. But shadows, like bones, grow brittle with age. The consequences can be deadly.

Brittle Shadows has already received numerous five-star reviews on Amazon.  Vicki Tyley's latest mystery is also available on Smashwords (use coupon code MX55F) and Barnes & Noble.

Get it before the price goes up!

The Importance of Proper eBook Formatting

Guido Henkel has an excellent post on his blog today regarding eBook formatting.  This is the first post in a series designed to help authors professionally format their books for Kindle and other eReaders.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who has been abruptly pulled out of a story by paragraphs that suddenly begin to run together, unusual indentations, or strange characters where quotations marks should be.  Even though I've always managed to keep reading when encountering these types of errors, many people will not.  With the flood of inexpensive eBooks on the market, many readers will simply move on to another author.  If we want our work to be taken seriously, our book's formatting must be perfect.

Guido's blog:  http://guidohenkel.com

Dreaming of Becoming a Writer?

I recently received an email from a young lady interested in becoming a writer.  She asked for my advice.  What did I tell her?

First, and foremost, you must read.

Read everything you can find in the genre in which you wish to write.  Don't just stick to the bestsellers list.  Read both well-known and not-so-well-known authors.  Read the classics.  Get a feeling for what makes a story work and what doesn't.  Study the pacing.  Study the sentence structure.  Study the characters.  How did the author make them come to life?

You should also read books on the craft of writing.  Here are a few of my favorites:
Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Browne and Dave KingWriting the Breakout Novel by Donald MaassStein on Writing by Sol SteinThe First Five Pages by Noah LukemanOn Writing by Stephen KingThere are scores of other books on the craft you may find helpful.  Many are devoted to a particular genre.

Along with reading, you also must write.

Write every day.  Set aside a designated amount of time and don't come out of your office / bedroom / whatever until you've written something.  If you don't have any story ideas yet, keep a journal.  Writing in a journal is one way to get the creative juices flowing.  Often, everyday occurrences can develop into a story idea.

Don't give up.

For every one person who has confidence in you, there will be a thousand who say you can't.  Don't believe the naysayers.  Even the most successful authors received hundreds of rejection letters before they were published.  And now, with the Amazon Kindle, the Nook, and other ereaders, self-publishing has become a viable alternative to having your work published by a New York publisher.  Whichever route you choose, if you want it bad enough, you can make it happen.

Now, get to work!  :-)
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Best of 2010

When I learned Deed To Death had made Amazon's Best of 2010 Customer Favorites list, I was shocked and excited.  I really appreciate all the Kindle readers who have been willing to take a chance on an unknown author.  Thank you all!

Three other independent authors also have books on the list.  Congratulations to Karen McQuestion, Vicki Tyley and Christian Cantrell!


 

