Monday, November 21, 2011
Small Blogs, Big Giveaways!: ENTER TO WIN!
Small Blogs, Big Giveaways!: ENTER TO WIN!: The Biggest International Bookish Giveaway Online 36 books split between 3 winners + 6 Gift Card Giveaways! Follow...
Friday, November 18, 2011
Review - Devil's Hand
The lone survivor of a tragic plane crash, Trent Hawkins inherited a mysterious lucky streak that made him famous, and hated, in the poker circles of the City of Sin. It wasn’t long before the eyes in the sky threw him on the blacklist and chased him out of town. Now, after years away, Trent returns to Las Vegas, and walks right back into trouble.
As a serial kidnapper terrorizes the city, Trent and his wife, Susan, rescue a strange, thirteen year-old girl, only to find themselves caught in a fallen angel’s plot to cleanse Las Vegas with an unholy blizzard.
As the neon dims and the city freezes, Trent is forced to make terrible sacrifices in order to protect his new charge, and learns dark truths about himself and the creatures plotting against mankind. Poker-playing demons, fallen angels, and otherworldly shades all vie to enlist his strange luck, and Trent must choose his role in the coming War, or watch our world fall to ruin beneath a blanket of shadow and ice.
*-*-*-*-*
My review:
From the beginning you are drawn into the world he has created. If you like stories with suspense, horror, non stop action and likable heroes you will love this book. For a debut novel it is amazingly well done. You would think he had been publishing for years.
The story drew me in from the beginning and didnt let me go until it was over. Trent is a surprisingly likeable hero that has an uncanny kind of luck. However as he learn more and more, all start to question what kind of luck is it really. He ends up in the middle of a plot to start a modern day Apocalypse. You have an interesting mix of demons, angels, and mixes in between all fighting to be in control. You are pulled along as Trent tries to understand what is happening around him and what his role is in this battle among beings that are not of this world.
This is a great book for fans of all kinds of supernatural fiction, suspense or horror. And it is not one to miss. Following along on Trent's journey is an interesting adventure for all who care to join in. I highly recommend this book for those even just looking for a good story. And I am eagerly looking forward to his next book.
Friday, November 11, 2011
Guest Post - David Scott Milton
ON THE CREATION OF “IRON
CITY”
By David Scott
Milton
Ten
years ago I made the first notes on “Iron City”. It began as a stage play,
became a screenplay, and eventually was written as a novel. It’s a companion
work to my earlier novel, “Kabbalah”, though I hadn’t planned it that way. Both
take place in Pittsburgh, Pa., the Squirrel Hill and Greenfield sections, and
both involve murder. In “Kabbalah” the murder takes place at the very beginning
and the reader knows who the murderer is. It is a chase novel in which two
people who grew up with the murderer, a cop consumed by ineradicable envy and a
rabbi obsessed with the ancient Jewish practice of Kabbalah, for their own
complex reasons, set out to find him.
(You can read the preface to
the reissued edition of “Kabbalah” to learn how I came to write it, not an
uninteresting process. See www.dsmilton.com or www.redroom.com/author/david-scott-milton)
“Iron City” is more
traditional, a dense mystery involving a string of bizarre murders that is not
solved until the very end. A disgraced ex-cop, Frank Kalinyak, a Greenfield
native, is on a mission to find why the victims are being killed and who the
murderer is. Kalinyak, who has suffered a tragic loss in his life, seeks to
redeem an existence that is drifting, splintering, by tracking the murderer who
has terrorized the city he grew up in, Pittsburgh, Pa., known by people raised
there as Iron City. The area that Kalinyak operates in, the area where the
killer lurks, is a harsh, brutal environment of pimps, hookers, druggies, failed
clergy, business hustlers, closed-down, rotting steel
mills.
We
follow Kalinyak on his increasingly desperate search for the murderer and to
prevent further terror and slaughter, through the underbelly of Iron City. We
find ourselves in a maelstrom of political and church intrigue, brutal
encounters, surprising duplicities, ghosts of the past, furies of the present.
