Archive for March 20, 2015

Darkness Calling ~ Author Guest Post Plus A Giveaway and Free Book!

Posted: March 20, 2015 in Blog Tour, Freebies!, giveaways, Guest Post, Romance, urban fantasy
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I have so much to share with you today.

Come on in and meet the Primani.

Enjoy the character interview.

And don’t forget to enter the giveaway!

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Interview with Aisling Andersson

Bio: Aisling Andersson is one of the youngest Primani in existence today. Born in Norway in the late 1700s, she was made by the archangel Gabriel in a rare moment of compassion. Now retired from combat service, she lives in Plattsburgh, New York, with her seven-year-old son, Sean Michael, and Dalmatians Rambo and Winchester. Eternally drawn to the bad boys, she’s made a few colossal mistakes, but has finally found peace with her past.

AislingAndersson

Describe yourself. What is your worst and best quality?

“Hm. I try to stay true to myself even if that truth is dark. I might be immortal but that doesn’t mean a thousand lifetimes of sunshine and roses. Until just recently, the only light in my life was my son Sean Michael. I like to think I’m an excellent mother. He’s my number one priority. I’m sorry. I’m getting sidetracked. You asked about my qualities. I guess my ability to be honest about who and what I am is my best quality. If I had to narrow down bad qualities to just one, it would be my lack of trust of pretty much any other creature–human, angel, or demon. I’m working on this with Sean, but my walls are still pretty thick.”

What is the one thing you wish other people knew about you?

“I just want to live a quiet life with my family. Everyone thinks I’m some kind of slutty skank after what happened in Rome. You wouldn’t believe the hate mail I’m getting! But here’s the thing — That, um, episode with Cain wasn’t normal for me. I’m not usually like that, but I was in a bad place, and he was there to offer some escape. It’s hard to think about the past when you’re living in the moment. Sure, it turned out he was a demon, but the sex was fabulous. I won’t deny it. I know there must be women who’ve done the same thing — wicked sex with a totally inappropriate lover. It doesn’t make me a horrible person. I hope readers can relate and cut me some slack. I’d really like the hate mail to stop.”

What are you most afraid of?

“Other than being buried alive? I dread the thought of losing my son to his destiny. The Four Horsemen will take him, and I may never see him again. Raphael promises that won’t happen, but how does he really know for sure? We don’t know what Armageddon will be like. I can’t stand the thought of losing Sean Michael.”

What about Sean? How does he feel about that?

“Sean isn’t thrilled with the idea of losing Sean Michael either, but he’s the warrior in the family, isn’t he? He’s working his ass off to prepare our boy for what’s coming. I’ve never seen a stronger fighter or a more determined man. He’ll do everything in his power to keep our baby safe.”

Okay, so on a lighter note. How are things with Sean? Have you made any future plans yet?

“Things are really, really good. I can’t believe how this has turned out. I was so bitchy to him, but he’s forgiven me. He just wants us to move forward and be a family for once. After all this time, it’s wonderful to have peace.”

One last question for you. Did you two really destroy a building during sex? I can’t believe that’s possible!

“Oh, my God! I can’t believe you’d go there! Seriously?”

Come on. Give my readers a juicy Sean story. They love him. Is it true or not?

“Okay. Fine. It’s true. We did break the turret of the hotel. Our energies were off the hook that night, and we didn’t know we’d create something like a sound wave! It was the most intense sex I’ve ever had. I won’t lie. Sean’s amazing. And speaking of Sean… I have to run. I’m late for a date!”

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DARKNESS CALLING (Primani #5)

by Laurie Olerich

Dark Urban Fantasy Romance

Published on March 5th, 2015

 

ad infinitum: endlessly, forever, without limit

Finally freed from a century in purgatory, former-wild child Aisling just wants to raise her son and live as a normal human again. Her taste of freedom is cut short the moment her past comes to claim her. There’s one reason she was exiled, and his name is Cain. With him, there was only darkness, and the angels help her, she liked it that way. Now he’s back, and his commands are simple. Stay away from Sean or else. But when he threatens to take her son, she turns to the one man who can save them both. Sean.

Sean is sick and tired of his baby mama’s hateful attitude. Her mood swings give him whiplash, and he’s seriously thinking of strangling her. But when a brutal old enemy shows up to destroy everyone Sean loves, he discovers Aisling is hiding more than her feelings for him.

Joining forces to protect their son, Sean and Aisling set out on a journey that leads them from the city streets of Manhattan to the elegant hotels of Vienna to the final terrifying showdown in the bowels of Rome.

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Add Darkness Calling to your Goodreads list!

SPECIAL OFFER:

The first book in the series, Primani, is currently FREE!

