Katie Hamstead's Blog, page 69

Fall Into Fantasy Week #5

Welcome to the Fall Into Fantasy Tour, where we are keeping your mind off any end-of-summer blues and welcoming the cooler weather by introducing you to some incredible fantasy reads to curl up with and giving you plenty of chances to win awesome prizes!

Week 5: The Dark Choir Series
Book One: The Curse Merchant
By J.P. Sloan

Dorian Lake spent years cornering the Baltimore hex-crafting market, using his skills at the hermetic arts to exact karmic justice for those whom the system has failed. He keeps his magic clean and free of soul-corrupting Netherwork, thus avoiding both the karmic blow-back of his practice and the notice of the Presidium, a powerful cabal of practitioners that polices the esoteric arts in America. However, when an unscrupulous Netherworker interferes with both his business and his personal life, Dorian's disarming charisma and hermetic savvy may not be enough to keep his soul out of jeopardy.

His rival, a soul monger named Neil Osterhaus, wouldn't be such a problem were it not for Carmen, Dorian's captivating ex-lover. After two years' absence Carmen arrives at Dorian’s doorstep with a problem: she sold her soul to Osterhaus, and has only two weeks to buy it back. Hoping to win back Carmen's affections, Dorian must find a replacement soul without tainting his own. As Dorian descends into the shadows of Baltimore’s underworld, he must decide how low he is willing to stoop in order to save Carmen from eternal damnation... with the Presidium watching, waiting for him to cross the line.

Buy it from: Amazon Barnes & NobleAdd it Goodreads
ABOUT J.P. SLOAN
J.P. Sloan is a speculative fiction author, primarily of urban fantasy, horror and several shades between. His writing explores the strangeness in that which is familiar, at times stretching the limits of the human experience, or only hinting at the monsters lurking under your bed. 
A Louisiana native, Sloan relocated to the vineyards and cow pastures of Central Maryland after Hurricane Katrina, where he lives with his wife and son. During the day he commutes to the city of Baltimore, a setting which inspires much of his writing.

In his spare time, Sloan enjoys wine-making and homebrewing, and is a National-ranked beer judge.
Find J.P. Online:J.P. Sloan's Fistful of Fiction  Facebook  Twitter  Tumblr


Want to get involved with the Fall Into Fantasy promotional tour?
Don't forget to join us at the Facebook party here! If you are interested in joining up as a blogger, you can always sign up here. We are happy to welcome more bloggers into the fold as the promotion continues. If you are an author or blogger and want to sign up to help with the party, please fill out this form.a Rafflecopter giveaway

Winner of The Book Vote

So my October paperback read and review is...



Looks like I'll need to get my hands on the rest of the series. How many books are there anyway? So look out for my review soon to come. The runners up came in as The Rose Master and Red Scarf Girl.

The winner of one of my paperback books is...

Krystal Wade
Choose from Kiya 1, 2, or 3 and Papina, or wait for a few weeks until Branded becomes available.

Thanks again for all those who voted. Come by next month to vote on what I read in November.

Cover Reveal: I Heart Robot by Suzanne van Rooyen and Giveaway #M9BFridayReveals

Welcome to the Cover Reveal forI Heart Robot by Suzanne van Rooyenpresented by Month9Books!Be sure to enter the giveaway found at the end of the post!I HEART ROBOT Cover Art from Suzanne van RooyenI'm not the most artistically inclined. While I do love art and have been known to bust out the pencils and paints myself, it's not an area where I'd consider myself particularly talented. In short, I knew that cover design was something best left to the professional and I had every confidence in Month9Books.I am so grateful to Georgia McBride for allowing me to have the amount of input I did when it came to cover creation for I Heart Robot. This is a novel that is as much about a civil rights struggle in a futuristic, post-war city as it is about romance, and we wanted a cover that reflected both elements. Finding the right balance between romance and science fiction was a tall order, but Month9Books delivered in spades by presenting me with two stylistically different covers. I loved elements of both, and by working closely with the cover artist and with Georgia we managed to combine all the best parts of both original covers into what we have today: a cover that reflects the gritty world my characters live in while emphasizing the fact that this is above all, a love story.

