This Book For Free

About the book: (from author’s website)
Where special powers and super sexy collide…these are not your brother’s superheroes!

ISBN: 978-1-60777-142-5
Publisher: Ravenous Romance
Release Date: April 2009

Brains. Attitude. Beauty that brings men to their knees—if their Jujitsu moves don’t do it first. The women of the private investigation firm Stilettos, Inc are not your average PIs. Each armed with a special power, there’s no case the Stiletto Girls can’t crack—until Specials start vanishing in growing numbers.

Darian Lorring is an agent for the Specials Intelligence Agency, a secret government organization of humans with special powers. His unit’s latest mission is to track the Stiletto Girls and determine their role in the assassination attempts on the president. But it’s hard to keep secrets from a Stiletto Girl. His best defense? Keep sex on the brain. And Darian will eat and breathe sex to protect his country…having Paige in his bed again is just an added bonus.

Empath Paige Sykes hopes solving the missing Specials case will answer unresolved questions of her mother’s disappearance ten years ago. But one sexy, chauvinistic SIA agent continues to get in her way—and in her bed. How can she trust what she feels around Darian when his ability allows him to project emotions and physical sensations? How can she trust any man when her ex, Collin Raines, appears to be tied to attempts on the president’s life?

About Lexi: (from her website)
Lexi Ryan lives with her family in a small Indiana town. When she’s not chasing after her young son or cheering on the Colts with her husband, Lexi enjoys losing herself in fun, sexy stories featuring mouthwatering men, smart women, and happily-ever-after. She loves to hear from readers.

*********** Guest Post ***********

Falling in love…

First, thanks so much to Shoshana for having me here today. I’m excited to share a FREE digital copy of my debut, Stilettos, Inc. with one lucky winner!

Today, I want to talk about falling in love…with secondary characters. With every book I write, I find the secondary characters are these amazing little surprises. They’re like sirens, calling to me from the shore, “Write my story!” they say. And to tempt me, they show pieces of themselves to prove they’re much more complex than I ever bothered imagining.

I wasn’t necessarily intending on writing a series when I started writing the first Stiletto Girls book. I was open to it, of course, but I wasn’t invested in the secondary characters yet, so I wasn’t sure. However, I wasn’t far into the first draft before I knew I’d return to these characters, and the Stiletto Girls series was born. The first book is Paige’s story. Paige is an empath who runs the Stilettos, Inc. investigation agency with her friends Josie and Chrissie. They’re beautiful PIs with sharp tongues, special powers, and big hearts.

As I wrote about Paige, I learned more and more about Josie and Chrissie…and knew I wanted to tell their stories. I learned that Chrissie spent her teenage years on the streets and that her troubled relationship with Rider was much more complicated than I imagined. I learned that Josie, who can see pieces of people’s futures, had lost her family when she was young, and that she blames herself for not preventing their tragic murder. For her, seeing the future is a double-edged sword. She doesn’t like to share what she sees because then she’s responsible when people change their course (which, in turn, changes everything). On the other hand, when she sees something tragic on the horizon, she feels responsible if she can’t stop it.

These girls remind me a lot of my sisters. They give each other hell, but at the end of the day they’d sacrifice anything to protect each other. Paige couldn’t have grown as she did in the first book if it weren’t for her friends (and the hero, of course!), and Paige and Chrissie play an equally important role for Josie in the second book of the series, Flirting with Fate (coming this fall).

To whoever wins the free copy of Stilettos, Inc. – I hope you enjoy these characters half as much as I enjoyed writing them.

To everyone reading – May your life story be filled with “secondary characters” worth falling for who keep you laughing, living, and believing in your worth!

Please visit me on my website to learn more about my books or to read an excerpt: http://www.lexiryan.com

Stilettos, Inc. can be purchased at Ravenous Romance: http://www.ravenousromance.com/breathless/stilleto-s-inc.php

***********End Guest Post ***********

About the contest:
Open worldwide. 1 winner will be drawn on July 22. Winner will get a digital copy of this author’s debut novel.
+1: Leave a comment for Lexi below.
+1: What book have you read where you end up falling in love with the secondary character? Give book title and author please.

Make sure to subscribe to this blog to find out if you’re a winner.

The Scarecrow (Unabridged audio)
Michael Connelly (author)
Peter Giles (reader)

About this audio:
Forced out of the Los Angeles Times amid the latest budget cuts, newspaperman Jack McEvoy decides to go out with a bang, using his final days at the paper to write the definitive murder story of his career.

He focuses on Alonzo Winslow, a 16-year-old drug dealer in jail after confessing to a brutal murder. But as he delves into the story, Jack realizes that Winslow’s so-called confession is bogus. The kid might actually be innocent.

