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August 31, 2014

Blood & Gold by T.G. Ayer ~ Release Day Blitz with Giveaway!


Welcome to the Release Day Blitz for T.G. Ayer's Blood & Gold, the second book in The Hand of Kali Series! I can't wait to read this series!! I love the covers, and the books sound different from what I've been reading lately. Don't forget to check out the giveaway at the bottom of the post!   



Title: Blood & Gold 
Series: The Hand of Kali #2
Author: T.G. Ayer
Release Date: August 31st 2014




Purchase Link: Amazon US




As Maya perfects her Fire skills she finds there is more to being the Hand of Kali than just wielding Fire.


A surprising summons to Mount Kailas takes Maya on a journey to meet the Lord of the Hindu Pantheon – Lord Shiva himself. This time the God’s request may not be so easy to fulfill.



Maya and her friends must flee the demons and the ruthless killers on their trail to retrieve the golden bow of Lord Rama.



Can Maya get the bow back in time, and also save a certain demon king in the process?







Fire & Shadow 
(The Hand of Kali #1)
Release Date: 23rd July 2013


Normal people sneak out to a party and have fun. Maya Rao ends the evening by incinerating the guy who attacks her.

Nik Lucas, sexy, new in town and totally forbidden, happens to walk in on her. Normal guys would run for the hills. Nik knows a whole lot more than he's telling.

Maya doesn't believe the gods are real, doesn't waste her time with mere mythology. But when gods, demons and hellhounds become the new normal and wielding fire becomes her new skill, she must decide what it is she really believes.

Can Maya accept that normal is something she will never be because it isn't normal to be ...

The Hand of Kali.

A new Paranormal coming of age series delving in the fantasy and magic of Hindu mythology and its plethora of gods, demons, legends & mythology.


Amazon | B&N | iTunes | Kobo | Smashwords   

 


I have been a writer from the time I was old enough to recognize that reading was a doorway into my imagination. Poetry was my first foray into the art of the written word. Books were my best friends, my escape, my haven. I am essentially a recluse but this part of my personality is impossible to practice given I have two teenage daughters, who are actually my friends, my tea-makers, my confidantes… I am blessed with a husband who has left me for golf. It’s a fair trade as I have left him for writing. We are both passionate supporters of each others loves – it works wonderfully…

My heart is currently broken in two. One half resides in South Africa where my old roots still remain, and my heart still longs for the endless beaches and the smell of moist soil after a summer downpour. My love for Ma Afrika will never fade. The other half of me has been transplanted to the Land of the Long White Cloud. The land of the Taniwha, beautiful Maraes, and volcanoes. The land of green, pure beauty that truly inspires. And because I am so torn between these two lands – I shall forever remain cross-eyed.

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Docked & Anchored by Rachael Wade ~ Blitz: Excerpt & Giveaway!


Welcome to the Blitz for Rachael Wade's Docked & Anchored, books one and two in the Docked Series! If you recall, I adored her novel, The Replacement, which caused me to cry uncontrollably. Something about that story just brought out some major emotions in me! Due to my love for that book, Rachael Wade has become an auto-buy author for me, and if you've ever read her books, then you know why. If you haven't had a chance to yet, then I highly recommend reading them asap! 

Read on for an excerpt and giveaway! :D


Title: Docked
Series: Docked #1
Author: Rachael Wade
Genre: Contemporary, New Adult

Purchase: Amazon | B&N




  

A new, sensual Adult Contemporary Romance from author of the Amazon bestselling PRESERVATION SERIES, THE REPLACEMENT, and LOVE AND RELATIVITY. Coming to eReaders everywhere May 26, 2014. 

It's not water that paralyzes Anya Banks - it's the ocean. Tumultuous and powerful, sleek and unpredictable, it's just like Tanner Christensen, owner of Trident Voyager, the cruise ship she's been talked into boarding by her vivacious, foodie fanatic best friend and co-worker, Lana. Tanner exudes confidence, and his raw masculinity is hard to resist. But Anya came aboard to work, face her demons, and then get the hell back to dry land. 