Sixteen-year-old Tyri wants to be a musician and wants to be with someone who won't belittle her musical aspirations.Q-I-99 aka 'Quinn' lives in a scrap metal sanctuary with other rogue droids. While some use violence to make their voices heard, demanding equal rights for AI enhanced robots, Quinn just wants a moment on stage with his violin to show the humans that androids like him have more to offer than their processing power.Tyri and Quinn's worlds collide when they're accepted by the Baldur Junior Philharmonic Orchestra. As the rift between robots and humans deepens, Tyri and Quinn's love of music brings them closer together, making Tyri question where her loyalties lie and Quinn question his place in the world. With the city on the brink of civil war, Tyri and Quinn make a shocking discovery that turns their world inside out. Will their passion for music be enough to hold them together while everything else crumbles down around them, or will the truth of who they are tear them apart?

Title: I Heart Robot
Publication date: March 31, 2015
Publisher: Month9Books, LLC.
Author: Suzanne van Rooyen

Suzanne is a tattooed storyteller from South Africa. She currently lives in Finland and finds the cold, dark forests nothing if not inspiring. Although she has a Master’s degree in music, Suzanne prefers conjuring strange worlds and creating quirky characters. When not writing, she teaches dance and music to middle schoolers and entertains her shiba inu, Lego. Suzanne is represented by Jordy Albert of the Booker Albert Agency.

Connect with the Author: Website | Twi tter | Facebook | GoodreadsComplete the Rafflecopter below for a chance to win!(Winners will receive their book on release day)a Rafflecopter giveaway

Cover Reveal: The Ghost of You by @amandaburkhard

The Ghost of Youby Amanda Burckhard Release Date: 12/30/14Swoon Romance


Summary from Goodreads:Emmy has everything she’s ever wanted: a hot boyfriend she adores, great friends, a promising future, and even a well-connected family. But one night rips it all away.
A car accident shatters her world, claiming the lives of her twin brother and her best friend. In the wake of the accident, her friends drift away, her family falls apart, and her boyfriend cheats.
The grief is more than she can handle, so she finds escape at the bottom of a bottle of painkillers. Taking the pills makes her brother alive again, if only in her head. Seeing and talking to her brother as if he were still alive is the only thing that keeps her going. Until Logan King moves to town.

Logan sees past the mask of pristine popularity she wears in public and he’s the only one who can tell she hasn’t moved on. His uncanny ability to read her forces her to open up and she starts to fall for him, no matter how unwilling she is to admit it. But Emmy isn’t the only one keeping secrets and when a close brush with death sparks events that bring everything to light, Emmy will have to decide what’s more important: learning how to forgive and move on, or holding onto the pills and the ghost of her past.

About the AuthorAmanda Burckhard grew up exploring bat caves and hunting for dinosaur bones in the Black Hills of South Dakota. When she wasn’t crossing paths with mountain lions, she was making up stories and devouring books at the library. Although, she still does that.
Amanda loves to travel and cross out things on her adrenaline packed bucket list. Some of the things she's been able to cross out include see an active volcano erupt, ride a gondola in Venice, and pet a tiger.

She currently lives in North Sioux City, South Dakota and works as a microbiologist by day. Some of her obsessions include comic book movies, hot chocolate, sushi, sunshine, and Doctor Who.
Author Links:      

Cover Reveal Organized by:

