Writer's Revolution

Friday, August 19, 2016

Book Blitz: A Chaotic Courtship by Bethany Swafford

For as long as she can remember, Bethany Swafford has loved reading books. That love of words extended to writing as she grew older and when it became more difficult to find a ‘clean’ book, she determined to write her own. Among her favorite authors is Jane Austen, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Georgette Heyer.

When she doesn’t have pen to paper (or fingertips to laptop keyboard), she can generally be found with a book in hand. In her spare time, Bethany reviews books for a book site called More Than A Review.

Connect with the Author here:

~ Facebook ~ Goodreads ~ Instagram ~

Twenty year old Diana Forester, a country bred young woman fears that her inexperience and uncertainties has driven Mr. John Richfield away. On arriving back home from London, she learns that he is already there, ready to continue their acquaintance. If Diana thought that it was difficult in London, courting takes on a whole new aspect when Diana's younger siblings become involved. She finds herself dealing with her own feelings, her sister, her younger brother, jealous members of a house party, a jilted suitor, and a highwayman as she falls in love with the charming Mr. Richfield.

Find all of the Authors books on:

~ Amazon ~ Goodreads ~ Amazon UK ~

Snippet:

“I thought you’d never get here!” Sarah said, ignoring my question completely as she spun to face me. I frowned at her as I put my outside garments away. She seemed highly agitated, a state which I had seldom seen her in. “Diana, I must speak with you!”

“About what?” I asked calmly.

Sarah took up pacing, and for a moment I believed she wasn’t going to continue with whatever she wanted to say. “You must listen to me for once in your life!” she finally said, as

though I had been disagreeable.

Sinking onto our bed, I tried to hide a smile. “Then come out and tell me what has you in such a state.”

“I think Mr. Richfield is the highwayman!”

My smile faded instantly as I stared at her. How had she come up with this ridiculous idea? “You what?” I asked in astonishment.

“There, I’ve said it!” Sarah collapsed into the chair at the dressing table. “I’ve considered the matter carefully, Diana, and as your sister, I could not let you become attached to such a black-hearted criminal!”

I couldn’t help but laugh in response to that absurd notion. “Blackhearted criminal? You cannot be serious, Sarah. I have never heard anything so outlandish. Have you been reading my novels?”

“Diana, I am being completely serious! Stop laughing!”

“How can I take you seriously when everything you say is utter nonsense? Why would you possibly think Mr. Richfield, a true gentleman if I’ve ever met one, is a common criminal?”

Sarah leaned forward, her eyes wide. “Don’t you remember what Aunt Forester said at dinner yesterday?” she asked, lowering her voice for some reason. She acted like she was about to disclose some deep secret to me, and I found myself leaning closer. “About the highwayman being around the Bath area?”

Thinking back, I did in fact remember the conversation and our aunt’s comment. “Yes, of course I remember. What about it?”

“Mr. Richfield was there!”

I failed to follow her line of reasoning. “I’m sure a great many people were in Bath at the same time, Sarah. Aunt and Uncle Forester, for example, were there for two months, I believe.”

Shaking her head, Sarah groaned. “Don’t be obtuse, Diana! You have to see the connection here. Mr. Richfield was in Bath when a highwayman terrorized innocent people. And now, he’s here, where a highwayman has mysteriously appeared to threaten our peaceful home!”

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Thursday, August 18, 2016

Cover Reveal: Murmur by Anne Conley

Add it to your Goodreads TBR pile, now!!!

Exclusive blurb from Murmur, Book 5 in Anne's Pierce Securities Series:

Valerie Dunaway is a former socialite who has hidden from the public eye for years, due to a horrific attack that left her scarred—physically and emotionally.

When a strange masked man makes himself at home with her, she’s unable to run. She calls the cops, but the agoraphobic won’t go into protective custody, so Detective Hollerman calls the only people he trusts: Pierce Securities.

Quinten Pierce is a Renaissance man—artist, lawyer, fighter—but his latest assignment has him losing his ever-present control. He’s got one fight left in his career, and although he can’t wait for it to be over, his opponent seems to have ties to Valerie, thus forcing him to hold on until he finds out exactly who he’s working with.

With the help of the Pierce team, the scarred princess and the gentle giant must silence the murmurs of the past that threaten their future.

Unedited Excerpt from Murmur:

The more Quinten learned about the reason for Valerie Dunaway’s agoraphobia, the less he liked it.