There are complex
psychological elements in both novels. I have always had great respect for the
mystery form. Dostoyevsky was an early influence on my work, as were the novels
of the Belgian, Georges Simenon. I admired the seriousness, the complexity in
their works, Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment”, “Brothers Karamazov”, “The
Possessed,” Simenon, “The Man Who Watched Trains Go By”, “Belle”, “The Brothers
Rico”: they were less “whodunits” as “whydunnits”, mysteries of character: they
were about peeling away levels of reality to reach the core of a human being,
the person’s soul.
“Iron City” is a mystery
that’s not solved until the end. I’m limited in what I can reveal about what
propelled me to write this story. It involves a series of murders that are
connected by a horrific act that has poisoned a community. As is true of all of
my novels it has relevance to my life and the complications in my life.
The
texture of the neighborhoods I grew up in is a very important element in the
book, as it is in many of my books. Squirrel Hill and Greenfield to the south;
North of Forbes, above Squirrel Hill—these neighborhoods have become my Dublin,
North and South Sides, the Hill District, my Nighttown. Squirrel Hill proper was
middle-class; as you moved into Greenfield the environment became working class.
North of Forbes was upper middle class with pockets of wealth. These areas form
a checkerboard of class and religious tensions, envies, wounds that fester,
scars that remain open.
I
must warn you—the novel is dark. I recently read a review of Simenon’s “The Man
Who Watched Trains Go By”, and the critic said of the book, “Despair
and negation predominate in Georges Simenon's ‘The Man Who Watched Trains Go
By’, a book that I considered to be darker than noir.” I’ve told you how much I
admire Simenon. And it’s possible that “Iron City” is darker than noir. It’s
possible that all of my novels are darker than noir.
Sorry.
The
book forms an intricate puzzle. I think the writing is strong. I have not
condescended to the genre. It’s a serious novel, ambitious, ingenious. If you’ve
liked my earlier novels, plays, and films, I think you’ll like “Iron City.” It’s
a tough book, a journey through a hellish world of harsh entanglements, brutal
relationships, reversals, twists, piercing insights into the dark night of the
soul. To be true, also, there are bright spots and entertainment and the
pleasures in what the novel illuminates, much darkness, but also explosions of
light, rich characters, the way they talk and behave, their ambitions, dreams,
foibles. And there is also tenderness and love and the generosity that grows
from love.
I
aspired, ultimately, to reveal something true and strong about our lives, about
retribution, foundering dreams, guilt, love lost, and love redeemed, to tell one
tale of this strange journey we all take to a dusty end.
About
the Author:
David
Scott Milton (born September 15, 1934) is an American author,
playwright, screenwriter, and actor. His plays are known for their
theatricality, wild humor, and poetic realism, while his novels and
films are darker and more naturalistic. As a novelist, he has been
compared to Graham Greene, John Steinbeck, and Nelson Algren. Ben
Gazzara’s performance in Milton’s play, Duet, received a Tony
nomination. Another play, Skin, won the Neil Simon Playwrights Award.
His theater piece, Murderers Are My Life, was nominated as best
one-man show by the Valley Theater League of Los Angeles. His second
novel, Paradise Road, was given the Mark Twain Journal award “for
significant contribution to American literature.
Learn
more about David at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Scott_Milton
You
Tube Video of David reading from Iron City
http://youtu.be/U-ERnDTWhaA
Iron
City
By
David Scott Milton
Publisher: White
Whisker Books Date Published: September 1, 2011
Genre:
dark mystery
Frank
Kalinyak, disgraced ex-cop, returns to Pittsburgh, Pa., “Iron
City”, his hometown, from Tucson where he has been living a
desperate existence since the death of his young daughter. He has
been summoned home by Bobby Mack, an Assistant D.A., to find out who
murdered an old high school friend. Kalinyak is swept into a
whirlpool of bizarre killings, religious fanaticism, church
duplicity, hustlers, cops, junkies, old friends gone bad. Amid the
fractured landscape of Iron City, rusting mills, rotting industry, he
struggles to find sense in his life. Ultimately he must ask: who is
he and can he survive?
