Black Friday Giveaway; While You Are In Liine

I've teamed up with the Sanction Chronicles to offer a Black Friday giveaway tomorrow. If you are in line with a smart phone, send out a tweet with this hashtag: #sanction_online or send a tweet to @@Sanction_YA

For each tweet you will get an entry. If you send a picture of yourself in line then you will receive five entries.

Time to start tweeting; because, why not?!

Tweets all day are eligible for a ten dollar Amazon gift card or a spa basket. As well, tweets during the day could win you the following books:

Rhys Bowen Mystery Giveaway

Print Copy of Royal Blood: A Royal Spyness Mystery

Penniless and thirty-fourth in line to the throne, Lady Georgiana Rannoch finds herself in a truly draining state of affairs. To escape her hateful brother, Georgie accepts an invitation from the Queen to represent the royals at a wedding in Transylvania. But at the macabre-looking castle, Georgie finds the bride with blood running down her chin, and a wedding guest is poisoned. Now it’s up to Georgie to save the nuptial festivities before the couple’s vows become “to love and to cherish, till ‘undeath’ do them part…”

Amazon Paperback * Audio

Barnes & Noble Paperback * Nookbook

Buy a Copy of ANY of Rhys Bowen’s Books and Get a FREE BOOK!

Enter? Send a Tweet @Rhysbowen #Sanction_YA

1pm-10pm EST On September 25th

Alison DeLuca’s The Night Watchman Express Giveaway

Each night, thirteen-year-old Miriam hears the eerie whistle of the Night Watchman Express.

The sound of the train gives her visions of an underground factory and a terrifying laboratory… Miriam has only her guardians’ son for company, and she and Simon dislike each other from the start. But they must find a way to trust each other, or they will end up on the sinister Night Watchman Express.

Enter? Send a Tweet @AlisonDeLuca #Sanction_YA

2-5pm EST On September 25th

Buy the Book – Amazon – Barnes and Noble — Email us and get a Free Book

FREE BOOK: With Purchase of Any Other Participating Authors Title

Fifteen-year old Alex Cronlord just met the boy of her dreams. Literally. Unfortunately, the dream involved him killing her. When she encounters him at her school the next morning, Alex understandably freaks out – and her mother’s bizarre behavior only makes it worse. What Alex doesn’t realize is that she can see the future – which will get her into a whole lot of trouble.

Across town, FBI Agent Moira McBain and her partner Andy Hall investigate a series of house burnings in Dallas, Texas. When a clue leads them to the Cronlords, Moira discovers a disturbing link between Alex’s family and her own – which opens an old wound Moira has spent years trying to ignore.

sanction

Just a Quick Cool Thing

My friend, Anabell Martin, did the cool animated cover for me up there ^^^^. I'm pretty darn excited about it.

Anabell is also the author of Harbinger in the Mist, a ghost story set in a huge Southern house. It's like American Horror Story, with Ouija and a paranormal romance as well.

Personally, I have always loved a great ghost story, and hers made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

Plus, she's all creative and artistic and stuff!

Follow Up: Blog Tour de Troops

Hello!

By this time you should have received your free ebooks. If you posted a comment during the Blog Trou from 11/11 - 11/14, and you did not yet get a book, please leave a comment here and I'll try again.

I hope you enjoy your ebooks as much as I enjoyed being part of the blog tour and sending them to you.

Time to Walk the Walk for Blog Tour de Troops!

Hello, and welcome, Tour followers! I hope you enjoyed your stay at Sip n Share with Susan!

I blogged about my great uncle in the first world war, a few days ago. It was my way of introducing my participation in Blog Tour de Troops, run by the Indie Book Collective (more about the Tour later.) My column today, however, features my family and what happened to them in WWII, in England and Ireland.

My mother and father were kids then. Mum's family had just moved to Northern Ireland, so they were suddenly part of it and found that they had to endure rationing. My dad, though, probably had the worst of it. Along with other kids from London, he was put on a train with his sister, my aunt, and sent to the country, to get away from the terrible air raids at the time.