Predator Blog Tour: Creating Characters Readers Love By Janice Gable Bashman

There’s something special about putting words together to create something new, taking characters I’ve invented, throwing them into a situation and seeing how they will react. Will they fail to live up to my (and their) expectations? Will they succeed? How will things turn out?
In Predator, my protagonist Bree Sunderland is smart, intuitive, and curious. She loves to investigate and explore. She is also a typical teen who falls in love and experiences all the emotions that go along with it. Bree can be headstrong and she stands up for her beliefs, no matter what the consequences. Yet she is also caring and kind.
When I initially created Bree I wrote a character sketch: age, height, weight, hair color, what she likes to eat, do for fun, listen to music-wise, etc. Then I wrote pages and pages of free thought in her voice, as if she were telling me about herself. How I initially envisioned Bree is not how she turned out. She had a mind of her own and developed and changed as the book progressed based on the situations she faced. She is much stronger emotionally than I (and she) had thought, and she will do what it takes to not only survive but to protect those she loves. But like all of us, she has her weaknesses and her strengths. Without them she would be a cardboard cutout of a character and one readers would not be able to relate to.
Writing a character readers will love is difficult work, but it’s also a lot of fun. I hope you love Bree as much as I do.
Here’s the blurb for Predator:
The hunt is on! Sixteen-year-old Bree Sunderland must inject herself with an untested version of her father’s gene therapy to become a werewolf in order to stop a corrupt group of mercenaries from creating a team of unstoppable lycanthrope soldiers.
When Bree went with her scientist father to Ireland, she thought it would be a vacation to study bog bodies. She never expected to fall in love with a mysterious young Irishman and certainly never expected to become the kind of monster her father said only existed in nightmares.Dr. Sunderland discovers that lycanthropy was not a supernatural curse but rather a genetic mutation. When they return home, her dad continues his research, but the military wants to turn that research into a bio weapons program and rogue soldiers want to steal the research to turn themselves into unstoppable killing machines. Bree’s boyfriend Liam surprises her with a visit to the United States, but there are darker surprises in store for both of them.
As evil forces hunt those she loves, Bree must become an even more dangerous hunter to save them all. Predator gives the werewolf legend a couple of new spins by introducing the Benandanti (an actual folkloric belief that certain families of Italy and Livonia were werewolves who fought against evil), as well as a modern scientific approach to mutation and the science of transgenics.
She will become the thing she hates, to protect those she loves!

Janice Gable Bashman is the Bram Stoker nominated author of PREDATOR (Month9Books 2014) and WANTED UNDEAD OR ALIVE (w/NEW YORK TIMES bestseller Jonathan Maberry) (Citadel Press 2010). She is editor of THE BIG THRILL (International Thriller Writers’ magazine). Her short fiction has been published in various anthologies and magazines. She is a member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, Mystery Writers of America, Horror Writers Association, and the International Thriller Writers, where she serves on the board of directors as Vice President, Technology.
Author Links:  Website | Twitter | Facebook | Goodreads

About The Book:  “Predator is a fast-paced, creepy page-turner! Bashman had me at the opening sentence and she’s still got me. I want more!”
Nancy Holder, New York Times Bestselling Author, The Rules
The hunt is on!
Sixteen-year-old Bree Sunderland must inject herself with an untested version of her father’s gene therapy to become a werewolf in order to stop a corrupt group of mercenaries from creating a team of unstoppable lycanthrope soldiers.
When Bree went with her scientist father to Ireland, she thought it would be a vacation to study bog bodies. She never expected to fall in love with a mysterious young Irishman and certainly never expected to become the kind of monster her father said only existed in nightmares. Dr. Sunderland discovers that lycanthropy was not a supernatural curse but rather a genetic mutation. When they return home, her dad continues his research, but the military wants to turn that research into a bio weapons program and rogue soldiers want to steal the research to turn themselves into unstoppable killing machines.
Bree’s boyfriend Liam surprises her with a visit to the United States, but there are darker surprises in store for both of them. As evil forces hunt those she loves, Bree must become an even more dangerous hunter to save them all.
Predator gives the werewolf legend a couple of new spins by introducing the Benandanti (an actual folkloric belief that certain families of Italy and Livonia were werewolves who fought against evil), as well as a modern scientific approach to mutation and the science of transgenics.
Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Kobo | Chapters Indigo! | TBD | iBooks

