Alyssa Linn Palmer's Blog, page 17

New Free Fiction! A Vee Christmas (Part 1)

Here’s a taste, and check out the rest at A Vee Christmas (Part 1):

Vee’s sitting by the fire in my favorite leather chair as I come out from the bedroom. She’s stretched her feet out, getting as close to the heat as she can. After the snow the other day, she’s been miserable, complaining about soaking her feet in the slush on her way to and from work, about the crush of Christmas shoppers, and having to mop the floor every hour. Now she’s quiet, holding a cup of coffee, her eyelids drooping. I almost hate to disturb her, but I’ve had this idea in my head all day.

“Let’s go out, Vee,” I say softly, coming to run my fingers through her red and green streaked hair. She did it for the holiday, but also to piss off her boss, who always fussed about her ‘abnormal and disgusting’ hair colors. I think it’s cute, and it’s the most holiday spirit Vee’s shown all month.

 Part 2 is coming soon!

Vee will be FREE! Starting Dec 24th.

Vee: The Collection (Vol. 1) will be free on Amazon from Dec 24-28th!

“Sylvia, my brightest star, my desire. My lust, my soul.

“She was Lia to her co-workers at the bookstore, Sylvia to her mother, who clicked her tongue disapprovingly at her bright blue and hair and her Monroe stud. But to me, she was simply Vee.”

In Alex’s notebooks, the story of Vee unfolds, from their first kiss, their first date, and the moments in between. It’s a May-December romance between a former punk girl gone conservative, and a gamine young woman in combat boots and fishnets. They find each other on the streets of New York City and it’s love at first sight.

Volume 1:

Vee (from FELT TIPS)

Heart of Glass

Birdland (I)

Birdland (II)

Vee’s Notebook (from ANYTHING SHE WANTS)

Buy on Amazon!

Do you know about the Hootenanny?

10 days and chances to win loads of free books!

Go check out Women & Words and leave a comment every day. eBooks, paperbacks, publisher giveaways…there’s something for everyone! It runs Dec 12-23rd!

Review for THE CHRISTMAS GAME

Thanks to My Book Addiction & More Reviews:

Palmer is a very good writer.  If you haven’t read the series you’ll enjoy this story without the background.  If you enjoy THE CHRISTMAS GAME, you will find the series grittier with much more complex story development and even more intriguing.

(read the entire review at the link above)

Check out THE CHRISTMAS GAME here. Available for all ebook formats.

Book Review: The Conversation: The Night Napoleon Changed the World, by Jean d’Ormesson (+ giveaway + excerpt!)

Leave a comment to be entered to win a hardcover copy of the book! (US readers only)

About the book

After pulling the French people back from the abyss of chaos and misrule, Napoleon Bonaparte is on the brink of declaring himself emperor. “An empire is a Republic that has been enthroned,” he says. And so history is made.

As Napoleon stands at the precipice of his new empire, Jean d’Ormesson’s novel The Conversation: The Night Napoleon Changed the World captures a fictional conversation in which the thirty-year-old, struggling between revolutionary ideals and his overwhelming thirst for power, declares his secret intention to ascend the throne.

Second Consul Jean-Jacques Cambacérès, a brilliant law scholar and close ally, bears witness to the birth of this self-created legend: a man who left his mark upon time not through birth, but with ambition, and whose hubris is still invoked as a cautionary tale. Their imagined conversation brilliantly captures the tenuous moment when one man’s dream becomes reality. History, of course, records Napoleon’s dizzying triumphs and subsequent fall.

Review

This is a conversation in the very literal sense of the word. As you’ll see from the excerpt below, the book in its entirety is a conversation between Bonaparte and Cambacérès. It took me a few pages to get used to the format, but once I did, I wished that I could have read this book as an audiobook, and had two actors performing the parts. However, the conversation was compelling enough on its own that it didn’t take me too long to read.

“A society without religion is like a ship without a compass. … I am Catholic here because most people are Catholics.”

These lines (and the entire paragraph) caught my attention. I don’t know as much about French history as I would like (one of these days I shall take time to study it beyond the French Revolution we learned in school), but I do remember reading about Napoleon re-opening the churches (shuttered by those who took over during the Revolution). I just hadn’t realized that his own beliefs were not religious.

Yet Napoleon does not just focus on political plotting. There is an amusing (to me at least) digression into family relations, and the rivalry of his Empress Josephine with his sister Caroline over an expensive shawl, which breaks up some of the more historically-heavy sections.

The majority of the conversation details Napoleon’s determination to be called Emperor of the French; his reasoning and plans are detailed, and you can imagine yourself a fly on the wall as he plots his ascension.

Read the excerpt, below

Bonaparte

It was anarchy. Twenty-thousand criminals immersed Paris in fire and blood. And forty- thousand Royalist Chouans were in control of the country in the West and intercepting communications between Paris and the sea.

Cambacérès

Admiral Bruix told me at the time that it took him a month to reach Brest to take up his command.

