Sunday, January 17, 2016

Now on Tour - The Ravaging In Between by A.J. Locke

Now on tour, The Ravaging In Between (The Reanimation Files Book 3) by A.J. Locke! Check out the schedule below and make sure you enter the giveaway! There are some great prizes up for grabs!

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January 18th
Teatime and Books
Spotlight

January 19th
Boom Baby Reviews
Guest Post

January 20th
Sunshine Book Promos
Spotlight

January 21st
Lola White
Spotlight

January 22nd
CDYess Writes
Spotlight

January 25th
Happy Tails and Tales
Review

January 26th
Kelly Smith Reviews
Review

January 27th
Apocalipstick the Book
Spotlight

January 28th
Around the World in Books
http://www.aroundtheworldinbooks.ca/
Spotlight


January 29th
Reading to Distraction
Review

February 1st
Books are Love
Review

Description:

Sometimes death is only the beginning...

Selene Vanream died—for two minutes. After being revived, she spends over a month in a coma before she awakes, free from the Rot and the reanimation power that caused her so much trouble. No one can explain how Selene survived killing Renton while he possessed her reanimation power, and her reunion with Micah is marred by the choices they each made to save her and stop Renton

But even though she’s Rot free, she isn’t problem free. First, she no longer has a job at Affairs of the Dead. And Ethan is missing and she can’t track him down. Not only that, ghosts that were sent to the Afterlife with unfinished business have somehow crossed back and are trying to settle the score in violent ways. If that wasn’t enough, Selene discovers that dying briefly has more consequences than she realized, because when she was revived, not all of her came back. Now she’s straddling both the living world and the dead, and she will find out what it means to come back to life but leave part of her soul behind.

Excerpt:

The Afterlife sucked.

Granted, I had just gotten here, but I would have expected some sort of fanfare to be waiting to greet me. There should be angels throwing confetti, and ghosts cheering as they welcomed me into eternity after my long, hard life. I thought there’d be some clouds, lots of light, maybe a rainbow or two arching above my head. But no, there was none of that. So far the Afterlife was gray and dull.

How disappointing.

And I mean it was literally gray. I did a slow turn so I could take in every direction. All I could see was gray beneath my feet, gray above my head, and gray on every horizon. I put my hands on my hips and blew my unruly ghost hair out of my face. This was what I got after sacrificing myself to save humanity from a madman who wanted to slaughter people so he could feed their ghosts to his creepily resurrected family? Seriously?

I wasn’t sure exactly how the Afterlife worked, despite being a necromancer. Hard to know what death was like until you were dead. But this couldn’t be all there was. I was at a loss here.

Then I thought about Micah and intense sadness washed over me. I don’t know how much time had passed; was it only minutes? Was Micah holding my dead body in his arms on the Brooklyn Bridge? Had days passed? Weeks? Was my funeral already over? My incorporeal heart ached. I missed Micah. I wished the whole mess with Renton didn’t have to culminate with my death.

I threw my hands up. Great, now I had eternity to miss Micah and lament that I had to die because of a psycho. Why couldn’t death erase all the bad stuff?

All right, time to put a positive spin on this. I couldn’t start my Afterlife in a funk. Maybe this was just the starting point and I had to get to where the good stuff was. They made it this dismal at the beginning to show you that it couldn’t get any worse. That way you’d really appreciate your slice of paradise, or maybe the Afterlife was more like communal, eternal fun. I’d take anything over this. I started walking and hoped my theory would be correct.

After walking for a while, the silence was broken by a stomping sound in the distance. A low vibration thrummed through the ground. Was this it? Hordes of angels were coming to greet me and they were running because they were late? But the closer the sound got, the more it reminded me of horses’ hooves. When I turned in the direction of the galloping, I saw glowing, red eyes coming at me.

If I had a beating heart, it would have seized up when I saw what looked like a hulking, jet-black horse. The only color was those red fire pits it had for eyes. Its body, which I could tell was equine, was surrounded by roiling waves of darkness. It was as though shadows had wrapped around it and were in constant motion. It looked twice as large as any horse I had ever seen, and even though I was a ghost, I didn’t want to get trampled. I moved out of the way, but the ghost didn’t seem as though it saw me. When it had run past me a few feet it stopped, reared up and neighed, which was a beastly and horrifying sound, then dropped down and continued running. I was left staring after it with my mouth hanging open.

Bio:
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A.J. Locke is originally from Trinidad and Tobago but has resided in New York City for over fifteen years. She knew early on that she wanted to be a writer, penned her first novel at fourteen, and hasn’t stopped since. Creating is her passion, and other than writing she enjoys keeping up with her active toddler and finding time for her other creative whims such as drawing, painting, and graphic design.

