Friday, December 11, 2015

Emerald Bound by Teresa Richards - Excerpt & Giveaway




Favorite 5 reasons why books are better than boyfriends
by Teresa Richards


1. Books don’t have a curfew.

2. Books can go with you anywhere. You can even carry them around on your phone which, sadly, is something you can’t do with that hottie in your Bio class.

3. Went too far with your book last night? No worries, all you lost is a little sleep. Your self-respect is still completely intact.

4. A good book makes you forget about all the drama in your life, while boyfriends only heighten it.

5. Reading a book gives you a certain amount of creative license. You can imagine the scenes just the way you like, filling in the details that aren’t filled in by the author. Wouldn’t it be great if boyfriends came the same way? For example: “To your ink-black hair and powder-blue eyes, I’ll add some bulging muscles, a talent for whipping up delicious kitchen creations and, oh yeah, how about an Italian accent?” Now you are perfect. 


Emerald Bound
Teresa Richards
Fantasy, Romance, Suspense

Editor's Pick
A princess, a pea, and a tower of mattresses. This is the sliver that survives of a story more nightmare than fairytale...

 Maggie Rhodes, high school junior and semi-reformed stalker, learns the tale’s true roots after a spying attempt goes awry and her best friend Kate ends up as the victim of an ancient curse. At the center of the curse lies an enchanted emerald that has been residing quietly in a museum for the past fifty years. Admirers of the gem have no idea that it feeds on life. Or that it’s found its next victim in Kate. 

 Enter Lindy, a school acquaintance who knows more than she’s letting on, and Garon, a handsome stranger claiming he knows how to help, and Maggie is left wondering who to trust and how to save her best friend before it’s too late.

 If only Maggie knew her connection to the fairy tale was rooted far deeper than an endangered best friend. 



Buy Links:   Evernight Teen    Amazon  Smashwords    B&N    


Follow along with the tour HERE

Check back for my review at the end of the month! 


Excerpt:

A part of me died long ago.

It was the part of me that feels, and it was Calista’s fault.

What happened tonight was nothing new—innocent victims welcomed into our home, not knowing they would never leave. I learned long ago I could not help them, so I stopped trying.

But this time something was different. This time I was awake, burning with a gut-wrenching guilt, as the next victims slept downstairs. This time I knew the victims. And they didn’t deserve what was coming.

It had always been hard for me to make friends. I’d been called loner, loser, outcast, and freak. Even still, I remembered Maggie offering to show me around when I first transferred to their school.

Through her, I met Kate and Piper. The three of them were always nice to me, while other kids kept their distance and spread rumors behind my back. I told myself I didn’t care—I wasn’t like them.

But being a loner was lonely.

So tonight when I saw Maggie and her friends here, something inside me snapped. Or, perhaps it was the dead piece of me coming back to life. Now I cared desperately about what was happening in the room below mine.

But there was still nothing I could do.

Calista usually lured in victims from out of town to avoid arousing suspicion. Pregnant ones were a particular favorite—easy prey, she called them. But Maggie and her friends came here all on their own. The opportunity was too good for Calista to pass up.

Everyone thought Calista was my mother, but she wasn’t.

Back in my day, almost four centuries ago, Calista had an alternate method of luring in victims. She and her husband, Theodore, advertised for hired help with their inn. The number of parents willing to sell their daughters into a life of servitude in exchange for a forgiven debt or a clean slate was staggering.

My father was one of them.

By the time my mother found out what he’d done, it was too late. There was no escape. I was bound.

My story was well known in this land, whispered as a bedtime tale to ease children into sleep. But, just like any other story passed down through time by rumors and idle gossip, the fragment that survived was woefully incomplete. It began something like this:

There is rumored to have been (once upon a time, of course) a princess, a pea, and a tower of mattresses.

That much was true, though in actuality it was only one mattress, not twenty. The pea was also real, though most would call it a precious stone—an emerald, to be precise.

The gem that sealed my fate was now in the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C. Calista was furious when she found it missing. She thought I’d stolen it until she remembered my limits. The identity of the true thief remains unknown.

Even though the emerald is no longer in our possession, we are still bound to it, as it is bound to us.

Admirers of the opulent necklace where it rests don’t understand it. Like me, the gem is a prisoner, struggling against its fate.

Even now, centuries later, I don’t understand all the details of what happened to me that night. But it began with a troubled slumber on a bed of enchanted emeralds.

