B.L. Blair's Blog, page 42

Monthly Giveaway - Forgive Me (Holton Series #4) eBook

The August 2016 monthly giveaway is a copy of Forgive Me (Holton Series #4).

Leaving Emily was Mitch’s greatest mistake.  Can she forgive him?
Growing up, Mitch Carson had always dreamed of leaving Holton, Texas, traveling the world, and writing life altering stories.  As an investigative journalist, he made those dreams come true, but he left behind the only woman he ever loved.  That was his greatest mistake.  Mitch has returned home to see if she can forgive him for leaving her when she needed him the most.
In high school, Emily Fairview had fallen deeply, madly, and completely in love with Mitch.  The two of them planned a life together far away from Holton, but when Emily’s family needed her, she chose to stay.  Mitch chose to leave.  Fifteen years later Mitch is back and wants a second chance, but Emily doesn’t know if she can forgive him.
Return to Holton, Texas one last time to see if Mitch can get Emily to forgive him.  Forgive Me is the fourth and final book in the Holton Series but may be read as a standalone novel.
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July Giveaway - $10 Amazon Gift Card

The giveaway for July is a $10 Amazon Gift Card. You may enter each day, but please note that entering the giveaway will also register you to receive my quarterly newsletter. You may unsubscribe at any time. Good Luck!


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Iron Goddess by Dharma Kelleher - $25 Amazon Gift Card

Iron Goddess (Shea Stevens Thriller #1)
by Dharma Kelleher
Genre: Noir Thriller
Age category: Adult
Release Date: 28 June 2016

BLURB:
In this gritty, fast-paced debut thriller, an ex-con biker chick turned law-abiding citizen risks everything to save her new life—and confront the demons of her past.

Shea Stevens is biker royalty. Her father was the president of the Confederate Thunder Motorcycle Club. Under his watchful eye, she learned how to pick locks, disable alarms, and hot-wire cars like a pro. But all that is ancient history. Or so she thought . . .

After a stint in prison, Shea has worked hard to make a quiet, happy life for herself in Arizona. She spends her time bonding with her big-city girlfriend and running her bike shop, Iron Goddess Custom Cycles, with her dedicated team of misfits. But when one of her employees is shot and three of her specially commissioned bikes are stolen, Shea’s new life collides with the criminal underworld she tried to leave behind.

Shea knows better than to trust the police. So, with her Glock on her hip, she takes the investigation into her own hands. Shea’s search for the bike thieves leads her straight to her father’s old gang—and her estranged sister, whose young daughter has been kidnapped by a rival club. The last thing Shea wants is to be caught in the middle of a war—but if she learned one thing from her old man, it’s that when someone comes at you, you push back. Hard. And that’s exactly what she’s going to do.

EXCERPT:
Sparks exploded from the left footpeg of Shea Stevens’ motorcycle as it scraped against the pavement. She was going too fast through the curves that twisted up the south side of Sycamore Mountain. The road was dark—daybreak still an hour away. Getting up close and personal with an elk at sixty miles an hour would be disastrous. But Shea was in a hurry.
She tried to convince herself the call from the security company was another false alarm—a rat looking for a crumb, or maybe a glitch in the sensors. But she couldn’t shake the fear that someone had broken into the shop. If the three custom motorcycles they’d finished the night before were stolen, it would be a quarter-million-dollar loss.
Please, God, let it be another false alarm.
The cold air blasting through the vents in her jacket caused her teeth to chatter. In her rush to alleviate her paranoia, she’d thrown on her jeans and T-shirt from the night before. Didn’t bother with a bra. Her only precaution had been the .40-caliber Glock she’d slipped into a pancake holster at the small of her back.
Fifteen minutes later, her bike crested the hill and reached what the residents of Sycamore Springs, Arizona, call Olde Towne—a mile-long strip of locally owned shops including a café, a pharmacy, an antiques shop, and Iron Goddess Custom Cycles—her destination.
She screeched to a stop in front of the cycle shop, killed the engine, and ripped off her helmet. The pungent scent of creosote mixed with dead skunk made her nose crinkle. Moonlight reflected off the desert dust on the plate glass window, obscuring the Iron Goddess logo. Her gaze shifted left to the shop’s front door. Shards of glass clung to the doorframe like broken teeth.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Dharma Kelleher writes gritty tales about outlaws, renegades, and misfits. Her hobbies include riding motorcycles, picking locks, and getting inked. Her debut novel IRON GODDESS will be published by Penguin Random House’s Alibi imprint on June 28, 2016.
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GIVEAWAY:
This giveaway is US and Canada only. Below are the prizes you can win:
- a 25$ amazon gift card
- earplugs with the Iron Goddess shop logo