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Check out the other books in the Reanimation Files Series:


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Now on Tour - Clean by Mia Kerick

Review Tour for Clean by Mia Kerick kicks off today! Make sure you follow along and check out all the reviews and this great read!

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January 18th
Elin Gregory
Review

Boom Baby Reviews
 http://www.boombabyreviews.com/
Interview

January 20th
Natural Bri
Review

January 22nd
My Addiction: Books
Review

January 25th
Crushing Cinders
Review

January 28th
Kelly Smith Reviews
Review

January 29th
Sexy Siren Book Blog
Review



Book Description:

High school senior Lanny Keating has it all. A three-sport athlete at Lauserville High School looking at a college football scholarship, with a supportive family, stellar grades, boy band good looks… until the fateful day when it all falls apart.

Seventeen-year-old Trevor Ladd has always been a publicly declared zero and the high school badboy. Abandoned by his mother and sexually abused by his legal guardian, Trevor sets his sights on mere survival.

Lanny seeks out Trevor’s companionship to avoid his shattered home life. Unwilling to share their personal experiences of pain, the boys explore ways to escape, leading them into sexual experimentation, and the abuse of illegal drugs and alcohol.  Their mutual suffering creates a lasting bond of friendship and love.

When the time finally comes to get clean and sober, or flunk out of high school, only one of the boys will graduate, while the other spirals downward into addiction. 

Will Lanny and Trevor find the strength to battle their demons of mind-altering substances as well as emotional vulnerability?

Clean takes the reader on a gritty trip into the real and raw world of teenage substance abuse.


Excerpt”

PROLOGUE

Lanny

Trevor wouldn’t even look at me when I walked over to the gas station this morning to say hi. And Jimmy’s Fuel Stop is like three miles from my house so it took a major effort to walk there, especially since I’ve been feeling like total crap lately. Another one of my shaky human bonds bites the dust. I need to go out and get myself a cat.

“Can’t you see I’m working, Keating?” That was all he said. But I’ve always been good at reading between the lines. I could tell what he was thinking as he stood beside the gas pumps, totally caught up in not looking at me. “Take a hike before you get me fired, loser. Some of us got goals in life....” So I took off before he had a chance to make me feel like I shouldn’t have ever made an appearance on the planet earth. But I still know it would have been better had I never been born...maybe Joelle would still be okay.

It’s Saturday afternoon and nobody’s home. Mom and Dad are probably off at the park with Joelle, sloshing through the wet snow together so she gets her daily exercise. Or maybe they took her to the make- your-own-sundae-place to improve her fine motor skills by sprinkling sweet toppings on big scoops of ice cream. I’m in Mom and Dad’s bathroom, bent in half with my head stuck in the closet, searching the cluttered shelves for anything that will get me high enough to escape. And I mean anything.

That’s when I see the cough syrup. The bottle in front is almost new, and there’s an older bottle of a different brand right behind it, little more than halfway full. Seeing these medicine bottles reminds me of something Chad suggested about a week or two ago— that we should try robo-tripping. He told me that if we drink enough cough syrup, the DXM in it would get us high in a “super blissful, tingling-body-parts way,” which sounded pretty decent to me then and still does now. Not completely surprised I remembered Chad’s exact description of a DXM high, I thank God for this dextromethorphan stuff that suppresses nasty coughs, because it looks like I’m going to find my much-needed buzz after all.

Pleased that I don’t have to resort to sniffing glue from the tube on my father’s basement workbench or huffing my mother’s hairspray—and believe me I came close—I snatch the bottles with a shaky hand. They’re both sticky with the syrup that dripped down the side last time one of the Keating’s had a major head cold accompanied by a hacking cough. Licking my fingers provides me with a hint of the cherry flavor I’m probably going to be barfing up later tonight. But I don’t care. I can’t get through a single day without some help, and by that I don’t mean help from my human friends, seeing as I have none left. 

Bio:

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Mia Kerick is the mother of four exceptional children—all named after saints—and five nonpedigreed cats—all named after the next best thing to saints, Boston Red Sox players. Her husband of twenty-two years has been told by many that he has the patience of Job, but don’t ask Mia about that, as it is a sensitive subject.

Mia focuses her stories on the emotional growth of troubled young people and their relationships, and she believes that physical intimacy has a place in a love story, but not until it is firmly established as a love story. As a teen, Mia filled spiral-bound notebooks with romantic tales of tortured heroes (most of whom happened to strongly resemble lead vocalists of 1980s big-hair bands) and stuffed them under her mattress for safekeeping. She is thankful to Dreamspinner Press, Harmony Ink Press, CoolDudes Publishing, and CreateSpace for providing her with alternate places to stash her stories.

