Narrelle M. Harris's Blog, page 22

Quintette of Questions: Charlotte Marigold

Answering five questions for me today is:

Charlotte Marigold

1. What’s the name of your latest book – and how did you choose the title?

The name of my latest book is Only for Show (book 2 in my Only You series). My publisher came up with the title and it’s inspired by the story’s fake relationship that is ‘only for show’. The first book in the series is Only for Pretend (another fake relationship) so you can see a trend!

2. If you could choose anyone from any time period, who would you cast as the leads in your latest book?

Casting a celebrity as inspiration for the hero in my stories is one of the most fun parts of starting a new book (and essential research of course!). For Only for Show I imagined the delectable Gilles Marini in the role of bad boy billionaire, Roberto Conti. He’s seriously hot and captures the cool, self-assured demeanour of Roberto while hinting at an inner vulnerability for my empathetic heroine, Sofia, to explore. Google him, you won’t regret it!

And for my heroine, spirited Sofia Beaumont, I would
love to cast a young Monica Belluci. Dark, beautiful, sophisticated and
sensual. The perfect match for Gilles/Roberto!

3. What five words best describe your story?

Glamorous, sexy, emotional, funny, delicious (chocolate plays a big part in this story!)

4. Who is your favourite fictional couple or team?

Johnny and Baby (Dirty Dancing movie) immediately spring to mind. Classic bad boy romance!

But if you’re talking literature, I’d have to go with another classic – Elizabeth and Darcy from Pride and Prejudice.  A popular choice, but there’s a reason for that! Swoon, swoon, swoon….

5. What song reflects a scene in your book?

I wrote the opening scene in Only for Show with Elvis’ version of Fever playing in my head. I also reference the song in this scene (Sofia and Roberto have to pose together in a photo-shoot while the music plays). The smokiness of the vocals, the seductive rhythm and suggestive lyrics perfectly captures the chemistry between Sofia and Roberto who are struggling to resist their scorching attraction to each other. It also happens to be one of my favourite songs.

About Only For Show

Enemies to chocolate lovers.

Sofia
Beaumont and Roberto Conti’s relationship is only for show – a twisted
fairytale manufactured for the Italian tabloids. But when the reclusive
chocolatier unites with her family’s CEO playboy nemesis their sizzling
chemistry is blatantly real. To Sofia’s alarm, her faux boyfriend is a
seductive wolf in smoking hot sheep’s clothing; in Roberto’s embrace
she’s in danger of losing all her senses.

Neither Roberto nor Sofia are prepared for the intense sexual awakening and emotional roller coaster as family loyalty collides with personal desire. Bound by their messy past, love of chocolate and forbidden attraction, the lines between fantasy and reality blur. But as the power of sensory memory unlocks devastating secrets to the past, will their chance at love be forsaken?

About Charlotte Marigold

Charlotte Marigold writes sexy contemporary romance for Escape Publishing (Harlequin Australia). In her passionate stories hot romance and seduction always lead to love.

Follow Charlotte Marigold online:

Website: Charlotte Marigold Twitter: Charlotte Marigold

Buy Only for Show

Escape Publishing KoboAmazon AustraliaAmazon USAmazon UKGoogle PlayBooktopia

Cover Reveal: Duo Ex Machina Book 3 – Number One Fan

I’m delighted to reveal the cover for my third Duo Ex Machina novel, Number One Fan.

Duo Ex Machina Book 3: Number One Fan

It’s 2009 and Frank and Milo are in a new phase of their music career. They’re not where they thought they’d be: the violence they’ve witnessed and been subjected to has had consequences.

In spite of the traumas they’re dealing with, they are still making music. A new album has just been released and Frank is cutting his teeth as a producer for former pop princess, Gabriella Valli.

Then they start seeing strange messages from their Number One Fan. The trouble is that there are way too many candidates for the role.

The book is being serialised in fortnightly chapters on my Patreon. Once the final chapter is posted in April, the ebook will be prepared and published in partnership with Clan Destine Press.