Winner will be drawn October 18, 2014
·         Four (4) winners will receive a digital copy of Predator by Janice Gable Bashman (INT)·         One (1) winner will receive a digital copy of Predator by Janice Gable Bashman AND a $10 Amazon Gift Card or B&N Gift Card – Winner’s Choice (INT)
a Rafflecopter giveaway

Guest Post on Women in Historical Fiction by Carol Roddy

My newly released book, Dangerous Works, centers on a woman struggling to do scholarly work in spite of the opposition and even scorn of pompous university fellows (all men not surprisingly). Of course, my book is a romance, not a scholarly tome. Their opposition forces her to hire a tutor to teach her enough to give context to the words, in order, as she says, to make the poems sing. She quickly learns that little Greek is one thing, but the art of love is another.
The setup to the story, however, comes from the way the heroine is hampered by lack of education and lack of access to a good library in order to do her work. The opposition leads her to hire a man to teach her what she needs to know.
People have asked me how I came up with the idea for the plot. It began with a “what if.” I had noticed some work being done by women in recent years and wondered what would have happened if a woman would have attempted such work in Jane Austen’s time. The answer turned out to be that she would have a very hard time. While some individual scholars may have been willing to assist a woman, no university would admit her to their programs or their facilities. She would be on the outside looking in.
The book is set in a fictional Cambridge, but the exclusion of women is real.  Separate colleges for women associated with the university didn’t open until 1869, fifty years after my story. Women weren’t made full members of the university until 1948. Only in 1972 were women admitted to the more prestigious, previously male-only, colleges.
In the story, things work out. Andrew, the hero, has returned from war.  She knows he has all the education and skills she needs. He wants to rest, heal his injuries, and find meaningful work. He doesn’t want to get embroiled with a stubborn woman.  Georgiana has to bully him into helping. Once he gets involved, however, she gets more than she bargained for.  Not all learning can be found in the pages of a book.  Before she knows it both her heart and her virtue are in danger.

Andrew and Georgiana’s goals set them in conflict initially but their relationship turns out to be a true partnership, the very best sort of romance. How have conflicts add spice to stories you like to read?

About:Caroline Warfield is the pseudonym of a writer who wishes she had walked through fascinating times in the shoes of one of her characters--but which one?
Caro has at various times been an army brat, a librarian, a poet, a raiser of children, a nun, a bird watcher, an Internet and Web services manager, a conference speaker, an indexer, a tech writer, a genealogist, and, of course, a romantic. She has sailed through the English channel while it was still mined from WWII, stood on the walls of Troy, searched Scotland for the location of an entirely fictional castle (and found it), climbed the steps to the Parthenon, floated down the Thames from the tower to Greenwich, shopped in the Ginza, lost herself in the Louvre, gone on a night tour of the Singapore zoo, walked in the Black Forest, and explored the underground cistern of Istanbul.By far the biggest adventure has been forty-five years of marriage to a prince among men.She sits in front of a keyboard at a desk surrounded by windows, looks out at the trees and imagines. Her greatest joy is when one of those imaginings comes to life on the page and in the imagination of her readers
Buy link:   http://tinyurl.com/lsaryjxWeb site:  http://www.carolinewarfield.com/Pinterest:  http://www.pinterest.com/warfieldcaro/Twitter:      @carowarfield