Jack is soon running with his biggest story since The Poet made his career years ago. He is tracking a killer who operates completely below police radar–and with perfect knowledge of any move against him. Including Jack’s.

About the author: (from his website)
Michael Connelly decided to become a writer after discovering the books of Raymond Chandler while attending the University of Florida. Once he decided on this direction he chose a major in journalism and a minor in creative writing — a curriculum in which one of his teachers was novelist Harry Crews.

After graduating in 1980, Connelly worked at newspapers in Daytona Beach and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, primarily specializing in the crime beat. In Fort Lauderdale he wrote about police and crime during the height of the murder and violence wave that rolled over South Florida during the so-called cocaine wars. In 1986, he and two other reporters spent several months interviewing survivors of a major airline crash. They wrote a magazine story on the crash and the survivors which was later short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. The magazine story also moved Connelly into the upper levels of journalism, landing him a job as a crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times, one of the largest papers in the country, and bringing him to the city of which his literary hero, Chandler, had written. [read more here]

The Giveaway:
Thanks to Anna and Hachette Book Group.
Open to US and Canada addresses. No PO Boxes please.
Three (3) winners will be choosen on July 21.

How to Win:
+1: Do reader make or break the book?
+1: Who is one of your favorite reader and which book did he read?
+1: How and when do you listen to your audio book?
For example, I can only listen to my audio book if I am doing chores, running or driving. Otherwise, I tune out and fall asleep. I listed to more than 60 audio books last year. Lots of chores, really.

+1: Who is your favorite reader?
+1: What book have they read?
+1: Subscribe to my feed (current subscriber welcome)
+1: bring a friend. Make sure to tell your friend to mention your name when they leave a comment so I can add another entry with your name.
+1: blog about this contest, or add a link in your sidebar

Shimmer
by Eric Barnes
288 pages, Hardcover
List Price: $25.95
Published in 2009
ISBN-10: 1-932961-67-4
Unbridled Books

Thanks to Libby for my review copy. This book is out on the shelves today, June 30.

My Take:
I like the premise of this book. When I started reading, it’s very hard to stop. The narrative and the dialog is captivating. Just to illustrate how captivating: My husband was playing with Star Craft on his computer; it’s an addiction of his. When I like a book, I tend to read aloud passages or paragraphs that I enjoy. I was reading about Robbie Case, how he came to be. He turned down his game volume while I was reading about Robbie, but he turned it off by the time I got to Trevor. Then he had me read aloud up to 75 pages. It was 2AM, and we’d gotten sleepy.

I supposed Eric Barnes is like Dan Brown, Jonathan Kellerman, and Joseph Finder. This book is edgy, exciting and thoughtful. It does a great job of keeping my interest so that I carry it around with me until I finished.

About the book:

In just three years, CEO Robbie Case has grown Core Communications, a data technology company, from 30 people to over 5,000. Now a $20 billion company made legendary by its sudden success, Core is based on a technology no other company can come close to copying, a revolutionary breakthrough known as drawing blood from a mainframe. And Robbie, its 35-year-old CEO, is acclaimed worldwide for his vision, leadership and wealth.

Except that all of it is based on a lie.

The technology doesn’t work, the finances are built on a Ponzi scheme of stock sales and shell corporations, and Robbie is struggling to keep the company alive, to protect the friends who work for him and all that they ve built. Each day, Robbie tries to push the catastrophe back a little further, while his employees believe that they are all moving closer to grace, the day their stock options vest, when they will be made rich for their faith and loyalty and hard work. The details of the lie are all keyed into a shadowy interface that Robbie calls Shimmer, an omniscient mainframe that hides itself, calculates its own collapse, threatens to outsmart its creator and to reveal the corporation’s illegal, fragile underpinnings.

Shimmer is the story of a high-tech crusade nearing its end. The shell game Robbie has created is finally running out of room. And Robbie is the only one who knows. And he’s the only one who has a chance to make things right. You can read the long version here.

About the author (straight from his website):
Eric Barnes is the writer of the novel, Shimmer (Unbridled Books, July 2009). Eric has been writing fiction for many years and published a number of short stories before finding a home for Shimmer at Unbridled.

He is the publisher of The Daily News and The Memphis News, two local publications covering business and politics in Memphis. Eric was once COO (and, before that, Publisher and Managing Editor) of Towery Publishing, a publisher of city guides, books, maps, city sites and business directories for cities around the country. Towery went under in 2003, a sad and endless and unforgettable experience that culminated in the purchase of a few cases of beer for the remaining staff at one final staff meeting at Union and Mclean.

Prior to that, Eric was managing editor of a business magazine in New York City, which was in the midst a transtion from what’s known as a “business opportunities” magazine to a legitimate business magazine. Business opportunities magazines run ads for get rich quick schemes and, it seems now, those ads were an influence on the much bigger schemes in Shimmer. Read more…

Q&A:
“What question have you always wanted to be asked in an interview but never have been?”

