Spotlight: Never Surrender by Rosie Miles

Book Title:  Never Surrender

Author: Rosie Miles

Release Date: 10/19/2015

About the book:  Police officer Maggie Sinclair prides herself on her independence. She doesn’t need anyone, especially her ex-lover. Working undercover to expose a prostitution ring, Maggie rescues two teenaged girls—but blows her cover in the process. Now she’s in deep, and the only person who can help her is the last man she wants to call…

Detective Quinn Keller remembers Maggie telling him Hell would freeze over before she needed him. He offered her everything, and she rejected him. Now he has the opportunity to show Maggie they’re stronger as a team—even as their attraction becomes increasingly hotter. But this passion won’t just bring them together or tear them apart…it could get them both killed.

Goodreads * Amazon * Barnes & Noble * Entangled

About the Author:  Rosie Miles has always been fascinated by cops. If she didn’t hate guns with such passion, she would have joined the force. Instead she writes about the cop behind the badge and the loves that challenge them.

She enjoys overseas travel but relishes the road trips she takes with her forever man, to different destinations throughout Australia, looking for settings for her next story.

Married with three adult children, Rosie believes that: Life is to be lived, You never stop learning, and you never, ever, give up on your dreams.

Website * Blog * Facebook * Twitter

Tour Schedule:  http://sizzlingpr.com/tour-never-surrender-by-rosie-miles/

Excerpt

He wanted to rise, meet her, but he was afraid, of what he wasn’t sure. She needed him, and that was what counted. She had sent for him, and like the fool he was where she was concerned, he’d come running. Maybe he should have handled it by the book and alerted his superiors. Maybe. Gut instinct had decided him against it.

The tip-tap of heels halted directly before him. Then the heartbeat of the street ceased, as though the world stopped breathing.

His gaze started at the four inch stiletto heels, slid up over well-shaped calves and thighs that stretched on until they met the hem of her short, short skirt. Heat crawled over his skin, and his breath caught. Beneath her open coat, welcoming hips and a tiny waist beckoned him. He scanned upward until his eyes feasted on full breasts failing to hide behind a slinky, black camisole. He didn’t need to look further. He knew.

“Maggie.” Her name sounded so good on his lips. For a mere second, the memory of their taste filled him with naked longing for another time, a happier time, but he pushed it away. She hadn’t called Quinn-her-ex, she’d called Quinn-the-cop.

“Maggie’s dead,” she snapped.

“Really?” He quirked a brow. “You look a hell of a lot like her.”

“I look like a two-bit whore. Trust me, Maggie’s long gone.”

Quinn pushed to his feet and stepped toward her. For a moment they stared at each other. Quinn’s breathing stalled as he gazed into her haunted eyes. Distance and time might have separated them physically, but she’d lived in his heart, his thoughts, constantly. Her face accompanied him to sleep most nights. Damn, he’d missed her. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jacket and stepped back.

“Why did you contact me? It’s been over twelve months. Why now?”

Maggie closed the gap and linked her arms loosely around his neck. “Because I need your help,” she whispered against his cheek.

Quinn withdrew his hands from his pockets and tugged on her arms, wary that the familiar contact, any contact, would shred his resolve.

Spotlight & Giveaway: Earth by Caroline Allen

Welcome to my tour stop of Earth by Caroline Allen, a literary fiction novel.  This is book 1 of the Elemental Journey series.  The tour runs from October 26-30 and the full schedule can be seen here.

Print: $15.99

eBook: $4.99

ASIN: B00SUWJ5FQ

Apple ID: 962247664

ePub ISBN: 978-1-62015-665-0

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-62015-651-3

Series Title: Elemental Journey series (Book One)

Winner of the 2015 Independent Publishers’ Gold Medal for Best Midwest Fiction. 

In rural Missouri in the 1970s, thirteen-year-old Pearl Swinton has just had her first mystical vision. There is no place for Pearl’s “gift” in the bloody reality of subsistence farming and rural poverty. As her visions unfold, she must find her way in a family and a community that react with fear and violence.

When Pearl discovers that her Aunt Nadine, the family shame, has a similar gift, she bicycles across the state to find her. That trip unexpectedly throws Pearl into a journey to save her runaway sister and sends her into a deep exploration of herself, her visions and her visceral relationship to the earth.

Told with fierce lyricism, Earth is a story about the importance of finding one’s own truth and sense of self in dire circumstances and against the odds. It is also a story about the link between understanding ourselves and our relationship with the earth.

In this first of the four-book Elemental Journey series that will follow Pearl across continents and into adulthood, Caroline Allen introduces a form of storytelling that is unflinching in its honesty, filled with compassion and underscored with originality.

Amazon | Goodreads

EXCERPT

That King James Bible and an almanac were the only books we ever had in the house. Once, a hardbound Reader’s Digest Father had found in the woods, some of the pages so speckled with mold you could make out only sixty percent of the words. All my life I was starving for books. Hungry for story.

 I’d already read the Old Testament. After Meghan left, I’d locked myself in the bathroom and covered the begetting and begatting, brother killing brother, being forced off the land, tossed off the earth, ripped from the magic of the soil. Lobbing a rock, flailing a bit of a plow, cracking a sibling over the head. Blood flowing and soaking. Forced to roam. Some crazy, heart-wrenching, gut-wrenching universal plan.

