Savvy Saturday: New Year's Ebook Giveaway

This week on Savvy Saturday we have a bunch of ebooks to giveaway!! Let's see what you can win, and then enter below! One winner per book will be chosen Friday the 12th.

A Sister's Secret

Brooke Rawlings's life is turned upside down after the death of her sister. Brooke's life as a tough investigative reporter hasn't prepared her for the challenge of being the guardian of her teenaged nephew Jeremy. When he withdraws from everyone, Jeremy's oh-so-attractive-but-arrogant teacher, Matthew Grant, is concerned that Jeremy is involved with drugs. While investigating Jeremy's behavior, Brooke and Matthew uncover surprising information about her sister's death and the disappearance of another student. She soon comes to realize there was much more to her sister than met the eye. Can she unravel the web of secrets and lies and find happiness with the man at the top of her suspect list?

Blade Dancer

Emerging from an ancient civil war with only a patchwork of once-powerful technologies, the Qurls are threatened by new weapons in the hands of old enemies. Driven by the guilt of a comrade’s death, Mikial reaches out through her own divided heritage to discover the humans behind the guns. The one enemy she didn’t expect to face was her own people. The one ally she didn’t plan on being saved by was human.

D.I.C.K.s Case One: Holy Murder

Three friends and co-workers stumble upon a murder. They decide to hide the body until they can find their kidnapped Pastor before he meets the same fate. With humor and a little love along the way, the newly formed D.I.C.KS., Dames Investigating Crimes and Killers, stumble upon a prescription drug ring that leads them to break and enter buildings, follow criminals to an adult bookstore, and be betrayed by the most unlikely of suspects.

Dawn of Love

Fiona would sooner risk the wrath of a legendary beast than submit to the brigands who chase her to the walls of Burgis Keep. There, she finds herself under the protection of the most unlikely guardian. When the rumors of a vampire stalking the halls of the crumbling castle prove true, will she have the courage to discover the truth of the curse?

The Beast of Burgis Keep likes his privacy. Cursed by the gods seven hundred years ago, Alasdair is almost a vampire, but fights his ever present hunger with each breath. Until Fiona Buchanan stumbles into his castle. She calls to him like no other woman has, and he is lost when confronted with her subtle beauty and ever-present charm.

A legend exists which speaks of a way free of his bloody curse, but is Alasdair capable of trusting Fiona enough to find the path to love?

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Review of An Alien’s Guide to World Domination by Linda Workman-Crider

Book Review: An Alien’s Guide to World Domination by Elizabeth Fountain

Review by: Linda Workman-Crider

If you are seeking mainstream Sci-Fi, this is not it. This is more along the lines of Literary Sci-Fi. If you are not sure of this difference, Octavia Butler’s short story, Speech Sounds, is an award-winning example of Literary Sci-fi and can be found as a free read online. To me, the main difference is the focus on the human condition, along with fancier word choices and sentence structures. For the gist of An Alien’s Guide to World Domination by Elizabeth Fountain, imagine the movie Men in Black, but rewritten so that the aliens remain in their human form for most of the movie (One of the characters in this book is named Thomas Lee Jones, a nod by the author which may lend some credence to my statement).

A boy and an old man, Uncle, secretly stow the boy’s sister and Uncle’s wife aboard their pod as they are being exiled from their planet. They randomly land on Earth at the Teton Dam just as it is filling for the first time. The automatic self-destruct timing of their pod causes the Dam to collapse and flings their wispy alien bodies in two separate directions, with the boy and Uncle landing together in Selah, Washington and the girls flung off in the opposite direction. They all eventually take over dead bodies as their new skins. The boy takes the name Jack Smith and goes off to find his sister. He eventually gives up searching and moves to Prague trying to forget her. Our main alien protagonists, Jack Smith and Louise Armstrong Holliday find themselves working for the same company, PPP3, and smack in the middle of an alien plot to turn all humans into cyborgs. It’s up to them to save us from our fate. Will they decide we’re worth the effort?

While the plot reads science-fictiony enough, the getting through to the alien plot points requires trudging through vast amounts of mundane corporate deals and the unappreciated lives of office workers; some of which is relevant to the story-line, but most of which is commentary on the human condition. I think it was while reading an entire page and a half of an email, sent to Jack from Louie, with the subject line: “Re: My theory about middle aged white men” that I realized this was a literary plot-line and that the guidelines for the mainstream sci-fi review were no longer relevant. My review is now biased due to my, shall we say, lack of enthusiasm for literary fiction. If I use a literary standard that requires some difficulty to, or more than mainstream standard of intricacy for the literary plot, I would label this, in my best professional voice as, “meh.” Some portion of this score is based on a lack of, in literary terms, verisimilitude (believability), on how we get from one plot point to another sometimes by miraculous means (If someone challenges me on this due to literary sci-fi not being based on predictability, but instead on description, I will concede the point. Literary works are often prized for breaking the rules, which makes none of the rules really matter anyway).