“David
Scott Milton can write like an angel… a writer hell bent on
fulfilling the legacy of John Steinbeck, carrying on the tradition of
James Jones and exploring his own heights.” -- Alabama Journal
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Pimpin' Reads: November Giveaway Hop
Pimpin' Reads: November Giveaway Hop: Thanks to Kathy at I am a Reader not a Writer for the November Giveaway Hop - Nov. 8th to 11th - Co-hosted by Tristi Pinkston . Each of t...
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
All Things Urban Fantasy: Giveaway: The Iron Knight by Julie Kagawa
All Things Urban Fantasy: Giveaway: The Iron Knight by Julie Kagawa: Giveaway provided by Harlequin Teen via Media Muscle One copy of The Iron Knight by Julie Kagawa Available on November 6, 2011 b...
Friday, November 4, 2011
Once Upon a Twilight!: Blog Tour: Until There Was You by Kristan Higgins ...
Once Upon a Twilight!: Blog Tour: Until There Was You by Kristan Higgins ...: Welcome to the next stop in the Kristan Higgins Blog tour for her latest book Until There Was You. OUaT loves when we get asked to take par...
Thursday, November 3, 2011
Spotlight - Antique Charming
Antique
Charming
By
Natalie-Nicole Bates
The
night he came home…forever
Third-generation
funeral director Lizzie Morton is about to have her dream realized.
She has purchased the long abandoned Nichols Funeral Home and its
upstairs flat, determined to restore the funeral home to its once
former glory.
But
a late night visitor, Adam Nichols, claims the funeral home still
belongs to his family. Lizzie scoffs at his odd behaviour and
outlandish claims, but when a vintage photograph appears, she soon
realizes, to her horror, that Adam Nichols did once own the funeral
home—more than one hundred years ago—and now she has allowed this
entity to pass into her home.
Book
Trailer on YouTube http://youtu.be/Z1U7hlZ0koQ
She
heard it again.
The
same time as last Friday night.
Three
taps at her front door.
Lizzie
muted the television, tossed the blanket off of her body and scurried
out of bed. She slipped her robe over her shoulders and tied it
securely, determined to find out who in the world would knock at her
door at three in the morning. By the time she had reached the door
the week previous, no one was there. The street had been dark and
still.
It
had to be a mistake. She had only recently closed sale on the long
abandoned funeral home, determined to restore it to its once former
glory. She had only been living in the upstairs flat for a few weeks.
As
she hurried down the staircase, each step beneath her feet creaked in
protest. There was no one visible through the peephole. She unchained
the door and opened it just enough to peek around it.
No
one was there, just like the previous week.
The
street was dark and quiet. Not even the whisper of a wind could be
detected. Only the cold dampness of the October night raised a chill
on her skin.
Who
was playing this weekly joke on her? Could it be the ghosts of some
departed soul who had passed through the halls of Nichols Funeral
Home sometime during the past century? A small smile crossed her lips
as she prepared to close and lock the door. She was a third
generation Funeral Director. Did she now believe in ghosts?
Before
the door could close, a hand poked into the slight space and seized
her wrist. A cry rose in her throat and she jerked backward, but the
hand held tight and the door flung open.
The
man emerged, shrouded in darkness. He was an ethereal creature, tall,
and dressed in anonymous black. Only a streetlight glowed behind him.
“I’m
home,” he announced.
About
the Author:
Natalie
Nicole-Bates is a book reviewer and author.
Her
short paranormal romance, Antique Charming, was
published by Books To Go Now Publishing in October 2011 and her
contemporary romance, Change of Address, is scheduled
to be published by Secret Cravings in January 2012.
Her
passions in life include books and hockey along with Victorian and
Edwardian era photography. Natalie contributes her uncharacteristic
love of hockey to being born in Russia.
She
currently resides in the UK where she is working on her next book and
adding to her collection of 19th century post-mortem
photos.
Visit
Natalie online at http://natalienicolebates.blogspot.com/
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