Until Tanner convinces her to take the plunge. 

She quickly dives into a fun, carefree arrangement with him and embraces her goal to be brave, no matter how loudly her shaky knees tell her to abandon ship. For twelve days, Tanner's all hers. For twelve days, she's his goddess. Once the cruise is over and the ship docks, she won't be the same. But being brave always costs something, and this time, it might cost her heart.



Title: Anchored
Series: Docked #2
Releases in September!





Tanner and Anya's story continues...

Choosing to put aside her reservations about spending more time with Tanner Christensen, Anya said to hell with her instinct and agreed to another cruise. She agreed to take the risk. But now she's stuck.

Stuck on Trident Voyager. 

Stuck with Tanner Christensen, and the woman hell bent on making her pay.

What was supposed to be a fun, careless fling turned out to be something else entirely. Something she wasn't prepared for and something she certainly can't take back. The damage is done, and this time, Lana and Brie aren't by her side to help her weather the storm. There are no escape routes, only ship decks, miles of white sand, and one very self-assured, dominant cruise ship owner determined to get her attention and set things straight.

Lana might still be her partner in crime, but it's Anya who must fight for - and protect - her heart when it's all said and done.



~ Excerpt from Docked ~


A soft breeze tickles my shoulder, waking me from my serene, sleepy haze. One glance at my watch tells me it's time to head back to the room if I expect to be ready for this rendezvous with Lana and Mr. Blue Eyes. She's right, of course. She's convinced me to go. But only because it really does sound like fun, and I'd much rather let Lana humor herself than spend my first afternoon on a cruise ship by myself. 

I collect my things and hurry down the deck, veering around a corner to catch the elevator. The hallway is bustling with people getting on and off, many of them opting to take the stairs instead of waiting for the next lift. After waiting patiently for a few minutes, I decide to follow their cue and start for the stairs. I'm cutting it close.

I jog up two flights, sighing when our stateroom door comes into view. The hall is quiet, except for the faint sound of hushed giggling just a few doors down. I insert my room key and crane my head toward the noise, my fingers stilling at the sight. There at the end of the hall, a curvaceous brunette is entangled with Mr. Blue Eyes. I almost don't recognize him, but his baby blue tie immediately gives him away. His tall frame is pinning the brunette's petite one to the wall, one hand pushing up her skirt, fingers gripping her upper thigh. He playfully bites her bottom lip and she giggles again, hooking her leg around his waist. The scene is entirely intimate, not to mention unprofessional for Mr. Owner of the Ship, and yet here I am, watching like a total stalker. 

I can't look away.

"Tanner," the girl moans against his mouth, "take me inside." 

"I'll take you right here." 

"Someone will see," she whispers, gripping his forearms. He subtly rocks his hips, pushing her tighter against the wall, and I realize I'm gaping again, my jaw slack as I watch his hands roam over her body. 

"No one's around," he whispers back. "Everyone's headed up to the lounge for the party." 

"Don't you have to be there?"

"I have fifteen minutes." 

"That's it?" The girl whines, her face turning pouty.

"Oh, it's enough, baby." His hand travels higher up her skirt, and I see a flash of red lace before my clumsiness gives me away. The room key fumbles in my fingers and drops from the doorknob to the floor. I quickly bend to swipe it up, bonking my head on the doorknob in the process. 

"Shit!" I quickly stand, frantically attempting to open the door. I risk a side-glance toward them. 

I wish I hadn't.   

Tanner clears his throat, and his eyes lock onto me like missiles. As soon as I meet them, he looks away, back to the brunette, mumbling something I can't quite make out. It involves a string of F-bombs. Adjusting his groin and tugging at the sleeves of his suit jacket, he quietly directs the brunette to open their stateroom door. She's amused and embarrassed, covering her mouth as she struggles to unlock the door. Tanner and I exchange one last glance before both of our doors open, saving the day. He and the brunette hurry inside, and I hustle into my room just as quickly, exhaling in relief the moment the door shuts behind me. 