Mia is a social liberal and cheers for each and every victory made in the name of human rights, especially marital equality. Now marital equality is the law of the land!! WOOT!! Her only major regret: never having taken typing or computer class in school, destining her to a life consumed with two-fingered pecking and constant prayer to the Gods of Technology. 

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Monday, January 11, 2016

Now on Tour - Adelheid, Volume One by Mia Darien

One Week tour for Adeleid, Volume One, Welcome to Town kicks off today! Check out the schedule below and make sure you enter the giveaway!

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January 11th
Apocalipstick the Book
Spotlight

Happy Tails and Tales
Review

January 12th
CD Yess Writes
Spotlight

Cherry Mischievous
Spotlight

Around the World in Books
Spotlight

January 13th
Cassandra M’s Place
Spotlight

January 14th
Kelly Smith Reviews
Guest Post

January 15th
Home Schooling Mommy
Review

Books are Love
Spotlight


Book Description: 

Vampires are people, too...

Cameron's Law has made it so. In "Adelheid, Volume One" follow two novels and a short story that introduce us to the town of Adelheid, Connecticut--a sleepy New England town that has become the unofficial center for preternatural rights in the United States.

In this collection, meet Sadie Stanton, poster girl for Cameron's Law and owner of the Stanton Agency; Dakota, a bounty hunter who makes things that go bump in the night scared of her; and Madison, the cheerful, werewolf pseudo-sister of Sadie Stanton on an unwilling vacation.

*This volume contains Cameron's Law, When Forever Died and Cats & Dogs. All were previously released singly.

Excerpt:

That’s the part about being a vampire that I’ve always hated.

The perks are great, but lunch can kill you... and I’m not talking ‘I can’t believe I ate the whole thing’ kind of kill you, either. I mean, pull a wooden stake out of their back pocket and murder you. Honestly, who would like that?

Let’s be clear about my present situation. I wasn’t trying to eat anybody when the blonde psycho decided to do precisely that: stab me with a stake. Here I am, just trying to make an honest living when some whack job with a slayer complex comes darting out of the shadows and decides that I’m the one responsible for all the crimes my kind and those like me or pretending to be like me have committed over the past several centuries in reality and in fiction. I’m being assaulted over Dracula. Thanks, Stoker.

Now, I am very grateful to the public school system. In their lovely statement of patriotism, the Pledge of Allegiance, their having all children put their hands over the far left sides of their chests under the mistaken impression that’s where the heart is (rather than more centralized) has repeatedly saved my undead ass. It still sucks (no pun intended) to get stabbed, but at least I’m not dead, or any deader than I was before.

This turn of events was bad enough, but I could handle it. What I couldn’t handle quite so easily were the hysterics.

No, I’m not talking about my hysterics. I wasn’t hysterical. In fact, given the circumstances, I was really quite calm. I’m talking about my clients. While I’m sure that having their Preternatural Expert Advisor type person skewered wasn’t in their original plan, I was walking and talking, so was it really necessary to carry on like that?

“Mrs. White, please, really, I’m okay. Calm down,” I said through grit teeth. My hand pressed against the wound, holding back the oozing tide for a few moments.

If it hadn’t been for the screamers to my left, I probably would have gone after the bitch and said shoulder be damned, but my tearing off probably would only make the situation worse and besides, I was a little impaired. I wouldn’t forget the face. I was sure I’d find her again later and we’d have a real fight, a fair fight.

“But then... she just... out of nowhere... blood...” Mrs. Regina White sputtered, as if she’d been the one stabbed, before she promptly passed out.

Ernest White, who I assumed was her husband although no one had actually clarified it to me, knelt down beside her in a panic and then glared at me. Like this was my fault! What am I supposed to say? ‘Gee, sorry for getting stabbed. I’ll try not to leave a mess on your grave yard...’

I hate mortals sometimes.


Running after the stake-wielding psychopath was looking better all the time.

Bio:

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Born a Connecticut Yankee in nobody's court, Mia Darien grew up to brave snow and talk fast. She started reading when she was three and never looked back, soon frequently falling asleep with a book under her cheek. (Something she still does, though these days it’s her Nook as often as a paperback.)

At eleven, she discovered Night Mare by Piers Anthony and entered the world of grown-up fantasy fiction and it was all over from there. She started writing at fourteen, then met vampires as a teenager and the concept for what would become Adelheid was soon born. Epic fantasy remains her first love, but she enjoys writing whatever stories come to mind in any genre.


Now she loves both writing and helping her indie community with her freelancing. A geek till the end, she enjoys role-play by email games and World of Warcraft when she has the time. Married to her very own Named Man of the North, she lives with him, their mini-tank (also known as their son) and pets, who usually act more childish than the child.

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