Quinten looked over Evan’s shoulder at the three massive monitors.

“She doesn’t appear to have left her house in three years, dude. She shops online, doesn’t have a car registered to her, nothing.”

Quinten rubbed his jaw in thought. “Who comes in and out?”

“A therapist comes once a week. She pays a house keeper and a man who does gardening and errand-running type stuff. But it looks like that’s about it. She cut all ties with friends and family after the incident. Maybe they took sides?” Evan’s eyes pored over the screens in front of him, faster than Quinten could process what the man was reading.

“What exactly did her husband do to her? You said sliced and diced?” Evan’s choice of words churned in his stomach. Quinten peered at the screens, desperate to find the one that made sense.

“She was a model when they met. She came from old money. The Dunaways? They married into the Stadlers and created a dynasty.” Quinten nodded. That’s why she sounded familiar. He was pretty sure some of his parents’ dinner parties had involved the Dunaways and Stadlers. “Well, she was their face. Apparently, when she married Argyle Ford, he wanted her to stop being her family’s face piece, and when she wouldn’t, he tied her to their marital bed and sliced her face up with a straight razor.”

Quinten’s stomach churned at the prospect of a man doing something like that to the woman he vowed to honor and cherish. “When you say, ‘sliced her face up,’ what exactly, do you mean?”

“Put her in the hospital for two weeks. There were other injuries, mostly from the restraints he used. Her lawyer wouldn’t let her do any reconstructive surgery except the bare minimum until after the trial.”

Evan’s fingers flew over keys and he pointed at one of the monitors. There, displayed larger than life, was the most beautiful creature he’d ever seen, on the arm of some guy, in a newspaper article.

Quinten sat back in his chair. So she’d put the man who’d sworn to love her in prison after he’d taken away her identity as a woman in the worst possible way. She was a model, at least for her family’s enterprises—her mother’s clothing company, and her father’s golf club. Quinten had been there with his dad. She also was a spokesperson for numerous charities. She used her beauty for good, it seemed. And it had pissed off her husband? Was she hogging all his attention? Quinten shook his head, unable to understand it.

At least she’d taken a stand against her attacker. That should have been a step toward recovery. What would be so bad that a woman who lived in the limelight would suddenly disappear from it?

“Tell me if the bastard’s still in jail,” Quinten murmured as he leaned forward to try to make sense of Evan’s screens again. The computer wiz was clicking through them so fast, even Quinten couldn’t keep up.

“Well, I’ll be damned…” Evan mused, his fingers clicking on keys.

“What?” Quinten growled.

“Looks like he got out last month.” Another couple of clicks and something whirred to the left of Quinten. “I’m printing out his address for you. It seems he’s living with an uncle on the other side of the lake from Ms. Dunaway.”

That news didn’t make Quinten happy at all.

“I’m going to her house. See what you can get as far as backgrounds on friends and family, especially his. Find me some trial transcripts. And we’ll go from there.”

Evan nodded, still absorbed in the data on his monitors. “Will do.”

Read other stand-alone novels in the Pierce Securities Series:

Redemption for Misty (Book 4.5)-Available only on Amazon

Murmur pre-order links coming soon!

Keep up with Anne on these platforms:

Contemporary Romance Author

anneconleyauthor@gmail.com

www.anneconley.com

www.facebook.com/anneconleyauthor

https://www.pinterest.com/anneconley/

@anneconley10

FREE Novels!

Contemporary Romance: Neighborly Complications

Paranormal Romance: Falling for Heaven

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Blog Tour: Engines of Liberty: Rebel Heart by Graham Bradley

REBEL HEART
In 1776, the American rebels were thwarted by British magic. The leaders were executed, but the surviving soldiers went into hiding and kept the revolution alive. By 1984 they have developed better weapons and machinery to even the odds. Now all these "technomancers" need is an army for their arsenal, and their newest recruit is 15 year-old Calvin Adler of Baltimore. The problem is, he’s got a pretty strong will, and might give the technomancers at bit of trouble in training...

SUICIDE RUN
Calvin learns that the technomancers aren't all good guys like he'd thought, and soon runs afoul of the worst of them. Now, with a bomb in his chest and a lot of ground to cover, he has a little over a week to save his life, or else become another casualty in the revolution. Meanwhile, an old enemy comes back stronger than ever, with ambition to spare...