I love Willsin’s work – he’s made a lot of my Clan Destine Press novel covers – and he’s created another fantastic cover for the Duo Ex Machina series. Thanks Willsin!

Willsin Rowe’s covers for books 1 and 2 of the Duo Ex Machina series.

Review: Painting in the Shadows by Katherine Kovacic

After her fabulous debut, The Portrait of Molly Dean, Katherine Kovacic brings us another Alex Clayton mystery set in Melbourne’s art world.

Set in 2000, a year after the events in The Portrait of Molly Dean, art dealer Alex Clayton and her best friend, art conservator John Porter, are visiting the Melbourne International Museum of Art (the NGV in fictional disguise) for a preview of their latest exhibition.

A bittersweet note is already struck as it’s clear Alex has a mysterious but clearly unhappy past with MIMA. Alex’s discomfort is soon shoved aside first by the collapse of a gallery worker which damages the key piece for display (the real 1864 Landseer painting, Man Proposes, God Disposes, which remains undamaged by fiction) and soon after, the death of the gallery’s senior conservator Meredith Buchanan in front of the very painting she’s meant to be repairing.

Alex and John immediately notice some oddities about Meredith’s death and some of the items found where she died. The police, unfamiliar with the nuances of the art world, aren’t receptive to their doubts, inclined to believe the death a suicide.

As naturally nosy people, Alex and John decide at once that they’ll poke around some of these discrepancies and oddities they’ve found to see if there’s anything in it, and to hand over any evidence of murder to the police.

We all know how that tends to work out in a mystery novel.

John is quickly employed to oversee the restoration of such a valuable painting, giving Alex reason to mooch around the place as well, so they have plenty of opportunity to ask questions, go into cupboards looking for skeletons and generally be amateur sleuths.

The real Landseer, Man Proposes, God Disposes , makes a fictional appearance. Image from Wikipedia.

Alex and John’s long friendship is shown to wonderful advantage as they collude in how to follow up their hunches and suspicions. Their whole relationship is given more texture by the personal problems they’re each facing. Alex’s art dealership isn’t providing financial stability, and hanging around the gallery is making her reflect on that lost chance at MIMA all those years ago when the unnamed scandal saw her kicked out of the gallery. John’s difficult marriage is an earthy personal counterpoint to Alex’s professional woes.

One of the great charms of Kovacic’s books is how she brings her personal knowledge and love of art history to her work. Alex is surely channelling Kovacic in her capacity to talk with engaging passion and clarity about what a picture or artist means to her without disappearing down a well of art wank. (That said, there’s a hilarious scene in which Alex and John deploy art wank strategically for investigative purposes which is a favourite!)

Painting in the Shadows is nicely paced, balanced well between the mystery, Alex and John’s personal and professional troubles, the many other relationships, and the world of art. It’s clever and engaging, the protagonists are likeable and the denouement neat.

After the resolution to the mystery, enough personal titbits remain to fill in the background for another book.

There is going to be another book, isn’t there Ms Kovacic?

Buy Painting in the Shadows (RRP$29.95)

Painting in the Shadows Allen and Unwin Painting in the Shadows Booktopia Painting in the Shadows Wheelers

A Writer’s Library

Every writer has a reference library of some kind. I’d like to introduce you to mine!

The physical part of it at least. I also have a collection of ebooks and PDFs, including the 1894 Baedeker’s guide to London and its Environs and copies of The Strand Magazine from 1891.  I also have newspaper clippings and saved web pages relating to crimes, science and all manner of strangeness which I think I’ll need for upcoming projects.

My reference library is stuffed full – I will soon have to start balancing new books on top!

My two shelves of reference books are packed to bursting with books about forensics, London, music, queer history, 19th century medicine and medieval society. Not all of the related books have been written yet, but some research on Victorian-era underwear and sailing ships was used in writing The Adventure of the Colonial Boy. and the medieval books were used to write the origin story for Kitty and Cadaver – Hoorfrost – which is in my upcoming short story collection Scar Tissue and Other Stories.