An Interview With William Meikle

William Meikle is the author of 9 published novels and over 150 short stories.  The following are available on Kindle:
Darkness Follows, Carnacki: Heaven and Hell, The Haunting of Esther Cox, Brotherhood of the Thorns, Crustaceans, Chronicles of Augustus Seton, The Invasion (Extended Version), The Valley, The Road Hole Bunker Mystery, The Midnight Eye Files: The Amulet, and Island Life .
Question:  You have said of your novel, The Valley, that it was your tribute to Conan Doyle. Where you referring to its 19th century setting or the theme of this adventure narrative? 
Answer: The origins of "The Valley" are pretty simple to trace. In Fortean circles there have been attempts to find a picture that many claim to have seen, yet no-one has been able to find. This fabled photograph is said to show a group of Civil-War era men standing in a row wearing big grins. Spreadeagled on the ground in front of them is the body of a huge bird, a being that could only come from pre-history. In some accounts this bird is a giant eagle, in others it is even stranger, a leathery, paper thin Pterosaur. Whatever the case, that image was the thing in my mind, and I had a "What if..." moment, wondering what would happen if cowboys came across a Lost World. From that single thought, the initial concept of The Valley was born. 
Big beasties fascinate me. 
Some of that fascination stems from early film viewing. I remember being taken to the cinema to see The Blob. I couldn't have been more than seven or eight, and it scared the crap out of me. The original incarnation of Kong has been with me since around the same time. Similarly, I remember the BBC showing re-runs of classic creature features late on Friday nights, and THEM! in particular left a mark on my psyche. I've also got a Biological Sciences degree, and even while watching said movies, I'm usually trying to figure out how the creature would actually work in nature -- what would it eat? How would it procreate? What effect would it have on the environment around it?
On top of that, I have an interest in cryptozoology, of creatures that live just out of sight of humankind, and of the myriad possibilities that nature, and man's dabbling with it, can throw up.
Then there's the long tradition of Lost World tales, both in movies and fiction. Over the years I've devoured as many as I can find, from Conan Doyle through Haggard, from Tarzan in Pellucidar to Doug McLure in the Land that Time Forgot. Many of these tales involve dinosaurs, but I wanted something different. For a while I didn't know exactly what "creatures" I needed, but that all changed as soon as the setting clicked. Back in 2005 I had the good fortune to holiday in the Rockies. It was while scanning through photographs of that trip that the thought of the high mountain valley came to me, and when Neil Jackson told me about Montana and the Big Hole Valley, I knew I'd found my spot. And the pictures of the ice and snow from my trip also gave me the era from which I would draw my creatures -- the last Ice Age. I now knew that my protagonists would be heading into a Lost Valley where relic animals lived, and that these creatures would be hairy and large. I had an image of a herd of mammoths by a partially-frozen lake, and that was the image that drove me on in the early concepts.
But, to wind back to the question, yes, Doyle is the grandaddy of the genre, and his works were among the first things I remember reading. If the Lost World is a tribute to anyone, it is to him.
Question:  Most of your novels are set in Scotland. How important is Scottish folklore and mythology to you as a writer? 
Answer: Most of my work, long and short form, has been set in Scotland, and a lot of it uses the history and folklore. There's just something about the misty landscapes and old buildings that speaks straight to my soul. (Bloody Celts... we get all sentimental at the least wee thing).
But I think it's the people that influence me most. Everybody in Scotland's got stories to tell, and once you get them going, you can't stop them. I love chatting to people, (usually in pubs) and finding out the -weird- shit they've experienced. My Glasgow PI, Derek Adams is mainly based on a bloke I met years ago in a bar in Partick, and quite a few of the characters that turn up and talk too much in my books can be found in real life in bars in Glasgow, Edinburgh and St Andrews.
I grew up in the West Coast of Scotland in an environment where the supernatural was almost commonplace. My grannie certainly had a touch of "the sight", always knowing when someone in the family was in trouble. There are numerous stories told of family members meeting other, long dead, family in their dreams, and I myself have had more than a few encounters, with dead family, plus meetings with what I can only class as residents of faerie. I have had several precognitive dreams, one of which saved me from a potentially fatal car crash. 
I have a deep love of old places, in particular menhirs and stone circles, and I've spent quite a lot of time travelling the UK and Europe just to visit archaeological remains. I also love what is widely known as "weird shit". I've spent far too much time surfing and reading fortean, paranormal and cryptozoological websites. The cryptozoological stuff especially fascinates me, and provides a direct stimulus for a lot of my fiction.
So, there's that, and the fact that I was grew up with the sixties explosion of popular culture embracing the supernatural and the weird. Hammer horror movies got me young, and led me back to the Universal originals. My early reading somehow all tended to gravitate in similar directions, with DC comics leading me into pulp and to finding Tarzan.
Tarzan is the second novel I remember reading. (The first was Treasure Island, so I was already well on the way to the land of adventure even then.) I quickly read everything of Burroughs I could find. Then I devoured Wells, Verne and Haggard. I moved on to Conan Doyle before I was twelve, and Professor Challenger's adventures in spiritualism led me, almost directly, to Dennis Wheatley, Algernon Blackwood, and then on to Lovecraft. Then Stephen King came along.