  
About the Author:
Teresa Richards writes YA, but loves anything that can be given a unique twist. Her zombie stories 'Are You My Mombie?' and 'The Zombie Code' can be found in Z Tales: Stories from the Zombieverse by The Fairfield Scribes.

When Teresa’s not writing, she can be found either chasing after one of her five kids, or hiding someplace in the house with a treat her children overlooked. Emerald Bound is her debut novel. 

You can connect with her on twitter @BYUtm33 or atauthorteresarichards.com.



Giveaway:  Signed Copy of Emerald Bound

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Thursday, December 10, 2015

New Release Alert: Unfearing by Shane Morgan - Excerpt & Giveaway



Check out the promo event for the second book in Shane Morgan's YA Fantasy trilogy. 


Series: The Unresisting #2
Purchase: Amazon

Synopsis via Goodreads:
Natasha has finally learned the truth about herself, but she’s also discovered that having so much power comes with a price. 

After a close encounter with dark forces, Nat decides to trust the one person Chace warned her against, traveling to a dangerous place where no Ledarian is welcomed. 

Love is tested and more secrets are uncovered as Nat seeks a way to relinquish her vulnerable state and face her most powerful threat ever.



~EXCERPT~

My heart felt as if it would burst from my chest as I watched hopelessly while Ethryen ascended into midair, his fingers tightly wrapped around Chace’s neck. "Chace!" I cried, running towards them. 
Jesse grabbed my arm and tugged me back. "Don’t!" he warned as Ethryen floated over the dark pit with Chace. "He’ll drop him." 
"Do something!" I screamed at him, and then looked across at Ophelia and the man with long gray hair. 
They took slow steps forward but halted when Ethryen yelled, "Back! Or I’ll release him to the depths of this pit!" 
"Why can’t you just give up?" Chace choked out. "It’s over!" 
Ethryen growled. "It’s never over!" He drenched himself in a massive amount of red flames. It seeped from his body and trailed along the rocks to the ground of the cave, blazing all around us. "Give me the amulet or watch them die!" 
Chace struggled to free himself, clawing at Ethryen’s fiery hand at his neck. 
I moved forward again. Jesse wrenched me back. "We have to help him!" I shouted through clenched teeth. 
Ethryen glared down at me, cackling viciously. He commanded his flames to blaze higher. It flared in front of me and Jesse, forcing us back against the rocks. Jesse moved me behind him, protecting me from the flames. I tightly grasped his arm, desperate, wanting so badly to stop Ethryen once and for all. 
The monster spun back to Chace. "The amulet!" he barked. "Release the power to me! Now!" 
Chace gazed down at me with widened eyes, remorse veiling his face. Then with his left hand he started to rifle in his pocket. 
"Don’t do it!" Ophelia urged. She tried to diminish Ethryen’s flames with her own, but it was useless. The fire only blazed more, keeping us back. 
Fearing for our lives, Chace snatched the amulet out of his pocket and held it up before Ethryen. 
"No!" Dorin, the older man, and Ophelia shouted all at once. 
"Speak the words!" Ethryen ordered. "Now!" 
"Stop your flames first!" Chace bargained, tight-lipped and fuming. 
Ethryen growled, "Do you really think you can bargain with me, boy?" He waved his free hand and the red flames edged closer to us. Our backs pressed against the rocks. Should his fire touch our bodies it would have the same impact on the others as it did on me earlier. And I wasn’t sure I’d survive another hit like that. 
"I’ll do it!" Chace hollered fearfully, his hand shaking with the amulet. He looked down at me, and I knew what he was about to do. Chace would give Ethryen what he wanted just so he could protect me. 
I couldn’t allow it. 
There must be a way to stop this. 



About the Author
Shane Morgan is an author of Young Adult and New Adult fiction. She enjoys contemporary, fantasy, romance, and horror. Shane currently lives in Rhode Island with her husband, where she spends her days blogging, writing and listening music.







Wednesday, December 9, 2015

Doll Parts by Azzurra Nox - Giveaway




Doll Parts
Tales of Twisted Love

Azzurra Nox

Short Stories
Twisted Wing Productions
December 9, 2015

Amazon | Goodreads

A haunting trio of short stories about love, obsession, and secrets. Each short story is titled after a song, The National's Apartment Story, Placebo's Scared of Girls, and Skunk Anansie's Post Orgasmic Chill.

Apartment Story
A lonely married woman nostalgically rekindles a friendship with a former lover and the apartment they shared. Dark secrets and mysteries surround the apartment building and its new tenants that delve deep into the woman's psyche and prove to be fatal.