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Laurie Olerich

 

Laurie Olerich is the author of the urban fantasy romance series Primani. She loves to create guilty pleasures full of exciting locations, roller coaster action, strong, quirky heroines, and steaming hot heroes who’ll raise the temperature in any room you’re in! Paranormal romance? Check! Urban fantasy? Check! Romantic suspense? Check! Her Primani series combines the best of the three. When not plotting, writing, or fantasizing about her next hero, she’s planning parties, traveling the world, and spending lazy nights with her son, her Dal pals, and friends. Laurie spent most of her life in the Northeastern United States and in Germany. She now lives in San Antonio, Texas, with her son and Dalmatian duo, Domino and Rambo. Before throwing caution to the wind and diving into a writing career, Laurie dedicated 20 years to a career spent around men with guns and cool toys…this explains her obsession with both!

Website – Twitter – Facebook – Pinterest – Goodreads

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International Giveaway

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Too much of a good thing? Our Dried Voices by Greg Hickey ~ Tour Review

Posted: March 20, 2015 in Blog Tour, Dystopian, giveaways, reviews, Science Fiction
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Our Dried Voices Tour Banner
Hi ya’ll It’s my stop on the tour for Our Dried Voices.
I’m excited to share my review with you.
And there’s also a glimpse inside the book.
Check out this dystopian, science fiction venture.
It’s out of this world!
Our Dried Voices

 

Title: Our Dried Voices 

Author: Greg Hickey

Publisher: Scribe Publishing Company

Publication Date: November 4, 2014

Pages: 234

ISBN: 978-1940368931

Genre: Dystopian / Science Fiction

Format: Paperback, eBook (.mobi / Kindle), PDF

My Review

It’s hundreds of years in the future. Cancer has been cured. The remaining humans now colonize the lovely planet, Pearl. It’s Utopia.

You never want for anything. No longer suffer illness. It’s so perfect you don’t even need to think.

Until something goes wrong. The machines that run the utopian existence are breaking down. Mysterious figures are roaming the crowds. One young man, Samuel must repair the machines and set things right or the last humans may perish.

This book defied a real description. I started it and stopped, started it and stopped. Something kept drawing me back. Maybe the author put in some subliminal messages. LOL Whatever it was, I’m glad I kept reading. It’s unlike anything I’ve read before.

The people were so strange. I call them The Stepford Shells. They have no minds of their own. The bells would toll, the colonists would line up for breakfast. The bells would toll and they would line up for lunch. And so on. They had a hive or herd mentality.

You can imagine how bad it got when the food ran short, or the shelter doors didn’t open. It was chaos.

Samuel studied the break downs. He noticed the strange figures, called them  heroes, who would appear when a break down occurred and vanish just as quickly.

All of these colonists move through the days, repeat the same things, never even speak to each other. Why did Samuel awaken? Who was the girl he kept seeing wandering off on her own? What were the heroes up to? Were they good or bad for the colony?

I kept wondering why the title Dried Voices. Then I came to a point in the book and had an aha moment. I now knew why.

I reached the end and didn’t get all of the answers to my questions. There is an end, a clever one, yet a lot of this is left to your own interpretation.  I’d like to know what happened to the thinkers, the producers of the machines. I’d like to know what happens after the end.

I sure hope there is a sequel as I’m anxious to know.

4 Stars

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Synopsis

In 2153, cancer was cured. In 2189, AIDS. And in 2235, the last members of the human race traveled to a far distant planet called Pearl to begin the next chapter of humanity. Several hundred years after their arrival, the remainder of humanity lives in a utopian colony in which every want is satisfied automatically, and there is no need for human labor, struggle or thought. But when the machines that regulate the colony begin to malfunction, the colonists are faced with a test for the first time in their existence. With the lives of the colonists at stake, it is left to a young man named Samuel to repair these breakdowns and save the colony. Aided by his friend Penny, Samuel rises to meet each challenge. But he soon discovers a mysterious group of people behind each of these problems, and he must somehow find and defeat these saboteurs in order to rescue his colony.

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Check out this excerpt!