There's a separate but related thread of a deep love of detective novels running parallel to this, as Conan Doyle also gave me Holmes, then I moved on to Christie, Chandler, Hammett, Ross MacDonald and Ed McBain, reading everything by them I could find. 
Mix all that lot together, add a dash of ZULU, a hefty slug of heroic fantasy from Howard, Leiber and Moorcock, a sprinkle of fast moving Scottish thrillers from John Buchan and Alistair MacLean, and a final pinch of piratical swashbuckling. Leave to marinate for fifty years and what do you get? 
A psyche with a deep love of the weird in its most basic forms, and the urge to beat the shit out of monsters.
Question:  A writer with a shared interest in fantasy and horror fiction is Stephen King. After many experiments in various genres he seems to have most fun where his imagination finds the least number of formal restrictions. Is that the genre's appeal for you, too? 
Answer: It's pulp fiction that interests me, and I find that it crosses many genres almost seamlessly. I rarely think about "genre" anyway. I write what I want to write and leave marketing labels to the publishers. That said, there -is- indeed a freedom in writing about the supernatural where, instead of having a man come in with a gun to get the scene moving, you can have any manner of things going on as long as you can explain them away to the reader's satisfaction. The verisimilitude matters though -- the reader has to -believe-, and that can be difficult to pull off.
Question: Some biographical information?
Answer: I'm a fifty-something Scotsman, now living in Newfoundland. 
I didn't chose writing, it chose me. The urge to write is more of a need, a similar addiction to the one I used to have for cigarettes and still have for beer.
I -nearly- became a scientist. I have a degree in Botany, specialising in the archaeological history that can be gleaned from studying peat bogs. But I couldn't get a grant for a PhD, then I followed a woman to London and ended up by accident more than design in a career in IT. I actually took it seriously for a while, but the need to write slowly welled up and subsumed it a few years back.
That, and the fact that I like to move around and not be tied to one place for any length of time has limited career opportunities a bit. According to my family I'm "away with the fairies" too often for anything else to hold my attention for long.
When I was at school my books and my guitar were all that kept me sane in a town that was going downhill fast. The steelworks shut and employment got worse. I -could- have started writing about that, but why bother? All I had to do was walk outside and I'd get it slapped in my face. That horror was all too real.
So I took up my pen and wrote. At first it was song lyrics, designed (mostly unsuccessfully) to get me closer to girls.   
I tried my hand at a few short stories but had no confidence in them and hid them away. And that was that for many years. 
I didn't get the urge again until I was past thirty and trapped in a very boring job. My home town had continued to stagnate and, unless I wanted to spend my whole life drinking (something I was actively considering at the time), returning there wasn't an option.
Back in the very early '90s I had an idea for a story... I hadn't written much of anything since the mid-70s at school, but this idea wouldn't leave me alone. I had an image in my mind of an old man watching a young woman's ghost.
That image grew into a story, that story grew into other stories, and before I knew it I had an obsession in charge of my life.
So it all started with a little ghost story, "Dancers"; one that ended up getting published in All Hallows, getting turned into a short movie, getting read on several radio stations, getting published in Greek, Spanish, Italian and Hebrew, and getting reprinted in The Weekly News in Scotland. 
Years on I've written other ghost stories, but have increasingly moved away from that first love towards more pulpy concerns, of men and monsters, beer and ciggies, big guns and loose women, swords and sorcery, aliens and mass carnage.
But just this past year, the cycle has turned again, and I find my interest in the spectre renewed. I've written several straight ghost stories for GWP chapbooks, had an ebook of CARNACKI: GHOSTFINDER tales published, and sold a handful of stories to professional anthologies featuring old-school haunts and spectres. 
Part of this renewed interest has to do with me starting to feel my age in my second half-century, where my aches and pains are growing and my youth seems ever further away, so that I find myself looking forward to what might lie ahead. 
But mostly I think it's love... a love for the old stories, for the strange and the weird, for the supernatural in its more obscure forms.
I write to escape. 
I haven't managed it yet, but I'm working on it.
Question:  What's next for you and your audience? 
Answer: I have numerous work in the pipeline.
There's the already placed work 
- the 3rd Midnight Eye Book is due this fall, with Derek fighting a werewolf cult in Glasgow and Newfoundland- a Viking vs Yeti ebook that's a -load- of fun.- various chapbooks and box sets are coming from the Penny Dreadful Company- several novels and ebooks are coming from Ghostwriter Publications- there are three film scripts in various stages of production, including a film version of the 1st Midnight Eye File: The Amulet- a much anticipated appearance of The Midnight Eye in Cthulhu 2012, a hardcover anthology from Mythos Books - and I've got stories coming in several other professional anthologies
And I'm working on the 4th Midnight Eye File novel, which involves something evil lurking under the Merchant City.
And there's the submissions. I've got stories out at seven other anthologies, four magazines, two podcasts and a newspaper, and a novel looking for a big publisher.
All details at my website at http://www.williammeikle.com 
This interview is also scheduled to appear on eBOOK HIGHLIGHTS.