Blog Tour: Louder Than Words by Iris St. Clair

Summary from Goodreads:Disappointment has been on speed dial in Ellen Grayson's life lately. Her dad died, her mom numbs the grief with drugs and alcohol, and her so-called friends have slowly abandoned her. 
Trusting a popular teacher with her troubles should have been safe and should NOT have led to an unwelcome seduction attempt that made her desperate to escape the final moments of Junior year. Lesson learned. Best to keep all the sordid details to herself and trust no one.
Enter Rex Jacobi, a cocky boy, recently transplanted from New York City and fellow summer camp employee. Though his quick wit and confidence draws her in, she can't let him get too close. And summer is just long enough and hot enough to keep a boy like that at arm's length.
But by the time Rex's charm wears down her resistance, it's too late. He's put Ellen on the "just friends" shelf and has shifted his romantic attentions to the impossibly annoying and perky anti-Ellen. Even worse, the teacher who tried to get her to sleep with him is still at it, preying on other girls while Ellen struggles to come to terms with what happened.
With her ability to trust as shaky as a chastity vow on prom night, Ellen must decide if she has enough remaining courage to speak up about the well-liked teacher and risk retribution, tell Rex how she really feels about him and risk heartbreak, or hold all her secrets inside. After all, it's the only safe place she knows when the only thing louder than words is the fear of being rejected.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20562718-louder-than-words?ac=1
About the AuthorIris St. Clair is the pen name for a long-suffering cubicle worker by day, a Walter Mitty-like dreamer by night. (Her alter ego Tatiana Ivanadance also choreographs gravity-defying routines in those fantasies, but that's another bio.)No matter what genre she writes, she prefers witty, insecure heroines and kind, persistent heroes able to break through to the gooey heart inside.In high school she was voted most likely to win at Monopoly and Clue, but least likely to throw a ball anywhere near a target. Thank goodness writing requires less hand-eye coordination, punctuation errors notwithstanding.
Iris believes in the two-year "fish or cut bait" dating rule and has a 20+ year marriage and two teenaged sons as proof of concept. She lives, writes, dreams and dances in the rainy Portland, OR area.
Author Links:http://www.irisstclair.com/https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7771489.Iris_St_Clairhttp://www.twitter.com/https://twitter.com/Iris_St_Clairhttp://www.facebook.com/pages/Iris-St-Clair/173501372698392http://www.pinterest.com/clairegillian/louder-than-words-inspiration/


GIVEAWAY:
$10 Amazon gift card + ebook of Louder Than Words (INT)a Rafflecopter giveaway

Vote For My October Read - Paperbacks

It's that time again! Time to vote for my read. If you want to see the review and bonus interview for last month's winner, click here: How to Date Dead Guys.

As well as having a huge pile up of books on my kindle, I have tons of paperbacks sitting in wait for me as well. So, Once every three months, I'll put paperbacks in for your vote. Some of these I've had for quite some time, so they are a little old.

Like always, vote 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 in order of preference, and tell me why :-)

Here they are!

Red Scarf Girl by Ji-Li Jiang
The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan
Jade by Olivia Rigal
The Rose Master by Valentina Cano
After Dark Curiosity Quills Anthology
So vote, share, lobby etc etc. Make me read something you want to see reviewed, and a lucky winner from the people who voted for the winner, will be drawn to receive one of my books as a paperback, signed and everything! (U.S only because I'm not loaded. Non U.S. folk can get an ebook of their choice.)