The top shelf is home to much history and science of forensics (mainly for use in my Sherlock Holmes stories so I get the science correct for the era) and books about Victorian London. I have several on the history of queer London of the era and trans history, in part for canon-era HolmesWatson stories and partly for something I’m planning set in 1890s Melbourne.

The music books are used for the Duo Ex Machina series and for Kitty and Cadaver. The British folklore will be used in the as yet unwritten sequel to Kitty and Cadaver, which I’ll get to eventually.

In the centre of the bottom shelf are the notebooks full of research I’ve conducted in the British Library: they contain notes about medieval London, pages and pages on Frost Fairs, Victorian-era clothing and culture; many pages about ravens, and the history of the London Underground.

For my Melbourne-based stories, the Melway is invaluable. (I use Google Maps for London locales when I’m not actually in London – I used both methods for Ravenfall. I really should get a London A-Z.) I’ll use The Australian Hostess Cookbook in the third Gary and Lissa book (also on the cards in due course, after The Opposite of Life is reissued by Clan Destine Press). I’ve also been learning more about 1890s Melbourne, but I don’t expect to get to that project until at least next year.

These are two very tiny books that my mum had in her shelves of Indigenous place names and words. I’m not sure yet when or how I’ll use them, but they’re there when I need them.

I’m often finding new books to add – I’ve picked up several new ones on bees and British wildlife for a project I’m looking at later this year. Among the books I’ve collected over the last year are The Butchering Art , about the work of Joseph Lister (yes, Listerine is named for him) who pioneered antiseptics in 19th century surgery. The fictional Dr Watson would have graduated from medical school at about the time Lister’s ideas were actually being accepted and taught.

You can also see jammed among the titles three wonderful secondhand bookstore finds: The Scientist would definitely be a book in my vampire Gary Hooper’s library. A Girl at Government House states it’s the diaries of a young girl in service in Australia in the 1880s and 90s, and Two Years Before the Mast is an account of a man’s life at sea in the mid 19th century, so it’ll be another layer of primary-document information to help make my Victorian era fiction if not accurate then at least less inaccurate.

Why yes, I do have rather a lot of potential projects in my future. And this doesn’t count the several I haven’t actually mentioned yet!

Feel free to ask me about any of the books you can see in those shelves. I aim to write about a few more of them as I use them (and discover if they will serve their purpose well enough!)

Ten eBooks Return!

Ten titles make a return to ebook platforms

Last year, my publisher’s distributor went kaput. Some quick work saved my ebooks from being swallowed in the process, but it’s taken several months of wrangling to get the titles back onto Amazon! (Well, for some reason Expendable still isn’t there, but it’s shown up on other, related platforms so it should follow soon.)

I’m particularly delighted that the Duo Ex Machina novellas are now finally available again to readers across several ebook platforms: iBooks, Google Play, Nook Books, Kobo and Kindle!

The titles that have made a return are

The Secret Agents, Secret Lives series 1 -3The Talbott and Burns series 1-2The Duo Ex Machina series 1-2lesbian romances Near Miss and Birds of a Feather Walking Shadows

Of course, while the books are back, none of the previous reviews have come back with them. If you’ve read any of them and would like to leave a review on Amazon or Goodreads, that would be enormously helpful in getting the algorithms to help people see the titles. Reviews don’t have to be long. A sentence to say whether or not you liked it, and perhaps another sentence or two about why, is enough for any platform and to help readers decide if the story is for them.

But either way, hooray for these ten titles being available once again!

Review: The Madness of Grief by Panayotis Cacoyannis

It’s London, 1969 and 16 year old Jane doesn’t know it yet, but her life is at a crisis point. Between the moon landing, her widowed magician father, the great Mr Magikoo’s girlfriend Mia Mia, Jane’s Auntie Ada and her best friend Karl, Jane’s about to grow up in a rush.