Bonaparte

In thirty of the country’s departments, the Chouannerie was little more than a pretext for thievery. The right bank of the Garonne, Provence, the Languedoc, and the entire Rhone Valley was in the hands of highwaymen. Coaches were attacked, couriers robbed, homes looted. Pillagers were putting peasants’ feet on red-hot grills to make them tell them where their money was stashed.

Cambacérès

I know several merchants, even two representatives on official business, who bought passports from these bands just to ensure safe passage from Paris to Marseille or to Aix-en- Provence. No one went anywhere without an armed escort.

Bonaparte

The roads were impassable, public buildings were in shambles. It took Marseilles a full year to do the business it used to do in six months, and its old port was a wreck. In Lyon, there were fifteen-hundred boats instead of the normal eight thousand. In Paris, workshops hired a fraction as many workers as in 1789. It is indisputable that because of me, the present is better than the past. The future is what preoccupies me now.

Cambacérès

You have secured the future because you have done away with the past.

Bonaparte

Do not deceive yourself. I am at one with all of France’s past, from Clovis to this National Convention—of which you were also a part, my dear Cambacérès—and several times have I saved it from foreign threat. I have fought against, and beaten, violence, hatred, excesses, divisions, factions. No more factions. I want them gone.

Cambacérès

You have planted the colors, starting the day after Eighteen Brumaire and right up to your arrival here in the Tuileries. You have put your wife in Marie-Antoinette’s bedroom, and you have taken as your bedroom that of Louis the Sixteenth. Yet I understand that you find this a somewhat sad place.

Bonaparte

Grandeur is always sad.

Cambacérès

You found its walls covered in revolutionary graffiti and festooned in decorations dominated by the red cap. You called it “filth” and ordered that it be removed.

 

Release date: November 6, 2013

Page number: 128

Publisher link: http://www.arcadepub.com/book/?GCOI=55970104236100&

ISBN: 978-1-61145-905-0

Also available as Ebook

Where to buy

Available online and wherever books are sold.
http://www.amazon.com/Conversation-Jean-dOrmesson/dp/1611459052/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1382112990&sr=1-1&keywords=the+conversation+arcade
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-conversation-jean-dormesson/1114836020?ean=9781611459050 
http://www.indiebound.org/book/9781611459050

Websites:

http://www.arcadepub.com/book/?GCOI=55970104236100&fa=author&person_ID=428
http://skyhorsepublishing.com

Twitter: https://twitter.com/skyhorsepub

About the Author and Translator

Jean d’Ormesson is the author of more than fifteen books, has a PhD in philosophy, graduated from the École Normale, and is a distinguished member of the Académie Française. He lives in Paris.

Timothy Bent has translated a number of books from French, including Brassaï’s Henry Miller: The Paris Years, Emmanuel Carrère’s I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K. Dick, and Stéphane Audeguy’s novel, The Theory of Clouds. A former editor at Arcade Publishing, St. Martin’s Press, and Harcourt, he is currently Executive Editor, Trade, at Oxford University Press in New York, where he focuses upon history, biography, and current events.

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THE CHRISTMAS GAME now available! An erotic treat for the holidays

Alone in London on business just before Christmas, Marc Perron meets an intriguing young woman working at a bookshop. A light flirtation seems to lead nowhere, but the night before he returns to Paris, she knocks on his hotel room door.

Madelaine’s taking a risk, but no one’s ever looked at her the way Marc does, and she’s not about to pass up a chance to get to know him better. When he suggests a game of wagers, she can’t resist challenging him. And herself.

Their matchup is a fiery one and each wager tops the last, the sexual heat between them crackling. Neither want to lose the game, but Madelaine fears she might be losing her heart as well.

This novella is a part of the Le Chat Rouge series, but can be read as a stand-alone story.

eBook

Amazon
Smashwords
B&N (Nook)

Review & Guest Post: Jenny Lyn, and her new book RIVER RECKONING

Having found out that the most excellent Jenny Lyn has a new book out (River Reckoning: Trouble in Trespass), I was delighted to be able to read it, and write a review. Plus, Jenny was happy to come by and talk about the setting of the story, which I found rather interesting. Mind you, I have no experience of swamps or alligators!

I finished this book in an evening. It’s not short, but I couldn’t put it down. It didn’t take long for me to get into the book, the author had me from the moment Bond reveals that her name is because of a film (and no, not James Bond). Add in the swampy South, and I was set. (I’d read a couple of Intrigues by Jana de Leon set in the South as well, and this book reminded me a bit of them, though those were set in Louisiana, I think.) Mix this in with corruption, bribery, stalker-ex boyfriends, and a couple of delectable US Marshals, and it’s just about perfect.

It’s apparently first in a series, but for those of you worried about cliffhanger endings — don’t be. Unlike a lot of romance novels these days, this one has a good solid ending, satisfying my needs perfectly.