The sound of the bells echoed across the colony.
They sounded five times, and by the end of the fifth peal everyone had stopped
what they were doing and started to walk toward the nearest source of the
noise. The bells had a tinny, hollow sound to them. To be sure, it was
unmistakably the sound of bells, but it lacked that rich, thunderous, rolling
swell once heard in passing by an old church at the top of the hour. Instead,
it was as though the sound of real bells had been recorded and re-recorded ad
infinitum until only bell-like sounds now remained.
The bells called the people to the midday meal. All
across the lush meadow, the colonists fell into a kind of reverie. Moments
earlier, they had been romping through the meadow or splashing in the river
with the joyful abandon of children, while others napped blissfully at the base
of a modest hill or fornicated with some momentary lover in the shade of a
spreading tree. But now their innocent laughter, their hushed excited voices,
their intermittent shrieks of pleasure all ceased for an instant as they moved
as one toward the sound of the bells. As soon as the fifth toll had faded in
the air, the human noise resumed as though it had never been silenced. The
colonists walked eagerly but unhurriedly, small, hairless, brown-skinned
people, all barefooted and dressed in simple, cream-colored smocks.
The bell sounds came from the seven meal halls
spread throughout the colony—long, tall, rectangular buildings erected from the
black, craggy rock characteristic of the mountains of Pearl, now smoothed down and
cut into bricks and painted a soothing off-white. Another smaller building
abutted one end of each meal hall. Their wan stone façades matched those of the
larger halls and there were no discernible entryways in their solid exteriors.
As the colonists entered each meal hall, they lined
up along the right-hand wall to wait for their food. The walls were painted a
pale sky blue, and on the far wall was a small square hole. One by one, each
diner stepped forward in line, a small, red light above the hole flashed, a
short clicking and whirring noise sounded and then a round, firm, dark brown
cake appeared at the edge of the opening. One by one, each colonist took the
proffered meal cake and carried it over to one of the many wooden tables or out
into the meadow.
Near the front of the line at one hall, a male
colonist turned to face the man behind him.
“Hellohoweryou?” said the first man.
“Goodthankshoweryou?” replied the second man.
“Goodthankshoweryou?”
“Goodthankshoweryou?”
The two men stared blankly at each other for a
moment. Then the first man blinked and said “Goodweathertoday.”
The second bobbed his head and grinned.
“Betterenyesterday.”
They continued to gaze at each other with vapid
expressions until the first man turned around and stepped forward in line. The
two men were right. It was Tuesday. It rained on Mondays. And thanks to the
colony’s weather modification system, it had rained every Monday, and only on
Monday, for hundreds of years.
***
When about half the colonists at this particular
meal hall had received their food, an adult woman moved to the front of the
line. A young boy, no taller than her waist, stood behind her. The woman
stepped up to the wall, the red light above the hole flashed… and nothing
happened. There was no clicking, no whirring, and no meal cake emerged from the
hole in the milky blue wall. Some people a few places behind the first woman,
by now so accustomed to the regular pace of the line, stepped forward in
anticipation of her taking the food and continuing on. When the line did not
move, they bumped awkwardly into the colonists in front of them, very much
surprised that there should be a fleshy, breathing, human body in their path
instead of empty space. Those closest to the front of the line fell silent when
they saw the woman had not yet received her meal, and then the silence spread
evenly and rhythmically down the line, like a row of pillowed dominoes falling
to the floor. Yet all the colonists continued to wear the same insipid
half-grin on their faces as they waited patiently for the food to be dispensed
and the line to creep forward once more.
A long, loud, whining shriek from the young boy
waiting with his mother at the front of the line broke through the stillness,
and it was this sound, not the actual interruption of the food service, which
seemed to have the greatest effect on those in the hall. The boy did not cry.
He shed no tears, and the sound which emerged from his mouth was not a
breathless and choked sobbing, or even the petulant howl of a child’s tantrum.
It was a primal, animal moan that rose from the depths of his unfilled stomach,
rushed up his throat with a cold and persistent ferocity and forced its way
over his teeth, throwing his head back as it broke from his lips. No one tried
to comfort the boy. His mother did not even turn around to look at him. Her
weak smile faded, but she continued to stare at the dark hole in the wall,
still waiting for her meal to appear. Then a child some dozen places back in
the line picked up the boy’s howl, and then a woman farther behind did the
same. Soon the entire line was wailing loudly.
Those colonists who had already received their
meals hunkered over their cakes and stuffed their last bites into their mouths.
One of them stood up, bumping hard into his table. The rest followed. They
walked hurriedly to the door, brushing past the onlookers from outside who had
gathered to see what all the noise was about. Those still in line stared
dazedly at the others around them, at the now half-empty hall, an incipient
question forming somewhere deep in their skulls.
A man in the middle of the line broke their
unsteady ranks first. He ran, stumbling over tables and chairs bolted to the
floor in his maddened dash toward the doorway. The rest of the line scattered
in his wake. Out through the door they went, cracking bony limbs on the wooden
furniture in their paths, pushing and trampling one another as they all tried
to force their way through the doorway at once, like blood cells pumped through
a clotted artery.
Those who had already finished their meals stood
outside in a loose ring several meters away from the entrance of the food hall,
and as the wild runners pushed their way through the door, they began to run as
well, picking up the wail of the unfed as they went. They ran in no particular
direction, a single mass exodus from the hall, teeming out across the gay green
meadows, up and over the soft, undulating hills, and their cries rippled
throughout the once-peaceful fields to fill the void left by the cessation of
the bells with a sound far more vibrant than those stale chimes which had just
called them to their uneaten meal.
.