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This Madness of the Heart by Blair Yeatts - Win a $25 Gift Card

BLURB:Bad religion can be deadly. So Miranda Lamden, small-town religion professor, discovers in This Madness of the Heart. The dark hollers of Eastern Kentucky offer fertile soil for shady evangelist Jasper Jarboe, new president of Grace and Glory Bible College, as he beguiles the small mining town of Canaan Wells with his snake-oil charm.
When Miranda isn’t teaching at Obadiah Durham College, she’s investigating paranormal phenomena—or enjoying a turbulent romantic relationship with backwoods artist Jack Crispen. JJ’s inquisition-style gospel has alienated her long since, but when he announces his plan to transform her forest home into an evangelical Mecca, complete with neon cross and 40-foot Jesus, Miranda girds her loins for war. But JJ isn’t finished: he goes on to launch an attack on her friend and fellow professor Djinn Baude with an avalanche of vicious rumors. Not only does he accuse Djinn of demonic communion with the old Voudon witch whose curse killed the college’s founding family, but he also smears her with insinuations of lechery and vice.
With JJ’s urging, hate boils over into violence and tragedy, sweeping Miranda up in its flood. One death follows another as a miasma of evil overwhelms the tiny community, and only Miranda can see clearly enough to halt its spread.
This Madness of the Heart is the first in a new series of Gothic mystery-thrillers featuring Professor Miranda Lamden, whose spiritual gifts have drawn her beyond university walls to explore the mysteries of other world beliefs. Her unique vision brings her into repeated confrontations with evil, where too often she finds herself standing alone between oblivious onlookers and impending disaster.
Excerpt:I had to stop him! Now, before the damage was done!
I never even got to try.
Like a sullen current of arctic air pouring through a cracked door, cold snaked down over us, coiling around my senses, freezing my anger, congealing my blood: an implacable sister to the malevolence in the garden. I ground my teeth to stifle the scream begging to be born. Even so, a small voice spoke from outside my fear, detached and curious.
“This cold is not the same,” the voice observed. “There’s a difference. It’s not threatening so much as warning, ‘Keep off! Stand clear! Don’t interfere!’”
Immobilized by fear, I was incapable of interfering.
At first I thought my teeth were chattering. A split second later I realized the wind had dropped without warning, the riot of sound had ceased, and a clicking sound had filled the darkness. “Tch-tch-tch-tch-tch-tch-tch-tch-tch-tch-tch-tch-tch,” the sound ran on and on—no more than a field of insects, of snakes, singing in the night.
The light from JJ’s lantern brightened, bloomed, and died, shooting soft rainbows into the night. Cold weighed even more cruelly upon my breast, pressing me against the rough wall at my back, blotting all light from my eyes. Then the clicking stopped, and in the utterly empty dark, I heard the sound of stone rasping on stone, of crumbling brickwork tearing loose from rotten mortar, and the hollow thunk of heavy masonry falling ponderously onto yielding clay.
A soft sigh whispered through the grove. Then there was silence.
Buy Links:http://www.amazon.com/Madness-Heart-Miranda-Lamden-Mysteries-ebook/dp/B01DEC2GOS/The book is free on Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/624868(CreateSpace will be up on May 1)
GUEST POST:I asked Blair the following question: Who is the favorite character you have written and why?
Answer: I’m going to talk about one of my favorite characters from This Madness of the Heart: Jack Crispen. Jack is main character Miranda Lamden’s friend and lover, although they’re still in the walking-on-eggs phase of their relationship. Here’s how Miranda introduces him in Madness:
Years of never-mentioned military service had taken their toll on both his flesh and spirit. Out here in the back of beyond he’d escaped the crowding bodies, the unrelenting noise, the sudden violence of the city that had aggravated his nightmares and triggered his panic. Apart from myself and Viola, only the mountains and their creatures (and a few contacts in retail trade) made it past his guard. The mountains were healing him in their own time. I’d learned from their example to tread lightly.