And here is Jenny:

Alyssa mentioned in her review of River Reckoning that she liked that the story wasn’t set in NYC or some other big city. I’ve always known a good portion of my books would be set in small southern towns. After all, it’s what I know. The town of Trespass is fictional, but it’s a mash-up of several places I’m very familiar with since I live in Florida. Plus, the Suwannee River is not far from my house, so I know how beautiful it is because I’ve experienced it firsthand. My dad and I used to fish on the Suwannee. I’ve spent what felt like entire summers water skiing and swimming in it. I’ve been to its headwaters in the Okefenokee Swamp in South Georgia. I’ve also seen the alligators and the snakes Bond teases Nathan about. They really do grow to be monsters. Unfortunately, there are families like the Kyles, too, but that’s the case anywhere you go.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with setting a story in a big city, but small towns just hold more charm and appeal for me as a setting. There’s more to work with when everyone knows their neighbors, both good and bad. Being intimately familiar with the backdrop of my story helps me keep things authentic. Sure, I could bluff my way through a book set in Chicago or New York, but I can guarantee you I won’t get the tiny details right. It’s impossible if you haven’t spent a great deal of time there. I’d rather set it somewhere that I’m comfortable with, that I honestly love and know well, and maybe make you want to come for a visit. If you read the book (and I hope you will), let me know what you thought!

About RIVER RECKONING:

Bond Mason’s roots run deep in the backwoods hamlet of Trespass, Florida. Nestled against the banks of the Suwannee River, the only home she’s ever known holds bittersweet memories of a family long gone. Except one of her ghosts isn’t dead and possessive ex-lover James Kyle wants her back.

U.S. Deputy Marshal Nathan Gates sights are set on capturing fugitive Robert Kyle. Wanted for the cold-blooded murder of a DEA agent, Robert is suspected of being hidden away with his moonshine-brewing, marijuana-growing family of fellow lawbreakers, one of which is his brother, James.

Nathan expected high temperatures when he arrived in Trespass. What he hadn’t counted on is his searing attraction to southern beauty Bond Mason. She winds him around her finger like a tendril of Spanish moss, but his lawman’s intuition tells him she’s hiding secrets too. When he finally convinces her to talk, he’s not prepared for the dark truths she reveals about her hometown.

The Suwannee is deep, but Trespass’s sins run much deeper. For once, Nathan might be in over his head.

About Jenny Lyn:

I started reading when I was four, thanks to a babysitter who found out the only way to get me to sit still was to put a book in my hand. By the time I entered kindergarten, I’d blown through just about every Little Golden Book ever printed. Ten years later, much to my mother’s dismay, I found her stash of paperback romance novels. She tried to divert me back to something more chaste by buying me Harlequins, but I still snuck copies of her Kathleen Woodiwiss’s and Johanna Lindsey’s when she wasn’t looking. Shanna, The Flame and the Flower, and Fires of Winter will always hold special places in my heart because they introduced me to roguish heroes, headstrong heroines, and the trouble they could get into together.

I live in a swampy little corner of north-central Florida with my family, both the two-legged and four-legged variety. I love to read, run hot and cold in regards to cooking, and I never miss an episode of Justified, Longmire, or Dexter. I guess I like justice in all its various forms.

Website: http://www.authorjennylyn.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jenny-Lyn/352263128210885
Twitter: https://twitter.com/JennyLynwrites
Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/...
Pinterest: http://pinterest.com/jennylynwrites/

Buy the book!

Amazon:  http://www.amazon.com/Jenny-Lyn/e/B0078O9RAA/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_pop_1
Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/Jenny-Lyn?store=ebook&keyword=Jenny+Lyn
All Romance Ebooks: http://www.allromanceebooks.com/storeSearch.html?searchBy=author&qString=Jenny+Lyn

 

Cover Reveal! THE CHRISTMAS GAME, coming December 3, 2013!

Alone in London on business just before Christmas, Marc Perron meets an intriguing young woman working at a bookshop. A light flirtation seems to lead nowhere, but the night before he returns to Paris, she knocks on his hotel room door.

Madelaine’s taking a risk, but no one’s ever looked at her the way Marc does, and she’s not about to pass up a chance to get to know him better. When he suggests a game of wagers, she can’t resist challenging him. And herself.

Their matchup is a fiery one and each wager tops the last, the sexual heat between them crackling. Neither want to lose the game, but Madelaine fears she might be losing her heart as well.

This novella is a part of the Le Chat Rouge series, but can be read as a stand-alone story.

Cover Reveal! THE CHRISTMAS GAME, coming December 2013!

Alone in London on business just before Christmas, Marc Perron meets an intriguing young woman working at a bookshop. A light flirtation seems to lead nowhere, but the night before he returns to Paris, she knocks on his hotel room door.

Madelaine’s taking a risk, but no one’s ever looked at her the way Marc does, and she’s not about to pass up a chance to get to know him better. When he suggests a game of wagers, she can’t resist challenging him. And herself.

Their matchup is a fiery one and each wager tops the last, the sexual heat between them crackling. Neither want to lose the game, but Madelaine fears she might be losing her heart as well.

This novella is a part of the Le Chat Rouge series, but can be read as a stand-alone story.