What worries you the most, as the book is starting to hit the bookshelves?

“What is your answer to that question?”

That readers will have expectations of the book that the book isn’t meant to fulfill. Much of this is about all the stories of Ponzi schemes and fraud that’s been in the news. I worry people will compare Shimmer to the Madoff fraud or the Allen Stanford (alleged) fraud. It’s understandable and inevitable that people would, so it’s not that I fault anyone for having their expectations influenced by such big events. Even the marketing of the book, something as simple as the jacket copy or the jacket itself, those things too create expectations in a reader. But somehow, as the writer of the book − not a person trying to sell or market it, but a person who just hopes people read the book and like the book − for me I hope the book gets read for what it is, read only in the context of the words that actually are on the page.

“Why did you pick the genre you write in?”

I don’t think I ever picked how I write. It’s more, for me, about the voice in my head. I’m not sure I know where that voice came from. Maybe I don’t even want to know where it came from. But I started to write because, somewhere in my mind, there was a story and a voice and a fundamental thing that I wanted to say and that I thought people would want to read.

I’ve written in a variety of different voices or styles, now that I look back on it. Many of the first stories I published were in a much darker, more barren, even sometimes violent style. But that changed over time so that, while Shimmer is still often fairly dark, it’s also sometimes funny. There are light moments. And, certainly, it’s a book without violence, in style or content.

That said, to some degree, I’ve always been influenced by, or even tried to emulate, writers I like, particularly Don Delillo and Cormac McCarthy. And yet I don’t think I ever particularly sound like the writers that have most influenced me. Shimmer certainly doesn’t sound anything like Cormac McCarthy and similarities to Delillo are, maybe, there. Maybe. And so it really comes back to the unexplained voices in my head.

“What kind of research did you do for this book?”

I did very little research, in all honesty. I was working in a technology company when I wrote the first draft of Shimmer, which was during the dot com boom. For the most part, I didn’t need research time, I just needed time to think about and absorb all the information that I dealt with at work, that I read about and learned about as part of my job. Instead of researching, I was spending time reimagining all that information − ideas about technology, about business, about financing and building (and tearing down) a company.

However, I did do a few spreadsheets about the company’s finances and its technology, mostly to double-check my math on the way the Ponzi scheme would work. As I wrote, I knew how I wanted the scheme to work. How it would feel. What it’s essential rhythm would be. But I needed to do the math on the actual details of the pricing of the machines and the rate at which the company was spending money faster than was sustainable.

“What’s been the hardest thing for you when writing your books?”

These are great questions, by the way.

For a long time, the hardest thing was rejection. I was writing and getting rejected but still writing, late at night and early in the morning. I’ve blogged about this in painful detail on my own site, but the gist is that Shimmer is the fourth manuscript I wrote. And so writing, which is truly the hardest work I’ve ever done, the most tiring and draining work, writing while having manuscripts rejected was difficult. It’s impossible not to question whether this, writing, would ever work out. I was getting stories published, which gave me enough sense of success that I could keep working on the novels. It’s not that I ever thought I would not write. But it was wearing, deeply wearing, to be at a point where it wasn’t clear the novels I was writing would actually be read.

I’ve always wonder if authors have a routine. “When and where do you write? Do you have particular time of day you find you’re more creative”

I definitely have a routine. I write in the early morning, when it’s still quiet and when, for the most part, my day isn’t yet filling up with distractions. I need to write every day, day after day, in order to really be productive. I can’t write just every once in a while. I need the repetition, the constancy of being at my desk, day after day.

The reality is that, sometimes, there isn’t time to write. So, for me, I don’t try to write if I know I’m not going to have time, day after day. I have to give myself a break from writing if I know that routine isn’t going to be possible.

“What authors do you read when you’re not busy being an author yourself?”

My favorite authors are McCarthy, Delillo, Nabokov, Hemingway. But I also like to read non-fiction, particularly books by David Quammen, who writes about ecology, science, Darwinism and all kinds of unrelated things. There’s something very satisfying in reading books that are not at all like anything I write.

“What’s the best thing about being an author?”

Writing. I love to write. It’s tiring and exhausting, but to actually complete something that you like, that works, that you know is right, that’s one of the greatest feelings in the world.

“What question would you like your readers to answer?”

What was their favorite part of the book that was mostly if not entirely unrelated to the main plot, the lie? Was their an incidental character or moment they enjoyed most.

Giveaway:
Open to US and Canada, no PO Boxes please.
One winner will be drawn on July 18 and posted after that.

To win, if you have a chance to ask Eric a question, what would it be?

Please subscribe to my feed to find out if you’re a winner.