Above all, Jack Crispen is an artist in stained glass, but he’s also a master carpenter. He lives small, and works only to please himself, which leaves time for his other two callings: poetry—his therapy during the bad times—and caving. In Madness, he’s just beginning to make a name for himself in the art glass world, using techniques and styles roughly comparable to Tiffany’s. Miranda sees the vision he brings to his stained glass as a mystical gift:
He returned my smile, stretching out a long arm in invitation, and we walked together toward the house. I sighed with delight as the world around me suddenly took on the glowing colors of a stained glass window. Every leaf and branch, every patch of blue sky, shone with translucent magic, beckoning me to follow whatever being set the forest aflame with living fire. Such moments came to me from time to time, though rarely, and always in Jack’s company. In them, I was transported into the heart of his windows, a place where he himself resembled a pre-Raphaelite hero, sad and pale, full of inexpressible depths, blessed with wisdom that penetrated my darkest secrets. But these moments vanished as suddenly as they appeared, slipping from my grasp like dreams . . . just as this one did now.
Lest he appear too good to be true, I should mention that Jack’s fallback stress-relief is the classic 3-day bender, with a night in the town drunk tank for a chaser. But as he and Miranda learn to trust each other, these episodes are becoming less frequent. Still, he remains a hermit who welcomes almost no one but Miranda into his private world. And his mysterious military years (spent in some cousin of the Special Forces), have also left their mark, not least an unfortunate tendency toward machismo.
His name (Crispen) came from King Crispin, hero of a beloved fairytale called “Bluecrest,” but there were no illustrations of him in my book. Instead, I suspect my mental image of Jack looks a little too much like Renaissance-man Gardner McKay to be entirely an accident. If you don’t know who Gardner McKay was, you should Google him: tall, dark, heartbreakingly beautiful, brilliant, and completely outside the box. He was an actor, artist, writer, wildlife enthusiast, and master sailor. I saw him once in a summer stock production in Kentucky years ago. Jack isn’t quite that beautiful, or that brilliant, but there might be a vague family resemblance, at least if you squint really hard. Jack’s hair is long (just the way Miranda likes it), and usually tied back in a ponytail. Like all artists (at least in my mind), his hands are strong, and his fingers shapely.
He’ll be playing an increasingly significant role in the Miranda Lamden mysteries yet to come.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:Blair Yeatts grew up in the midst of a large, old southern Virginia family, much like the family of her main character. She followed her parents into a career in academia and taught religion at the college level in Kentucky for many years. Her special areas of expertise are psychology and Earth-based religions, in which she has done considerable research.
From childhood, Ms. Yeatts has been a fan of mystery fiction, starting with Nancy Drew and moving through Agatha Christie to twentieth century giants like Dorothy L. Sayers, P.D. James, and Nevada Barr. She is fulfilling a life’s dream in writing her own mysteries.
Ms. Yeatts shares her home with her photographer husband, two cats, and a dog. She has a lifelong love of wild nature, and prefers to set her stories in rural areas, where threads of old spiritual realities still make themselves felt. Her first three books take place in different parts of Kentucky and Tennessee.
Blog/Website:  http://blair-yeatts.comFacebook:  https://www.facebook.com/BlairYeatts/Twitter:  @blair-yeattsBooklife:  http://booklife.com/project/this-madness-of-the-heart-14158Goodreads:  https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29611895-this-madness-of-the-heartLinked In:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/blair-yeatts-21325911a?auth