Panayotis Cacoyannis’s The Madness of Grief is more than a coming of age story – it’s an exploration of notions of truth, perception, forgiveness and the complexity of relationships. The backdrop of the moon landing, with one minor character questioning whether it’s a hoax, is just one aspect of the story’s preoccupation with the idea of what is real versus what is not.

The Madness of Grief

While the moon exerts a pull on the underlying idea of what’s real, an older event holds the key to the peculiar relationships of Jane’s life.

Jane’s mother was killed in a stage accident ten years ago during a Mr Magikoo stunt. Val’s death is entwined with her father George’s stage persona, forming the foundation of the themes of The Madness of Grief. Almost nothing is what it appears to be and how the characters understand their lives is a huge interleaving of guilt, lies of omission, blame, pain and misunderstanding. Throughout the narrative, what seems to be true is regularly stood on its head, and then upturned again as layers and layers of secrets and unspoken histories are revealed.

The story takes time to hit its stride, but the moment Jane walks in on Mia-Mia in the bathroom to discover her father’s girlfriend is a man, everything you thought you knew is thrown into the air.

In one particularly eventful night, Jane’s life is thrown into disarray, visited with violence, loss and even more revelation. Much is made of the disruption and pain that evolved from her mother’s tragic death and how grief has twisted blame, guilt and love as a result.

Some events which seem unforgivable are leavened with kindness and viewed through a prism of life having more than one truth to be told. So many of the protagonists are influenced for good or bad by others in their life – Karl’s sense of entitlement fostered by his controlling mother; Mia-Mia’s choices in the face of discovery, George’s guilt bringing him to hide his love for his daughter behind a crass facade; Ada’s cruel pleasure in blaming George for Val’s death, in part a response to how their mother favoured George’s needs.

Feelings can turn on a pin when sudden realisations and revelations fundamentally alter what we think we know. Some truths are brutal and best left unsaid; some lies are kindnesses; some acts are less cruel than ill-informed and sometimes, we’re willing to forgive that cruelty when it’s part of something larger.

Some of the abrupt narrative switches back in forth in time are difficult to follow to begin with, but the result is an intriguing and layered study of the vagaries of human nature. Those layers are densely packed and it can take a while to unpack, but what’s clear is that nobody is just one thing – not even the worst thing they’ve done. And even when the reader is less willing to forgive than Jane is, you can at least agree that foolishness and grief can make you do mad things.

Buy The Madness of Grief

The Madness of Grief (Amazon US)
The Madness of Grief (Amazon Australia)
The Madness of Grief (Kobo Audiobook)

The all-new Narrelle M Harris review crew

At long last I am getting around to organising a review crew!

What’s a Review Crew? A mailing list of people who like to review books and who might like to review my books as they come out.

Depending on the publisher, review copies may be available as an ebook or through a site like Netgalley. You’ll only receive emails when a new book is being released, and you’ll be able to unsubscribe at any time.

If you’d like to join my Review Crew, please let me know which genres appeal to you, and you’ll only be notified of the relevant books for review. Let me know your preferred ebook format too!

If you end up reviewing anything, it would be wonderful if you could let me know, with a link to the review (Goodreads, Amazon, your own blog or some other social media platform).

Not interested in reviewing but want to be informed of new releases, public appearances and other news as it happens? Sign up to the Mortal Whispers newsletter instead! (You can unsubscribe at any time.)

#mc_embed_signup{background:#fff; clear:left; font:14px Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; width:500px;}

/* Add your own Mailchimp form style overrides in your site stylesheet or in this style block.

We recommend moving this block and the preceding CSS link to the HEAD of your HTML file. */

Join the Narrelle M Harris Review Crew mailing list
* indicates required
Email Address *

First Name

Last Name

 
What genres interest you?

Romance
M/M Romance
Holmes/Watson romance
Queer characters
Fantasy
Thriller
Crime
Paranormal


What is your preferred ebook format?

ePub
Mobi
PDF



 

Review: Highway Bodies by Alison Evans

It’s always fabulous to have new zombie fiction set in Australia, and it’s ten times as grand when the zombie fiction in question has as much personality, drama and heart as Alison Evans’ new YA book, Highway Bodies.