An evacuation worker writes a label to put on a small boy

Parents put their children on those trains, not knowing where the boys and girls would end up. Brothers and sisters were divided. The towns in the country that received them had no idea what they were getting into, either. One village that had been assigned twenty children ended up with over two hundred extra mouths to feed.

My father never talked about what happened to him during that stint in the country, and that silence is perhaps worse than knowing the truth.


It is in my parents' honor, then, as well as the men and women in uniform, that I join Blog Tour de Troops. 


If you have been following the tour, you joined me here at Fresh Pot of Tea from Susan Salluce's blog, http://sipnsharewithsusan.com/ I do hope that you will continue on to Delphine Pontvieux's blog, http://missnyet.wordpress.com/. I love both of their blog names, by the way, and I can't wait to read what my fellow authors have written to celebrate the troops.


A word about the blog tour: Fifty authors are offering their books as free giveaways to anyone who comments on this and the other blogs. 


In addition, every comment earns an ebook for a troop. Plus, each comment is an entry into a drawing for a free Kindle! So, how cool as that?

So, here is how you get your free ebook:


• Leave a comment below and share with us your connection to our military – is it you, a family member, a friend? Also please remember to include your email, or I can’t send you a free book!


• Do you have a specific soldier in mind to receive my book? Let me know! Leave their info below in your comment.


Here's where I get annoyingly redundant: Don't forget your contact info when you comment! Because otherwise I can't find you and give you a free book!


• If you just want us to designate a soldier, we are on it. 

• It may take me a day or so to get through the comments and respond to you with the free ebook. Oh, I know you want the books and I want to give it to you! But I hope to have loads of responses (since each response sends a free book to a soldier, and all) and so it might take a bit to catch up.

• As authors, we’d ALL really appreciate a review on Amazon after you read our free books. Because that would just be so great.

Please help me to support the troops by sharing this post on Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, or your own blog. You would be the coolest person ever if you did that.


Now, don't forget to mosey on over to Miss Nyet for more Tour, and more books...

Amador Lockdown and Thrown Out: Stories from Exeter

Amador Lockdown is a horror story which starts, naturally enough, in a cemetery. There the cliche ends. As the Paranormal Posse is shown around the graveyard, a black shadow flits by Hector, one of the  group. The chapter ends with an unknown voice; in fact, that voice punctuates some of the chapters. It quotes a dark force: "I am the power 333 of the 10 ether. I am a black hole. I destroy understanding. I sow confusion. I have set my feet in the earth."

At this point I knew I was not reading a run of the  mill horror story. For one thing, Russell puts in lovely details that make the characters come alive. At the graveyard, for  example, "Hector took off his black cowboy hat, and slapped at the sand on his knee." It's a  lovely real touch that stops the  conventional action and makes the reader care about the characters.

The real  plot begins, however, when the  Paranormal Posse is called in to investigate events at the Amador Hotel in Las  Cruces. The location and characters are described with a sure touch, and as the horror increases throughout the  book, with events at a quinceanera, a movie theater, and int the actual hotel, I could not stop reading the gripping story.

Thrown Out: Stories from Exeter is a different sort of book, from the other side of the country. It is a collection of stories all set in Exeter, Massachusetts. Coughlin is fascinated by historical research, and it shows in her work. She is able to give fascinating descriptions about the area, such as the background of Irish mafia gangs, in Bones of the Past, in which Ellie discovers some of the nastier secrets of her town.

End Run and Delicate Dance are extremely well written stories, but it was the title story in the collection that I loved the most.

In Thrown Out, the author investigates the gay relationship between Chris and Dan, and the problems that the love affair brings with it off campus. The crisis comes during a softball game, which Coughlin describes so perfectly that you feel you are on the bleachers, watching it.

Obviously,  the author knows her stuff. More importantly, she knows how to communicate it.