Purchase The Book:

Amazon ~ B&N ~ Goodreads

 
 

Discuss this book in our PUYB Virtual Book Club at Goodreads by clicking HERE

About The Author:

Greg Hickey

Greg Hickey was born in Evanston, Illinois in 1985. After graduating from Pomona College in 2008, he played and coached baseball in Sweden and South Africa. He is now a forensic scientist, endurance athlete and award-winning writer. He lives in Chicago with his wife, Lindsay. You can visit Greg’s website at www.greghickeywrites.com.

Connect with Greg:

Website ~ Blog ~ Twitter ~ Facebook ~ Goodreads

Our Dried Voices Tour Page Link

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Thanks so much for visiting fuonlyknew!

M9B Friday Interview and Giveaway ~ The Artisans by Julie Reece

Posted: March 20, 2015 in Book Promos, giveaways, Interview, Romance, YA
Tags: , ,
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M9B-Friday-Reveal

Welcome to this week’s M9B Friday Reveal!

This week, we are spotlighting Julie Reece, author of

The Artisans

presented by Month9Books!

Be sure to enter the giveaway found at the end of the post!

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Get to Know Julie Reece in 10 Questions or Less!

 

Twitter or Facebook? -Both

Favorite Superhero? –One hero to rule them all: Thor

Favorite TV show? -Sherlock (British)

Sweet or Salty? -Ice cream is a food group.

Coke or Pepsi? -Tea (I’m a rebel)

Any Phobias? –Sharks and, ew, spiders … oh and drowning.

Song you can’t get enough of right now? –Caroline (or anything) by Kill It Kid *dies*

Who is your ultimate Book Boyfriend? ‘Weaver’ from May Webb’s, Precious Bane *swoons*

What are you reading right now or what’s on your TBR? -Saving Francesca , by Melina Marchetta

Fall Movie you’re most looking forward to? –OMG! Crimson Peak and Mad Max:Fury Road

Born in Ohio, I lived next to my grandfather’s horse farm until the fourth grade. Summers were about riding, fishing and make-believe, while winter brought sledding and ice-skating on frozen ponds. Most of life was magical, but not all.

I struggled with multiple learning disabilities, did not excel in school. I spent much of my time looking out windows and daydreaming. In the fourth grade (with the help of one very nice teacher) I fought dyslexia for my right to read, like a prince fights a dragon in order to free the princess locked in a tower, and I won.

Afterwards, I read like a fiend. I invented stories where I could be the princess… or a gifted heroine from another world who kicked bad guy butt to win the heart of a charismatic hero. Who wouldn’t want to be a part of that? Later, I moved to Florida where I continued to fantasize about superpowers and monsters, fabricating stories (my mother called it lying) and sharing them with my friends.

Then I thought I’d write one down…

Hooked, I’ve been writing ever since. I write historical, contemporary, urban fantasy, adventure, and young adult romances. I love strong heroines, sweeping tales of mystery and epic adventure… which must include a really hot guy. My writing is proof you can work hard to overcome any obstacle. Don’t give up. I say, if you write, write on!

 

Connect with the Author: Website | Twitter | Facebook | Goodreads

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The Artisans

They say death can be beautiful. But after the death of her mother, seventeen-year-old RAVEN WEATHERSBY gives up her dream of becoming a fashion designer, barely surviving life in the South Carolina lowlands.

To make ends meet, Raven works after school as a seamstress creating stunning works of fashion that often rival the great names of the day.

Instead of making things easier on the high school senior, her stepdad’s drinking leads to a run in with the highly reclusive heir to the Maddox family fortune, Gideon Maddox.

But Raven’s stepdad’s drying out and in no condition to attend the meeting with Maddox. So Raven volunteers to take his place and offers to repay the debt in order to keep the only father she’s ever known out of jail, or worse.

Gideon Maddox agrees, outlining an outrageous demand: Raven must live in his home for a year while she designs for Maddox Industries’ clothing line, signing over her creative rights.

Her handsome young captor is arrogant and infuriating to the nth degree, and Raven can’t imagine working for him, let alone sharing the same space for more than five minutes.

But nothing is ever as it seems. Is Gideon Maddox the monster the world believes him to be? And can he stand to let the young seamstress see him as he really is?

The Artisans is a delectably rich, layered and dark YA Southern Gothic inspired by Jeanne Marie Leprince de Beaumont’s classic Beauty and the Beast.

“The Artisans has all the elements I love – spooky intrigue, strong friendships, and a romantic tension to be savored.” ~ Wendy Higgins, New York Times bestselling author of the Sweet Evil trilogy.

add to goodreads

Title: The Artisans
Publication date: May 2015
Publisher: Month9Books, LLC.
Author: Julie Reece

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Giveaway

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The book will be sent upon the titles release.

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Thanks so much for visiting fuonlyknew and Good Luck!

To see all of my giveaways click on the lucky horseshoe below!

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