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June 20: Christine Young
June 21: Room With Books
June 22: Booklover Sue
June 23: Deal Sharing Aunt
June 24: The Avid Reader
June 27: Danita Minnis
June 28: It's Raining Books
June 29: Hope. Dreams. Life... Love
June 30: BooksChatter
July 1: Queen of All She Reads - review
July 11: Readeropolis
July 12: Laurie's Thoughts and Reviews
July 13: Writer Wonderland
July 14: Brooke Blogs
July 15: Archaeolibrarian - I Dig Good Books!
July 18: Jane Reads - review
July 19: Long and Short Reviews
July 21: The Recipe Fairy - review only
July 22: The Cerebral Writer

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Win a $10 Amazon Gift Card

The giveaway for July is a $10 Amazon Gift Card. You may enter each day, but please note that entering the giveaway will also register you to receive my quarterly newsletter. You may unsubscribe at any time. Good Luck!


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The Daydreamer Detective Braves the Winter by S. J. Pajonas - Giveaway!

Start this series for free!
The Daydreamer Detective, the first book in this series is free for a limited time! You can grab your copy of The Daydreamer Detective for free on Amazon, B&N, Kobo and iBooks!

The Daydreamer Detective Braves the Winter (Miso Cozy Mysteries #2)
By SJ Pajonas
Genre: Mystery/ Cozy Mystery
Age category: Adult
Release Date: 7 July 2016

Blurb:
December has set in and just when the rural town of Chikata is recovering from one murder, Mei and her new boyfriend, Yasahiro, find their friend, Etsuko, dead in her apartment. Etsuko was sweet and talented, and now everyone suspects her longtime boyfriend killed her. Mei doesn’t believe it, though, and she vows to help solve the crime.

But Mei has more to think about than murder. With the barn gone and their vegetable stores destroyed, she and her mother are down to their last canned goods and no money for heat. Mei’s mom is fortunate to find work, but Mei must fend for herself, get a job, and keep their financial situation a secret from Yasahiro. In pursuit of paying work, she stumbles onto a new witness to the crime, and before long, the dead woman's secret life unravels before everyone’s eyes. Half-starving and out of her element, Mei is on thin ice, and it’s going to take a whole lot of ingenuity and quick thinking to solve the crime before the killer gets to her as well.

Excerpt:
“If only I could do for others what I do for you, as a real job.” I sat back in my chair and stared at the woman making coffee behind the counter. “I don’t think I have it in me to be a nurse, nor do I have the qualifications to work in a nursing home, but there has to be something else.”
Murata hummed, picking at the napkin on the table. “You know what’s missing in Chikata? A gathering place for us older folks. It used to be that the community center was that for us.”
“Right,” I said, perking up. “You were telling me that last week.”
“What about a central place where people can do crafts?”
“Maybe they could do crafts, or sit and talk, or have tea. They could even have family gatherings there some days.”
“Yes, yes,” Murata said, nodding. “If you could figure out how to sell discounted meals there, too, that would be ideal.”
I slipped away into a daydream of this place. Several low tables and easy seating, crafts on designated days, birthday parties, and grandkids coming to visit, hot tea and discounted bento boxes. A place like this, central and catering to anyone over sixty-five, would be hopping with people. What if it also sold specialty items to help cover the rent?
“Mei-chan?” Murata sat forward, trying to get my attention. “Your smile is as wide as the ocean.” She laughed. “What are you thinking about?”
“I’m thinking about making dreams into reality.” I picked up our empty cups and brought them to the counter. “Let’s brainstorm some more on this on the way home. I just had a fantastic idea, and it’s going to involve a lot of planning.”
“Planning, young lady, is what I do best.” She snapped her hat on her head. “Let’s go.”
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The First book in the series:
The Daydreamer Detective (Miso Cozy Mysteries #1)
By SJ Pajonas
Genre: Mystery/ Cozy Mystery
Age category: Adult
Release Date: 31 march 2016

Blurb:
Luck? Forget it. Mei Yamagawa is fresh out of it. She's just been downsized from her 3rd job in five years and her bank account is dry. Now, to keep her head above water, she must leave Tokyo and move back to her rural Japanese hometown. And there's nothing worse than having to face your old rivals and ex-boyfriends as a failure while starting life over as a farm girl.

But when her best friend's father is murdered, and her best friend is named the main suspect, Mei turns her daydreaming ways towards solving the crime. Between dates disguised as lunches with the town's hottest bachelor chef, searching for clues, and harvesting sweet potatoes, Mei has a lot of non-paying work cut out for her.

Will she catch the killer before her bad luck turns worse? Or will she fry in the fire with the rest of her dreams of success?

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About the Author:
Stephanie (S. J.) is a writer, knitter, amateur astrologer, Capricorn, and Japanophile. She loves foxes, owls, sushi, yoga pants, Evernote, and black tea. When she’s not writing, she’s thinking about writing or spending time outside, unless it’s winter. She hates winter. Someday she’ll own a house in both hemispheres so she can avoid the season entirely. She’s a mom to two great kids and lives with her husband and family outside NYC. They have no pets. Yet. When it comes to her work, expect the unexpected. She doesn’t write anything typical.

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Giveaway
There is a tour wide giveaway for the blog tour of The Daydreamer Detective Braves the Winter. One winner will win a bundle of S. J. Pajonas ebooks. Including: Removed, Revealed, Washing Statue Wanderlust, and The Daydreamer Detective. Follow the tour for more chances to win. View the complete tour schedule here.

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