My computer hates me. It’s like that movie Evil Dead where his hand is trying to kill the rest of his body. Not that my computer was trying to murder me. It just won’t open my website. It’s been like that for almost a week now. Then today, my husband gave me this brilliant idea. Why not access my site in the other 4 computers we have in this house? Duh! I felt like I was just given a Darwin award. I honestly didn’t think of it.

I am very sure that it has nothing to do with watching Dexter season 1 in one-week and still be there for my five kids because it’s summer. Or that I had my nose glued in a book and my subconscious is taking any excuse there is to just do what I wanted. Anyway, I’m hi-jacking my husband’s computer. I had to fix his bookmarks a little. I’m sure that would make him glad that he suggested I used ‘other’ computer. It’s like house keeping really. I can’t resist making everything neat.

I made this while watching Colin Firth brood all over Pride and Prejudice. It’s like my Mr. Darcy dish cloth. I hope my computer starts working soon because I like my computer. I know my way around there.

Please send me an e-mail stating the book title you won, and your mailing address. If you have won THE NIGHT GARDENER or THE SUMMER AFFAIR already, please inform me so I may pick another winner. Thanks!

The Accidental Bestseller by Wendy Wax
List Price: $15.00
Published in 2009
ISBN-10: 0-425-22767-7
432 Pages
Berkley Trade

Winner: 18. Linda S.

.

The Night Gardener by George Pelecanos
Mass Market Paperback
List Price: $7.50
Published in 2007
ISBN-10: 0-446-61921-3
464 Pages
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Winners:

24. Lethea Benson
6. Alexa
39. Amanda
11. Pam P
9. Cindi

Murder in the Rue de Paradis (An Aimee Leduc Investigation, Vol. 8 ) by Cara Black
Paperback
List Price: $13.00
Published in 2009
ISBN-10: 1-56947-542-3 (1569475423)

Winner: 10. Christy H.

.

A Summer Affair: A Novel by Elin Hilderbrand
Paperback
432 Pages
Published 2009 by Back Bay Books
List Price: $14.99
ISBN-10: 0-316-01861-9

Winners:

21. Bridget3420
2. Lori Barnes
15. Esme
14. Belinda
9. Scottsgal

The Brat by Lynsay Sands
Mass Market Paperback
340 Pages
List Price: $6.99
Published in 2007 by Leisure Books
ISBN-10: 0-8439-5501-5

Winner: 29. Couchpapaya

Knight of Desire (All the King’s Men)
by Margaret Mallory
Mass Market Paperback
List Price: $6.99
Published in 2009
ISBN-10: 0-446-55339-5

My Take:
On the night before her wedding to an odious man, Lady Kate steal into the night and by accident met William in the stable. She’s headstrong and brave, and the least this knight could do was go with her for a ride to make sure she’s safe.

Years later, William defeated and killed a treator and travelled to secure that traitor’s land. Kate and William met again. But Kate does not know who William is. Kate’s late husband abused her physically, so she’s slow to trust. William, who recognized her right away is also suspiciouis why a wife would betray her husband.

This book is a satisfying journey into love, and marriage. It makes me realized how marriage is a careful dance of trust, giving, and honesty. A good marriage makes all these things so easy. Margaret Mallory’s first book is poignant and good to read. She reminds me of Lorraine Heath’s stories. I feel the heroine’s emotions. A great book will do this, and this one’s no exception.

Warning: You can’t start this book and not finish it. The story is that compelling. I had to turn my room and house upside down every time I lost track of this book. I just love it!

About the author: (from Hachette site)

MARGARET MALLORY recently surprised her friends and family by abandoning her legal career-and her steady job-to write tales of romance and adventure. At long last, she can satisfy her passion for justice by punishing the bad and rewarding the worthy-in the pages of her novels, of course. She lives in the beautiful Pacific Northwest with her husband and their two college-age children. KNIGHT OF DESIRE is her first book so she would dearly love to hear from readers.

The Giveaway:
Thanks to Anna and Hachette for this giveaway.
You can win 1 out of 5 books. Drawing on July 15.
This contest is open to US and Canada. No PO Box address please.

A winner will also be choosen for international (except Canada). Your copy will be the copy I just read. It will be a good condition ARC (unless my sister buys her own copy again and give me the book after she reads it). Make sure to enter your name like this: Name - Country
This will make it easy for me to have two groups for drawing.

Participating Blogs:

How to Win:
+1: Leave a comment telling me the top 3 books that made you cry because the story is so good!
+1: Subscribe to my blog’s feed (information on the sidebar), current subscriber included.
+1: Put my button on your sidebar. Those who already have my button counts also.
+1: Link to this contest on your sidebar.
+1: Tweet about this contest.
+1: Bring a friend, and make sure your friend mentions your name for the extra entry.