 In my house, nobody ever told tales. It wasn’t just my parents. My relatives were all shut up too. The silence of my kinfolk wove core-deep. So few stories, you could fit them in the palm of your hand. Poor folk didn’t talk about themselves, wary of what specters such stories might invoke. I was surrounded by clenched jaws, thinned and bitter lips. My story was a lack of story, a poverty of legend, a dearth of poetry. I wanted to tell Mother that our being poor wasn’t just about food— we were starved for legend. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Caroline Allen worked in newsrooms across Asia and in London. She is now a novelist and visual artist who lives in rural Oregon. She is the founder of Art of Storytelling, a coaching service for writers. This is her first novel. To learn more about Caroline and the upcoming novels in the Elemental Journey series, visit:

Website | Facebook | Twitter | Goodreads

GIVEAWAY

The prize will be a 9x12 original watercolor painting that was done as part of Op365, featured on www.carolineallen.com.   It has a retail value of $125.

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Guest Post: A Gathering of Butterflies by Sean C. Wright

Welcome to my tour stop for "A Gathering of Butterflies" by Sean C. Wright.  The tour runs from October 26-30 and the full tour schedule can be found here.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Tales of steely but vulnerable women of color will melt your heart while lifting your spirits… A fierce grandmother keeps her grandson from the clutches of Old Scratch in Devil Does Dallas. An alien abduction transforms a large, miserable woman in Hazel Hogan. A country girl meets a city girl on her birthday, and struggles to decide if the girl’s heart is dark or light in Bubble Bath Twelve. And methodical Genie forms an unlikely relationship in Heaven’s Halfway House while in a coma.

Amazon

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF SEAN C. WRIGHT

- GUEST POST

It all started at the age of 8. I wrote a story about a girl who found a strawberry in the woods the size of a Volkswagen. It took 30 more years of writing and numerous rejection letters (I have a huge binder.) to get published. But I consider myself lucky; many writers’ works are published posthumously.  It seems that once you get published, you are allowed to sit at the popular kids’ table. I entered an essay contest with Glamour magazine shortly after Devil Does Dallas was published and it was selected to be made into a film short by actress Jessica Biel. In between entering writing contests and sending off query letters, I’ve gone the self-publishing route, too.

Writing is like any other creative craft – music, art – in that it chooses you. Stories and characters come to me subconsciously all the time. They are a hodgepodge of people I’ve known, my experiences, things I’ve seen on the news. You feel naked to your readers, baring pieces of yourself in print, but I love doing it. I like to write the whole story, raw, with all its warts. Then I go back and cut and rearrange. Some stories go through five and six revisions. It really is like giving birth, all painful and beautiful and awesome at the end.

My Clark Kent job is a proofreader. I spend most of the day halting typos, over-printing, and poor grammar. Then I come home and do other writing in the evening. Creative writing isn’t the only writing on my plate. I also write copy for retail websites, make over resumes, and edit other documents for people. Some people enjoy crunching numbers, I enjoy crunching letters. My husband and I end the day watching television before bed. We like documentaries and horror TV, like American Horror Story or Sleepy Hollow.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sean C. Wright is native to Dallas, TX, and earned a degree in English from University of North Texas. She is the author of the short story collection A Gathering of Butterflies, the novella Honey Riley. Actress Jessica Biel directed a short film based on her winning essay in 2010: Sodales (18 minutes). For more information about her writing skills and how she can assist you with yours–for business or consumer needs–visit http://www.iwrightaway.com/.

Cover Reveal: Love or Justice by Rachel Mannino

Welcome to the cover reveal of "Love or Justice" by Rachel Mannino.  Full tour schedule can be seen here.

So, here is the amazing hot cover of LOVE OR JUSTICE.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

Laurie Shelton is the only person alive who can identify Hawaii’s most notorious mob boss…

After stumbling into a deadly kidnapping, Laurie’s life is in grave danger, and it falls to US Marshal Dante Stark to keep her safe until she testifies against Kaimi Quamboa—assuming he can be captured.

Dante knows he’ll lose his job if he becomes romantically involved with a witness…
But when he has to comfort her through constant nightmares, he finds it nearly impossible to fight his attraction to the beautiful, strong young woman he is sworn to protect. Laurie feels it too, but aware she’s in a high-stress situation and that when the danger is past she’ll never see Dante again, she tries to ignore his easygoing smile and the security he offers.

Laurie and Dante are forced to flee again…

When Kaimi’s men descend on their hideaway, they escape to a second safe house, only to be tracked down there as well. Dante now knows there’s a mole inside the US Marshal Service, and the only thing left to do is disappear.

Kaimi will never stop looking for Laurie, and if he’s caught, showing up to testify could be the last thing she ever does.

With each choice as dangerous as the next, Dante and Laurie must confront the boundaries of what they’re willing to sacrifice, and which is more important…

Love or Justice.

Tagline:

“How do you hunt down a killer when he’s also hunting you?”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Rachel Mannino is a passionate writer who creates characters and settings that allow readers to explore power dynamics in relationships, the empowerment of women, and the ethical and moral dilemmas love can create in our lives. Rachel also uses her writing skills to raise thousands of dollars for entities that enrich our lives and create community change around the world.  She has worked for the Peace Corps; the Humanities Council of Washington, DC; Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company; and the Mayor’s Office of Arts, Tourism and Special Events in Boston, MA. Her first novel, Love or Justice, will be published by Limitless Press in November, 2015. Her second novel, Fractal, will be published by eTreasures in the spring of 2016. Rachel has a BA in theatre studies and writing, literature, and publishing from Emerson College, and she has used it every day since graduation.  She lives with her husband, author Christopher Mannino (www.christophermannino.com), and their adorable dog and cat in College Park, Maryland.

AUTHOR ONLINE: Website | Facebook | Twitter