Zero Point Blog Tour: High Tech and Politics are Combustible by Nafeez Ahmed

Date of Publication:August 14, 2014Goodreads | Amazon US | Amazon UK | Barnes & Noble | Kobo
Description:
Near future Great Britain is on the brink of collapse. Mass riots. Economic meltdown. Blackouts. And a new oil war in Iraq to keep the world economy afloat.
Iraq War veteran and war crimes whistleblower David Ariel is sick of violence, and trying to make ends meet working for Specialist Protection. But after Prime Minister Carson is brutally assassinated by extremists on Ariel’s watch, he is covertly targeted by a compromised police investigation.
When forensics discover that Carson’s assassination inexplicably defied the very laws of physics, bodies drop like flies as key witnesses are murdered in impossible circumstances.
Fleeing for his life while London is locked-down under martial law, Ariel gets a phone call from Iraq he will never forget. His estranged girlfriend, journalist Julia Stephenson, warns that the Carson killing is just the beginning of a wider plot to bring the West to its knees. Then she disappears.
Ariel’s blood-soaked race against time to track the terror cells behind Carson’s death tumbles into the cross-fire of a hidden battle between mysterious rogue intelligence agencies. The goal: to monopolise black budget technologies which could unlock the universe’s darkest, arcane secrets.
As the world he thought he knew unravels, Ariel faces off against bent coppers, double-crossing agents, psychic killers and super soldiers to complete a black ops mission like no other: stop Quantum Apocalypse.
ZERO POINT  - high tech and politics are combustible.What if the human species continued business as usual, pursuing unlimited economic growth on a finite planet, plundering the planet’s natural resources for the benefit of a corporate few – despite the danger of climate catastrophe? What if Iraq destabilized to such an extent that our governments dragged themselves into another prolonged war in the Middle East? What if our Middle East wars didn’t stop terrorism, but, as with the 2003 Iraq War, inflamed regional tensions and sparked blowback at home? What if fear of this prompted our intelligence agencies to, instead of re-assessing state-militarism, fund new forms of surveillance, contributing to the rise of an increasingly repressive police state? What if we were able to develop stupendously powerful technologies that could conceivably save us from our looming environmental challenges?
Of course, no one can know the answer to these questions for sure, but we don’t need a crystal ball to hazard reasonable guesses. While these questions surely concern matters of utmost significance to many of us in current times, they also make great material for a dystopian scifi thriller!
Without wanting to make light of such issues, I started writing ZERO POINT about six years ago because I wanted to explore such questions through the medium of fiction. As such, ZERO POINT is unashamedly political fiction – inspired by ‘true events’ in the real world of politics and espionage, and jam-packed with a not-so-subtle political message about the dangers of business-as-usual.
But it’s also a lot of fun. I think the motivation to write a work of fiction came about as a fan of both science fiction and thrillers, whether in terms of literature, films, or TV. But both of these genres have occasionally bugged me – scifi in terms of its futurism, and thrillers in terms of their politics.
Much scifi attempts to build futuristic, self-contained worlds in relative isolation from the present. While semi-plausible narrative strands that link them up to present times are often utilized, still, we are often offered dystopian scifi worlds wholesale as visions of the future, vast vistas in our imaginations that allow us to escape from the doldrums of the everyday, while also reflecting subliminally on the everday’s political underbelly.
I love such scifi, but with ZERO POINT I wanted to do something different. I wanted to explore how the machinations of the present could give birth to the dystopian future – how such dystopia is not, really, all that distant, but is even now emerging from seeds we plant today in the everyday. I wanted to explore how the dystopian universes we imagine in a fictional far-flung future could actually come about.
That’s why ZERO POINT is set in a near future very much like our own, and indeed begins with the taut unpredictability of a conventional political thriller. But it soon opens up into a strange, parallel world in which unimaginable high technology is just beginning to emerge, with extreme social and political ramifications. The next volumes in the trilogy go deeper, by extrapolating today’s trends further into the future. But rather than simply fast-forwarding to that future, I explore the shaping of the present into that future.
Equally, this is where I take on the staple tropes of conventional thriller writing. Most spy thrillers take the essential ‘goodness’ of our spy agencies for granted. If they are responsible for evil, it’s usually through the actions of rogue agents, or megalomaniacally evil leaders. In the real world, I can tell you based on my experience as an investigative journalist who has broken major stories on global affairs, terrorism, and international security, this is simply not the case. In the real world, the unaccountability of our spies and spy agencies is the problem.  If there are ‘rogues’, quite often they are whistleblowers, ruthlessly demonized and excommunicated by their own agencies just for exposing their failures.
This leads us into a realm that is much more morally complicated than simplistic spy stories of ‘us good’ and ‘them evil’, in which the institutional corruption of intelligence exposes interweaving good and bad intentions, exploitation, double-crossing, bribery, ideology, and careerism – ingredients which, when combined with the dangers of high technology, are extremely combustible.