PATRIOT'S GAME
Calvin is on the brink of death. The army is scattered, the commodore is dead, and the British mages know about the technomancers' secret weapon. Just as all hope seems lost, Calvin and his friends find out the mages have a weakness, one that could end the war overnight and liberate the colonials.
But it will take a miracle to reach it...

~ Amazon ~ Goodreads ~ Amazon UK ~

~ Amazon Canada ~ Amazon Australia ~

Graham Bradley is a truck driver by trade, but has been writing since age eight, thanks to the encouragement of a childhood teacher, Mrs. Peplowski.

Likewise, his grandmother made him promise to "do something" with his knack for drawing, so he illustrates as well.

He is fluent in Spanish, and knows the proper method of ironing a dress shirt. Despite spending less than 6 hours of his entire life in Indianapolis, the Colts are his team.

He lives in Henderson, Nevada, with his wife and sons.

Connect with the Author here:

~ Instagram ~ Blog ~ Twitter ~

Character Casting

Funny thing is, I used character models for many of these people, and a lot of them were friends and family. (Calvin and Godfrey were based on my wife's two brothers, Patrick and Joe.) If they were to be cast for a film or something, I think I'd like some unknowns for those roles. I will say that I think Jonathan Frakes should play Commodore McCracken, and Marina Sirtis should be his wife Edith, for nerdy reasons. And I would demand a side role for myself, I'm just that vain. I think I'd like to be John Penn, the man who recruits Calvin to join the cause. That would be pretty meta.

Snippets

Book 1

Here's a scene from REBEL HEART. It's not the Boston Tea Party, but, well, the similarities are there.

Calvin recalled the trip he’d taken with his father. They’d left Baltimore and led a horse-drawn wagon all the way up to Massachusetts, where Father knew of a captain who would deliver their wool to a wholesaler in Nouveau France, for a small commission. Their meager stock from that season had filled only a small part of the deck on the captain’s ship; the rest of it was dried tea leaves in strong crates secured with a special kind of iron.

“Frosted iron,” the captain whispered to Father. “So as it can’t be magicked away by the mages, you see. It’s a special product from Ohio. Your load’s safe on this ship, Mr. Adler.”

Father was impressed. “And all this tea?”

The captain told how he and a handful of his friends had planted the valuable crop many years prior, tended to it themselves, harvested the leaves and dried them with painstaking care. It would catch a king’s ransom on the open market, compared to what the crew normally sold on their voyages.

Father and the captain shook hands and parted ways. Yet it would seem that not all of the captain’s commercial associates had been so discreet that year. After Calvin and Father had gotten off the ship, a trio of mages showed up, wands in hand, and matching sneers on their faces.

At the time, Calvin hadn’t understood what was happening. The mages demanded to know the captain’s intent for the tea. He and his crew bristled at the question. Some of them quietly grabbed nearby instruments off the deck, but they weren’t holding them the way they held tools. The captain stated his business, that they meant to sell their haul, and the mage casually said he’d have to confiscate the load.

“It just wouldn’t be fair to the other colonists, who don’t have any tea to sell,” the mage had said, signaling for his companions to seize every crate of product. Calvin scratched his head at this; if the captain and his men had done all the work, why shouldn’t they sell it?

Apparently the captain agreed with this sentiment. What happened next was burned into Calvin’s memory sure as a branding iron marked livestock.

Some of the crewmen were still loading crates of tea leaves onto the deck of the boat. Half a dozen crates sat on a platform mounted to the dock, all rigged up with ropes and pulleys so it could swing out over the water. While the platform hung between the dock and the boat, the captain uttered a word in what sounded like an Indian language. One of the crewmembers, a bronze-skinned man with pitch-black hair shaved in an extreme pattern, drew a tomahawk from behind his belt, spun around and hurled it with stunning accuracy at the rigging. The tomahawk’s blade bit into the ropes, sliced them clean through, and unlaced the complicated weave that allowed the platform to move. Six crates plunged into the salty water below, instantly ruined. To save the falling crates, the mages uttered summoning spells in the Old Saxon tongue, but the anti-magical iron did its job.

Calvin was pretty sure a fight had broken out after that, but he didn’t get to see it. Father clapped a hand over Calvin’s eyes and quickly whisked him away, telling him they were to return to Baltimore immediately.

Even now, Father refused to let Calvin speak of that day, and all of his questions since then had been met with a sharp command to put it out of his mind. Calvin had never forgotten it, though. After years of seeing Fitz and Birty squeeze coins out of the Baltimore residents, Calvin eventually understood why the captain had destroyed his load.