The story is divided into three-chapter sections: the first from the point of view of a teen near the epicentre of the zombie outbreak; the second from a  group of young musicians taking a week away in the country to work on songs; the third a pair of non-identical twins whose mother is a nurse at a hospital where the outbreak is getting out of hand.

These young people are diverse and queer. As their stories are told and eventually converge, we learn that the world has always been hostile for them – the twins, for example, bear scars inflicted by a violent father. In trying to survive, each group is aware that other survivors are just as – or even more – dangerous to them than the mindless zombies.

Evans has a deft hand in giving each of the three main narrators their own distinctive voice. A lot of what happens is gruesome as each is confronted with the zombie infestation, mitigated by the humanity of the characters’ responses and fears for the lives of their loved ones.

The story leads to a conclusion that isn’t a safe geographical point so much as a fierce dedication to supporting each other in a world where everything is hostile. It’s a bit like actual life in that way.

For all the gore and violence, Highway Bodies manages to be simultaneously uplifting in the love and protectiveness its protagonists feel for each other. Love for family (both born and made) and friendships are the motivating forces for each of them, and there’s tenderness, loyalty and love at the heart of the end of the world.

As zombie fiction it’s fast-paced and full of the types of zombie encounters we love to read about. As an allegory for growing up queer in an environment that’s hostile to your very existence, it has power beyond the surface story.

Highway Bodies is thematically reminiscent of Mary Borsellino’s fantastic work in Ruby Coral Cornelian, The Devil’s Mixtape, Thrive and others – diverse kids in a hostile world, whose best weapon and best hope is love.

Evans’ second book is a corker, and I can’t wait to read whatever they write next.

Buy Highway Bodies (RRP $19.99)

Highway Bodies (Allen and Unwin)


Highway Bodies (Booktopia)


Highway Bodies (Angus and Robertson)


Highway Bodies [image error] (Amazon US)
Highway Bodies (Amazon Australia)
Highway Bodies (Amazon UK)
Highway Bodies (Dymocks)


Highway Bodies (Readings)

2018: My writing year – and my year to come: 2019

On the brink of a new year, I’m looking back on 2018 with satisfaction and maybe a smidge of exhaustion. 2019 looks to be just as full of writing challenges and delights!

In case you missed anything, I’ve summarised my writing year below – and teased with some of my upcoming projects for 2019!

Thank you all for your support during the year – 2018 was fraught in many ways, but I hope it brought rewards as well. May 2019 bring you more of what you love, and more of what heals you.

2018
Holmes and Watson in Love

My second Improbable Press Holmes/Watson book came out in June. A Dream to Build a Kiss On is a single story arc told over 100 stories of exactly 221 words each and the last word of each story begins with b. 221b.

Cover Reveal: Grounded

I revealed this cover a week ago to my Patreon supporters, and a few days later to my newsletter subscribers. Now for my blog readers – ta-da!

This is the gorgeous cover for my upcoming spec fic romance, Grounded, featuring Benedick Sasaki, one of the story’s love interests.

The blurb

In a world where flight is life, will two grounded people find other ways to fly?

When Benedick Sasaki’s wings are wounded in the line of duty, the former policeman doesn’t know if he has a place in a world where he can no longer fly.

Then he meets Clementine Torres, an artist born without wings and a vocal advocate for the flightless who has been subjected to recent hate mail and vandalism ahead of her new exhibition. As Clementine starts to teach Benedick new ways to appreciate the world on the ground, the threats against her art and possibly her life begin to escalate.

To survive, they will need to teach each other that not all beauty is in the air, and that both of them can soar without wings…

The edits have all been completed (my editor was a treat to work with!) and everything is set for Clem and Benedick’s story to come out on 20 March 2019 in ebook form.

Grounded is already available for pre-order at the following sites:

Grounded (Amazon US)
Grounded (Amazon UK)
Grounded (Amazon Australia)
Grounded (Kobo)
Grounded (iTunes)
Grounded (Google Play)