While we are given glimpses of most of our alien characters in their natural form, we spend what feels like ninety percent of our time with them in their human forms. Their alien-ness becomes more like an afterthought even as they fight to save our world from galactic invasion. Since the main function of literary fiction is to be a commentary on the human condition, it makes sense for the characters to be written in a way that focuses on their human qualities. Moreover, there is not even a need for our characters to be rounded. They are merely props to propel the statement of the literary work. In this case, “In the event of almost certain galactic doom, humans might not be worth saving.” Love, kindness, and compassion are presented as alien conditions unique to the protagonist characters of our story, especially in our main characters, Jack and Louie.

I would not trust my own review regarding the level of closeness developed with the characters by the reader. My bias against literary works in general would hinder the building of these relationships. However, I can say in fairness that Fountain’s characters all had unique traits and styles that set them apart from one another. Each character was interesting in some way, and with many given their own chapter of background, the architectural foundation for closeness, at the very least, has been laid.

Fountain’s world-building is where she lost me as a reader the most. She wrote the individual settings well and I could even accept alien junk dealers traveling the galaxy to sell pfootahns. I had a hard time accepting an inconsistent ability of “knowing” things that should not be known, of wispy aliens—that could just pop into a dead human body— developing (or needing) zippers to leave the human form, of the perfect dead bodies to match the alien character profile of old man or young woman to be so conveniently available, or of one alien changing into what could be called a fairy godmother and causing fairy-tale types of events to occur. These things push past the sci-fi genre limits, push past the fantasy genre limits, and land within the genre of fabulism. The reader is thus left never really understanding what type of world the story is taking place in.

My overall impression is that An Alien’s Guide to World Domination lacks a focus of genre that will alienate all readers with preferences to specific forms, but most closely matches the label of Literary Science Fiction. Unfortunately, I think a literary reader would find the word choice and sentence structure too mainstream for their liking. It’s quite possible that this book should more aptly labeled as Experimental Fiction and that this issue of mislabeling is the largest actual issue in terms of understanding and recommendation of this book. I believe my issue of bias has been solved. While I would not recommend this book to Sci-fi fans, I can recommend this book under the guise of experimental fiction to those who read literary fiction mainly for the commentary on the human condition.

An Alien’s Guide to World Domination is available on Amazon, Kobo, at Barnes & Noble, and at the Champagne Bookstore.

Review of Amber Gifts by Linda Workman-Crider

Book Review: Amber Gifts by Kevin B. Henry

Review by Linda Workman-Crider

After a series of bad decisions leads to desperate times, what difference can one more make? The answer is plenty.

Hope for a currently homeless Mitchell meant taking a chance on the past, not his past, but the past before he was even born. Drinking the liquid that was gifted to him by a complete stranger could lead to an exciting life traveling through time, or it could turn out to be suicide. What more could he really lose after losing his wife, his career, and his home? He had tried scrambling out of this pit for long enough to know that continuing the struggle wasn’t any guarantee of achieving even a poor man’s view of success. The only future Mitchell could foresee was survival for one more day, if he didn’t get beaten to death, for any number of stupid reasons people pick on a homeless guy, in the meantime.

We wouldn’t have a story, at least not this story, if Mitchell didn’t accept the amber vial of liquid. The only instructions he had been given were to take a sip and speak a year, any year before he was born. He awoke in another time, which answered the questions of would the liquid kill him and did it work. Now, he has to wonder who the stranger was that gave him the vial and why was he—Mitchell, a homeless man, a basic nobody anymore—chosen. In his search for these answers, he discovers that the vial is reusable, that other time-travelers, called Amser, can easily be spotted because they sparkle, and that, even in his new frame of existence, living until the next day is still not guaranteed.