I work to collect my wits. I've just made a complete fool out of myself, and in less than fifteen minutes, I'm supposed to face the man I just caught manhandling his girlfriend. Hell, more than that. He would have fucked her right there in the hallway had I not ruined the heat of the moment. I fall back against the door and hang my head in exasperation.

"Lan?" I call out, pushing myself off the door and moving toward the tiny bathroom. She's not there, and the rest of the cabin is empty. She must have left for the lounge already. Hurrying to my suitcase, I dig around for my little black dress - the one Lana suggested I wear - and then begin washing up. I take a few minutes to freshen up my loose, brown curls and apply some smoky eyeliner to enhance my hazel brown eyes. I feel fresher, but no amount of primping will prevent the big ol' pile of awkward I'm about to walk into. 


Rachael Wade is the Amazon bestselling author of The Preservation Series, The Resistance Trilogy, and the upcoming sci-fi series, The Keepers Trilogy. When she's not writing, she's busy learning French, watching too many movies, and learning how to protect animals and the environment. 

Visit her at http://www.RachaelWade.com and http://www.LightsOnOutreach.com, or come chat with her on Twitter via @RachaelWade


Website | Facebook | Twitter | Goodreads      





Blitz organized by:

August 30, 2014

Pieces of Autumn by Mara Black ~ Blog Tour: Review & Giveaway

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Welcome to my stop on the Pieces of Autumn Blog Tour hosted by Literati Author Services! Click here to follow along with the full tour schedule. 


Pieces of Autumn photo autumnfinal-400_zpsd40add7d.jpgTitle: Pieces of Autumn 

Author: Mara Black 

Genre: Dark Romance 18 + 

Publish Date: July 31, 2014 

Publisher: Indie Published 

Event organized by: Literati Author Services, Inc.            



I wish I could tell you that I was stolen.

Kidnapped off the street in some third-world country, sold against my will, while a desperate family back home waited and prayed and talked about me on the news.

I wish I could tell you that, because then you might understand.

What really happened? I walked to my fate with my eyes wide open. But before you say I deserved whatever happened to me, you should know. I was desperate. I was alone. I was afraid for my life. You would have done the same thing.

I thought things couldn’t possibly get any worse.

But then, I woke up in darkness, unable to move. There was only one thing I was sure of: I wasn’t alone anymore.

And then I heard HIS voice...





Amazon | B&N




I wasn't sure what to expect from Pieces of Autumn after reading the synopsis. I remember feeling intrigued to find out who this girl was and what happened to her. Told from two different characters' POV, this novel was so much more than the synopsis leads you to believe. 

Hints are dropped here and there that the world has gone to hell and now only the extremely wealthy have luxuries such as running water and electricity. Society didn't collapse too terribly long ago; Autumn, the main character, can still remember vividly what life was like before the collapse. I've never come across this in a dark romance before, and it made for an interesting backdrop to the story.  

Spending several years living homeless, Autumn became desperate to stay one step ahead of the man searching for her. With her life in jeopardy from both the man searching for her and the dangers of living on the streets, she decided to trade safety for freedom. It's been said that you can't have both - to be safer, you have to give up some freedom. Autumn gave up all of her freedom for only a small bit of safety. 

Autumn is given to a man named Tate, also known as the Viper. Their relationship is dark and twisted but also has moments where they understand each other better than anyone they've come into contact with for a very long time. I didn't understand why Autumn was so attracted to Tate right away without knowing him, and even she questioned herself time and time again.  She saw something in him that he didn't want her to see, and he did his best to hide it but it was too late. She already knew it was there. 