About Nafeez Ahmed:  Nafeez Ahmed is a bestselling author, investigative journalist, and international security academic. He writes for The Guardian via his Earth Insight blog, reporting on the geopolitics of interconnected environmental, energy and economic crises. The author of five critically-acclaimed non-fiction works addressing humanity’s biggest global challenges, Nafeez’s forthcoming book is a science fiction thriller, ZERO POINT, due out 18th August 2014.
Nafeez has also written for the Independent on Sunday, The Independent, The Scotsman, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Huffington Post, New Statesman, Prospect Magazine, Le Monde Diplomatique, among many others. He has been a talking head for BBC News 24, BBC World News with George Alagiah, BBC Radio Five Live, BBC Radio Four, BBC World Today, BBC Asian Network, Channel 4, Sky News, C-SPAN Book TV, CNN, FOX News, Bloomberg, PBS Foreign Exchange, Al-Jazeera English, Press TV, Islam Channel and hundreds of other radio and TV shows in the USA, UK, and Europe.
Nafeez is also cited and reviewed in the Sunday Times, Times Higher Educational Supplement, New York Times, The Independent, Independent on Sunday, The Observer, Guardian, Big Issue Magazine, Vanity Fair, among othersFind Nafeez Ahmed:Website | Facebook | Twitter | Goodreads

Blog Tour: Zero Point by Nafeez Ahmed

Date of Publication:August 14, 2014Goodreads | Amazon US | Amazon UK | Barnes & Noble | Kobo
Description:
Near future Great Britain is on the brink of collapse. Mass riots. Economic meltdown. Blackouts. And a new oil war in Iraq to keep the world economy afloat.
Iraq War veteran and war crimes whistleblower David Ariel is sick of violence, and trying to make ends meet working for Specialist Protection. But after Prime Minister Carson is brutally assassinated by extremists on Ariel’s watch, he is covertly targeted by a compromised police investigation.
When forensics discover that Carson’s assassination inexplicably defied the very laws of physics, bodies drop like flies as key witnesses are murdered in impossible circumstances.
Fleeing for his life while London is locked-down under martial law, Ariel gets a phone call from Iraq he will never forget. His estranged girlfriend, journalist Julia Stephenson, warns that the Carson killing is just the beginning of a wider plot to bring the West to its knees. Then she disappears.
Ariel’s blood-soaked race against time to track the terror cells behind Carson’s death tumbles into the cross-fire of a hidden battle between mysterious rogue intelligence agencies. The goal: to monopolise black budget technologies which could unlock the universe’s darkest, arcane secrets.
As the world he thought he knew unravels, Ariel faces off against bent coppers, double-crossing agents, psychic killers and super soldiers to complete a black ops mission like no other: stop Quantum Apocalypse.

About Nafeez Ahmed:  Nafeez Ahmed is a bestselling author, investigative journalist, and international security academic. He writes for The Guardian via his Earth Insight blog, reporting on the geopolitics of interconnected environmental, energy and economic crises. The author of five critically-acclaimed non-fiction works addressing humanity’s biggest global challenges, Nafeez’s forthcoming book is a science fiction thriller, ZERO POINT, due out 18th August 2014.
Nafeez has also written for the Independent on Sunday, The Independent, The Scotsman, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Huffington Post, New Statesman, Prospect Magazine, Le Monde Diplomatique, among many others. He has been a talking head for BBC News 24, BBC World News with George Alagiah, BBC Radio Five Live, BBC Radio Four, BBC World Today, BBC Asian Network, Channel 4, Sky News, C-SPAN Book TV, CNN, FOX News, Bloomberg, PBS Foreign Exchange, Al-Jazeera English, Press TV, Islam Channel and hundreds of other radio and TV shows in the USA, UK, and Europe.
Nafeez is also cited and reviewed in the Sunday Times, Times Higher Educational Supplement, New York Times, The Independent, Independent on Sunday, The Observer, Guardian, Big Issue Magazine, Vanity Fair, among othersFind Nafeez Ahmed:Website | Facebook | Twitter | Goodreads