The plot-line for Amber Gifts, on paper, has some major holes in it. What I find extremely refreshing, is that Kevin B. Henry acknowledges through this story that sometimes our past goals become meaninglessness as new reasons to continue (or enhance) our existence emerge. There doesn’t always need to be an epiphany within a character for the plot, or a sub-plot, to shift toward other goals. Just like real life, Mitchell gets caught up in his actions and reactions in dealing with his current situation and never notices that he has changed direction. He just grows past it being relevant anymore. So, I can tell you that as a reader you will be left with some unanswered questions by the time you finish this book. However, for me, the plot-line was a solid continuum of advancement in challenges met and conquered. Kevin B. Henry chose wisely the battles which Mitchell would actually face in this novel, and those he would not.

Mitchell becomes a round character very early. We meet him as a homeless man and very quickly he changes into the time-traveler we follow throughout the book. We see him form relationships and take on responsibilities that were no longer a part of the past-future him. The future-past him becomes a much more heroic character that we would expect in a novel, with reason to feel fear and to question his own next move, but brave enough to still face the challenges head on. I do not mean to say that Mitchell was predictable as a character. He was not. Though the first-person narrative from Mitchell’s perspective was a dead giveaway to his ultimate survival, the need to foretell the year of his next jump impeded any knowledge of the choices he would make next.

This is the section where I would normally discuss a second main character, but for this book the choice is too difficult to make. There is the person who gave Mitchell the vial, known only as “The Man.” There is Gil, the person who teaches Mitchell the very little he knows about time-traveling and who sent him on a mission to help Nicolas and Samantha. There is then, most obviously, Nicolas and Samantha whom Mitchell is helping. The antagonist would have to be the assassin who has been trying to kill Mitchell at almost every turn and then there is Crystin, the woman who is currently responsible for the Amser meeting room in 1918 Chicago and whom eventually becomes Mitchell’s romantic interest besides. Every single one of these characters is integral and irreplaceable within the plot-line and I can name only two as remaining static. Read the book and then tell me if you could choose just one. I am sincerely curious if it was just me.

Kevin B. Henry never keeps us in one time or place for very long. When Mitchell jumps to a year, he also jumps to location that is tied to that year (for instance, jumping to 1918 will always land a time-traveler in Chicago). I am neither a history buff nor a fashionista, so I would have believed just about anything had Henry written it well, which he did. For the sake of my own integrity as a reviewer, I wrote down three items at random to check for a match. Gibson Girl and Lady Lafayette vest were appropriate looks/fashions of the times they had been mentioned in, as was a reference to the Wickenburg Massacre mentioned later on. So, have no-fear, those of you in the know, you will find these details to be realistic.

I was primed from the beginning to enjoy this book because Henry opens with a quote from The Doctor. Though, I have not kept up with the low-budget television series since childhood, any references to Doctor Who stirs fond memories and an instant liking for the mentioner that is hard to shake. Leaving that bias aside, I would still highly recommend this book, that was 30 years in the making, with only a single caveat. Time-traveling is disorientating at first. Pay attention to the time and place as each new chapter begins and definitely read the quotes. I have been the type of reader who skips over these things in the past thinking of them as mere frills and decoration. In this book, that is not the case. Kevin B. Henry has taken ultimate care in presenting the characters, this story, and his amazing talent as writer in the best possible light and it shows. If you’re a Sci-Fi fan, this is not just highly recommended, this is a must-read.

Amber Gifts is available on Amazon, Kobo, and at the Champagne Bookstore. 

Coup de Grace Excerpt

Coup De Grace

Amazing Grace, 6
By Misa Buckley
Science Fiction Romance
$0.99
Amazon: http://goo.gl/lqJMXj
Kobo: https://goo.gl/NGmGh2

Rescued from the evil clutches of Hammel, Grace gathers the mutated ex-residents and goes to war, determined to strike a finishing blow against the evil company.

Excerpt:

My nose tickled. Wanting only to sleep, I batted at it in an attempt to push the itch away. Hands gripped my shoulders. Someone called my name. The floor beneath me trembled. A sound rumbled, both close and yet oddly distant. As if I’d heard it through water.

No, not water. Memory surged, and shock cleared the fog in my brain. I opened my eyes and pushed up.

“It’s okay.” Charity put an arm around me. “You’re safe now.”

“Well, not really,” muttered Emery. “There’s bombs. The whole place is going up.”

I looked around. Charity knelt at my side, Emery stood close by. Heidi was a little further away, wringing her hands as she glanced from me to an open door and back. Lucas waited in the doorway. His expression sent a frisson of fear through me.

“Where’s Benedict?” I asked, my voice faint for reasons that had nothing to do with my recent reawakening.

“Here.” He jogged into sight, sooty and rumpled, but still the best thing I’ve ever seen. The worry on his face turned to a tired smile. “Hello, Grace.”