I haven't thought of people as all good or all bad since I was a little girl. I know we're all a mixture of both with some of us having a little more of one or the other. Admittedly, that's a terribly simplistic way of explaining my view on human nature, but we're bad or good in degrees. Even people whom we see as truly evil started out as innocent babies. Pieces of Autumn forced me to examine not only the dark side of humanity but my own as well, and it was uncomfortable at times. 

Pieces of Autumn couldn't have been a better title for this book. Autumn was in pieces at the beginning, and I'll leave it to you to find out if she's still in pieces by the end. This novel gave me much to think about while at the same time delivering a story that won't be forgotten anytime soon, if ever. 


My Rating:    

  



Mara Black is a connoisseur of love that lurks in the shadows. 








~ Signed book of Pieces of Autumn ~



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August 28, 2014

Guardian by Courtney Cole ~ Release Day Launch: Excerpt, Review & Giveaway

Guardian RDL Banner  

We are absolutely over the moon excited about the Release Day Launch for Courtney Cole's GUARDIAN!!! GUARDIAN is a YA Paranormal Romance, and a book close to Courtney’s heart

Not only is this fabulous book back in a big way, it's Courtney's birthday! To celebrate all of the awesome she is making a few select titles only .99 TODAY ONLY! Grab them all and thank us later.

Guardian


 Amazon ** B&N ** Kobo ** iBooks









Sometimes, things that go bump in the night are real. 

My name is Whitney Lane. I’m sixteen years old and at first, I thought I was crazy. 

I kept seeing shadows move along walls, and hearing whispers around corners, but whenever I looked, there was never anything there. 

Until one day, there was. 

Our world isn’t what we think. There are things around us, good things, bad things, scary things. 

Things that we tell ourselves aren’t real, but they are. 

They’re very real, and they’re terrifying. 

I’ve been swept up now, in a battle of good and evil, confused about love and what is supposed to be love, but isn’t. I don’t know what to think anymore. I can’t trust my emotions and I don’t know what is true. 

There’s only one thing I know for sure.

Nothing is what it seems.


  Guardian Available now





Sometimes the things that go bump in the night are real.

   Happy birthday to me. 
   I close my eyes and burrow into my pillow as I try to sleep, as I try to escape this life. 
   It’s a life I never thought I’d have, a life I most certainly don’t want. 
   I’m still feeling sorry for myself as the blackness of sleep finally overtakes me. 
   I don’t know what time it is when I shoot straight upward like a rocket. Something had yanked me from the oblivion of sleep, something loud and shrill scraping my window. 
   My room is completely dark and I glance at my clock in confusion. 
   3:00 a.m. 
   As my heart pounds hard against my ribcage, I quickly scan every corner of the room. 
   In the last few hours, dark shadows had migrated onto my pink walls, but they’re familiar, nothing out of the ordinary, although in the night, they seem twisted and scary. 
   I remain motionless as I allow the sleep-induced fog to clear from my brain.    
   As I sit, I feel common sense and logic slowly returning. 
   Of course nothing had touched my window because my bedroom is on the second floor. Nothing can reach it. And there are no trees near enough to brush against it. It was just a dream. 
   It was only a dream. 
   I chant it silently to myself like a mantra as I consciously slow my breathing down, hoping that my racing pulse will soon follow. It was only a dream. 
   But just as I’m calming down, I hear it again. 
   A high-pitched shrill shriek, reminiscent of fingernails on a chalkboard, scraping down my window. I gasp and pull my feet up to my chest, which is when I notice the temperature. 
   I notice because I can see my breath. 
   Timidly, I blow a puff out again, watching the way my breath turns white in the air.    
   Holy crap. Oh my God. 
   What the hell? 
   The sound stops and stillness surrounds me once again, the silence so loud that it echoes in my ear. 
   Nothing moves around me, the shadows are perfectly still as they twist across my wall. They look like mangled fingers and arms and legs, but they don’t move. 
   My legs are weak and shaking, but I know I have to move. I have to move off my bed because it feels like something is under it. Something terrifying. 
   With a leap, I bound across the room, my feet hitting the floor several feet away from the edge of my bed. 
   The floor is ice cold, as though it had been covered in a blanket of snow. 
   I’m trembling as I race to the far wall and check the thermostat. Because that’s the only explanation. I must’ve bumped it earlier, I must’ve turned the AC way down. 
   But the luminous numbers stare at me in contradiction. 
   74 degrees. 
   It must be broken. It has to be broken. 
   My breath is coming in pants now, terrified, anxious pants. 
   My fear isn’t logical. I know there’s nothing here. I’m the only one in this room. 
   Or am I? 
   The air seems to push at me from all around, something dark, something heavy, something real. Something unseen. 
   My fingers shake, my legs tremble, and then all of a sudden, they can no longer support my weight. I go down like a pile of bricks, collapsing onto the floor. I lie still because I can’t move, because something seems to sit on my chest, holding me down. 
   The shadows start to move, to slither across the walls, to reach and pull and dance. 
   I struggle to focus, to see what it is. 
   But all I can see are the numbers on the thermostat suddenly moving, rapidly counting down from 74 to 20. 
   Twenty degrees? 
   The air is frigid as I suck it in, as I try to pull the ice crystals into my mouth so I can breathe. 
   All of a sudden, there’s a blackness in front of me. It hovers over me, a shapeless mass, sucking in the cells of the air, the atoms and the molecules. It’s darker than the blackness of my room, blacker than the blackest black. 
   Something is here. 
   With me. 
   “Dad?” I whisper in a white puff. Because what else could it be? 
   I reach out a finger to touch it, and then I can’t see anything else, because the darkness of it surrounds me, bleeding into everything else, even my vision. The shriek is back, screaming into my ears, bleeding into my brain. 
   Then there’s nothing.