Scared of Girls
A glamorous go-go dancer and a failing university student are bound by a dark secret that may change their fates forever.

Post Orgasmic Chill
The destinies of a cynical rock star, a groupie, an arrogant DJ, and naïve university student intertwine in a rainy London that serves as the backdrop to their tormented lives. Secrets and lies coincide in this dark tale of love gone wrong.

Hauntingly spare, beautiful, and twisted, Doll Parts is a disquieting and at times darkly morbid collection of short stories about normal people who suddenly discover their own dark possibilities.



Excerpt


It all began with a scent. I'm not quite certain when I first became aware of it, although it was a recent occurrence. Maybe the scent was always there, hidden and obscure. I couldn't quite pin-point a way to describe it. It was a mixture of fallen rain on asphalt and musk. The first time I noticed it I was sitting on the bus, inching towards midnight, returning home. Another time, I was at the entrance of a theatre, where a young man wrapped in melancholy handed me a ticket without looking up. The scent came suddenly and randomly.

            The only thing these two events had in common, was that in each case, I was thinking about a certain moment from my past. That moment was my stay in Milan when I was a student at the Bocconi University. My parents kept the apartment I stayed at while I was a student there long after I got married and moved to Bologna. I hadn't thought about that apartment in a long time until my mother recently passed away and I was sent a letter notifying me that she had left me that apartment, while my brother and sister got everything else that remained.

            I was a promising student. I had graduated with a score of 110 with honors in Art History. I had written a thought provoking thesis on the influence of religion on art, and how paganism as opposed to Christianity stunted creativity. I really thought I was going to go places. My parents thought the same thing. Nobody was expecting me to become a famous artist, but at the very least to become an art critic for an important literary magazine. But after graduation, none of that occurred.

            I grew so depressed that I would sit around the house watching afternoon TV like a bedridden old lady. My boyfriend at the time, Stefano, who would later on become my husband, ended up getting a job in Bologna as a chemist for a cosmetic brand and he asked me to move with him. I had nothing to keep me in Milan, and so I uprooted all my dreams and followed him. My husband couldn't begin to tell you the difference between a Monet and a Van Gogh, and yet, people hung upon his very words for an opinion. I know that not everyone breathes and lives art, as I did at the time, but I'll admit that I was a little jealous that my intellect went overlooked, while my husband was invited to conferences around the world for launches of new products all the time.

            So maybe it's been my recent feeling of dissatisfaction over having to wait weeks for Stefano to return that has made me think of about my college years in Milan. And perhaps that's why I started to notice that scent again. To be honest, I'm not even quite certain that one could even call it a distinct scent, as it's so faint. But it lingers, almost throbs with a heart of its own. But no matter how much I strained to capture it, to fully grasp its identity, I always fail. The scent is always vague, and although I feel as though it reeks of rain and musk, I could be entirely mistaken. All I'm capable of grasping is the sensation I'm left with after noticing its presence. It's an empty sort of feeling. The kind of feeling you get when you hug a lover goodnight and then get into your car, and notice that no matter how much time they spent holding you prior to that moment, you are now alone, in your car, and cold. But maybe, even having this description won't render the true feeling of the scent.

            A call came from a former lover on a cold, rainy afternoon in the middle of February. It was a miserable day that I spent it wrapped up in a bulky cashmere sweater and hiding out in bed. I was too lethargic from apathy to get up and feed the cat, despite its numerous attempts to get my attention.

            “Sorry to call you after all these years,” she said. At first I didn't recognize her voice. “It's been almost sixteen years, and I don't expect you to remember me, but at the same time, I kind of hope that you still do.”

            “How did you get my number?” My tone was far more accusatory than I intend it to be. But a part of me was guarded as to why she had gone by all these years without a word, and to suddenly show up out of the blue uninvited.

            “Nowadays you can find anything on the internet.”

            This was true, but it didn't quite answer my question. Why now?


About the Author

Born in Catania, Sicily, she has led a nomadic life since birth. She has lived in various European cities and Cuba, and currently resides in the Los Angeles area. Always an avid reader and writer from a young age, she loved entertaining her friends with ghost stories. She loves horror movies, cats, and a good rock show. She dislikes Mondays and chick-flicks. CUT HERE, her debut paranormal urban fantasy was inspired by a nightmare the writer had a few years ago. Some of her favourite authors include Anne Rice, Oscar Wilde, Chuck Palahniuk, and Isabella Santacroce.

Author Links:
WebsiteGoodreadsTwitterFacebook



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