I snorted and got my feet under me. My knees wobbled as I stood up. I locked them and put my hands on my hips. “Hello? I go through utter hell and all you can say is ‘Hello’?”

He laughed and closed the space. His arms crushed the air out of my lungs. Then his mouth was on mine, starving me of more oxygen. Not that I cared. I held on tight as fractured recollections of what had happened made me shiver.

“Um, could you two save that until we’re out of the burning building?” Charity asked.

Benedict pulled away with a rueful chuckle. “Good point.” He looked at me. “Can you walk?”

“I think so.”

“Come on, then.”

Michael W. Davis, Featured Interview

For Mike Davis, retirement was the perfect opportunity to follow his passion – becoming an author.     

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photo by David Hungate

 

Since 18 years of age, Mike Davis knew he wanted to be a writer. But it wasn’t until retirement that he began to fulfill his dream.

 

“With crises at work or emergencies at home, I just never got the time,” he says.

Davis worked various jobs in the intelligence sector before officially retiring five years ago. He remained active – hunting, taking care of his farm and lake home and babysitting his granddaughter – but also wanted to try his hand at the passion he had been putting off. The journey to where he is now certainly had its share of ups and downs.

“The success rate (for getting published) is very slim,” he says. “I gave myself two years; 22 months in, I finally got ‘the call.’”

His first book, “Tainted Heroes” was published in 2007, receiving great reviews. And his second, “Forgotten Children,” earned second place for Best Romantic Thriller of 2008 from Predators & Editors. Now, Davis has 20 books under his belt, ranging in genres from political thrillers and sci-fi to mystery and romantic suspense, and has won numerous awards for his work.

If he’s sitting at home, he’s most likely writing. His favorite spot to write?

“My man cave while listening to new age or light jazz music,” he says.Davis’ storylines most often come to him in dreams. Others stem from things he sees or hears on the news. For him, understanding the human condition is key to being a good writer.

“I think you have to have life under your belt and to have seen things like pain, suffering, sorrow,” he says.

To start a book, he doesn’t begin with creating characters. Instead, he comes up with a theme, then molds the characters around that idea. Thanks to his career, Davis has a knack for patterns and connecting dots, which he is able to do in his books.

If he could only write one genre for the rest of his life, Davis says he would choose romantic suspense. This may sound strange coming from a man, he says, but he’s a sucker for the bond between a man and woman, and isn’t afraid to share his feelings.

“I feel so fortunate to have the opportunity to write,” he says. “I’m not one that makes $8 million a year on my books; it’s become clear that I write for the writing, not the money.”

He enjoys reading reviews and meeting fans as well.“I put a lot of heart and soul into my stories, so it’s nice to see people excited about reading my books,” he says.

Davis says that after a while, he goes back and reads his own books. Why?

“The characters, they aren’t just creations in my head; they become my friends,” he says. “And that’s my way to go back and revisit my friends.”For more information on Davis’ books and where to purchase them, visit davisstories.com.

Read more: http://theroanoker.com/retire-va/people/the-write-time/#ixzz3Bbg39Zju

Venus Inferno

Click cover for an Excerpt from Chapter One

Venus Inferno comes out very shortly and I'm very excited by it. It represents a couple of firsts for me and one second.

It is my very first - but probably not my last - novella. I rather enjoyed this shorter format, although at times it was difficult to restrain myself from dropping an element into the story that would come up later. There wasn't going to be a later so if I wanted to say something, I had to say it now. I also didn't get the chance to interweave very much social commentary into the story, which I missed more than the chance to expand on the storyline.

It is also the very first story I wrote in the first person, which was very usual. I'm used to the third person and being able to provide different vantage points to allow the reader insight into what is happening. It is also odd using the personal pronoun 'I' all the time. One can't help but to identify with the main character. Admittedly this is an occupational hazard for writers but even more so in this case.

Venus Inferno represents my second published work with Champagne books. Hopefully there will be many more but having a second story accepted and published make it seem all the more real.

One of the things that I really enjoyed about Venus Inferno was that all of the main technology there is real.

Ion drives are real. They are slow compared to chemical rockets but they do exist.

Tellurium is real. It really is one of the nine rarest minerals on earth and it really does fall as snow on Venus.

Thermoelectric Materials are also real. And tellurium - in the form of bismuth telluride and lead telluride - really is a working element of thermoelectric devices.

Who knows? Maybe one day in the future they will be as commonplace as they are in Venus Inferno.

Let's hope so.

Cheers

David

Posted by David Boultbee