I think all of us as human beings wonder at some point why we're here, why we have to die, and what will happen to us after we die. Guardian is a story which explores possible answers to those questions. Reading this novel was emotional in a positive way and even comforting at times in terms of grief and life and death. I can't remember identifying with a character as much as I did Whitney with the way she grieved for her father. 

At the beginning of Guardian, Whitney's dad died several weeks ago, leaving behind her and her mom and younger sister. Since his death, Whitney's mom has been wrapped in a deep depression, and Whitney becomes the glue holding everything together. She begins caring for her sister, cooking, paying the bills...all of the tasks adults are responsible for doing. 

On top of taking on these heavy responsibilities, she's also heavily grieving and only sixteen years old. So it's completely understandable that when she starts having difficulty differentiating between dreams and reality and seeing things out of the corner of her eye, she thinks she's losing it. I would think that about myself as well! 

Reading about Whitney's feelings of loss will probably always stay with me. I lost my mom to cancer right when I started high school, and while I didn't have to step in and take care of my little sister, I had the feeling I should and even wanted to. Not that I ever thought I could take our mom's place, but I knew my sister didn't get as many years with her as I did and wanted to care for her like a mom would. 

I will say I'm glad I wasn't in Whitney's situation.
There isn't anything more frightening to me than demons. Not even zombies. Wars between angels and demons fighting over human's souls - the stakes can't get much higher than life, death and the beyond. There were some tense moments where I had no idea what was going to happen. I went along for the ride and was not disappointed! 

Guardian is the first book by Courtney Cole I've read, and I'm definitely a fan. This novel satisfied my craving for an angel/demon story and will stay with me long after the last page. 


My Rating:





To celebrate the release of GUARDIAN and Courtney's birthday the following books are on sale for .99, today only!



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Courtney Cole is a novelist who would eat mythology for breakfast if she could. She has a degree in Business, but has since discovered that corporate America is not nearly as fun to live in as fictional worlds. She loves chocolate and roller coasters and hates waiting and rude people. 

Courtney lives in quiet suburbia, close to Lake Michigan, with her real-life Prince Charming, her ornery kids (there is a small chance that they get their orneriness from their mother) and a small domestic zoo.    


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