A Warlock’s Secrets #MFRWhooks
This week. #MFRWhooks is the award winning A Warlock’s Secrets. In his darkest hours she is dragged into his magical world. If they survive, is she strong enough to heal his heart and tame the warlock? Or will their secrets destroy them?
A Warlock’s Secrets was not a planned book in the Demon’s Witch series. It was originally a three books series. After publishing the first book in the series, A Demon’s Witch, many readers and reviewers wanted or assumed that Tristian’s story would be next. In truth, I’d never considered writing his story. He was the Demon Overlords enforcer/assassin, for heaven’s sake. But I listened to my readers and wrote A Warlock’s Secrets before the rest of the books in the series. The hardest part of writing this book was wrapping my head around who Tristian really was and what he really wanted out of life. He challenged me at every turn of the story. The underlying message is Tristian has a strong moral compasses even though he works as the Demon Overlord’s Enforcer/Assassin. He basically is the paranormal police for the Western Hemisphere. Enforcement is necessary to keep a balance between mortals and creatures which he learned young due to the death of his parents and having to raise his little sister.
So pull up a chair and get comfy, grab a drink of your choice from the cooler, a Chocolate Chip or Peanut Butter cookie from the plate, and let’s find out a little about A Warlock’s Secrets!
A peek between the pages of A Warlock’s Secrets: The hook.
Years ago, a sacred ceremony at the Dragon’s Moon Coven turned deadly. Son of the high priestess, Tristian Shandie’s life changed forever. With a price on his head and revenge in his heart, he has no choice but to follow in his father’s footsteps to a profession shrouded in secrets. Now his skills as an enforcer for the Demon Overlord are second to none. But dangerous secrets he harbors are a liability he can no longer afford.
A chance meeting with a woman he finds irresistible flips Tristian’s world upside down. Hannah is a cyber security specialist with secrets of her own. Bad boys never appealed to her until Tristian, who changes everything. In his darkest hours, she is dragged into his magical world.
If they survive, is she strong enough to heal his heart and tame the warlock? Or will their secrets destroy them?
A little more about A Warlock’s Secrets!
Inside the house, a shadow passed by the huge bay window. She held her breath. Am I really going to go through with this?
Walking up the steps to the house, she paused. Why would he leave such an expensive car sitting out when he had a four-car garage? She was stalling. Straightening her shoulder’s she used the brass doorknocker. There was no answer. She knocked again.
The heavy oak door creaked open. Tristian stood shirtless, his abs rippled as he raised one muscular arm to lean on the doorframe. The skintight blue jeans hung low on his hips and his hair tousled as if he’d not been awake long.
When he stared at her, with those huge blue-gray eyes, tingles careened up her spine. She covered her mouth in case drool pooled in the corners her mouth. He was one sexy male. She sucked in a breath and opened her mouth to speak but nothing came out. A brow arched, he peered questioningly at her then twisted to glance backward into the house. The sunlight streaming through the doorway accentuated several scars across his chest, rib area and a healed slash across his back. Who gets those kinds of battle scars and lives to tell the tale? Not going to ask. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all.
Pssst… While you’re here, don’t forget to check out my paranormal romance/mysteries click here.
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Posted in Authors' Secrets Blog and tagged #MFRWHooks, A Warlock's Secrets, magic, Mystery, Paranormal Romance, Tena Stetler by Tena Stetler with 6 comments.
Interview with B. Davis Kroon Author of Trap Play
Give a warm welcome to B Davis Kroon , author of Trap Play.
Pull up a chair, grab a drink of your choice from the cooler, a Chocolate Chip or Peanut Butter cookie from the plate, and let’s find out a little about B. Davis and her Trap Play.
- What do you want your readers to take away from your books?
Trap Play is a complex story about complicated people—an ex-NFL player who thinks he has CTE, a woman who scrapped her academic future to help her family-owned sports company become a world-wide sports conglomerate, and a former sports model who has committed blackmail, arson and murder in order to set herself up as the next CEO of that same sports conglomerate. Ben and Mimi struggle to be recognized for their abilities, to regain control over their lives, and most of all to stay alive long enough to catch a murderer and expose a massive criminal enterprise.
I’ve enjoyed getting to know Ben, his courage and love for his father; and Mimi, who rises above the pain of being the discounted and overlooked child of an over-achieving and narcissistic father; and even Anna, whose method of resolving conflict is to destroy anything that gets in her way.
I hope my readers will see glimpses of themselves in Ben’s willingness to sacrifice himself and in Mimi’s determination and bravery. Perhaps my readers will even recognize themselves in Anna’s impatience, snarkiness and ultimately her dark side. I know I did.
- What inspired Trap Play?
A life-long lover of football, I’ve been saddened by reports of traumatic head injuries and how CTE has ruined the lives of athletes and their loved ones. My husband and I follow a college team. Our season tickets put us right on the 50-yard line. We bring our binoculars, we shout, we slap five at touchdowns… Over the years, more and more it has seemed like football officials were doing an uneven and sometimes miserable job: missing calls they should make, making wrong calls, sometimes even having trouble figuring out the yards they should deduct because of a penalty. For a while, we (including the people all around us) joked about what we might do to encourage the officials to do a better job. Our fantasy violence made us laugh for a while but it didn’t satisfy my need for the guys in the striped shirts to get it right.
I couldn’t let go of the injuries that players suffer. For example, what happens to the guys who are forced out of the game (and their really, really big-deal careers) because of those head injuries we read about? I’m not interested (or qualified) to write about chronic traumatic encephalopathy itself. But fiction is fiction, right? And a story that might capture the imagination of regular readers might be a good thing. So, what kind of a story? Well, what if one of those guys with a head injury discovered the loss of his career and even the possibility that he had CTE was not the worst thing that happen to him? What if someone he loved was murdered? Of course, you expect a murder in a thriller. But what motivated this particular murder? I say, the victim was killed to cover up some other crime. And that leads directly to the beginning of a story.
- Do you find it easier to write from a male or female point of view? Why?
The plot for Trap Play presented me with two questions—how to handle the multiple points of view, and how to convincingly stand in the skin of protagonist Ben (a 6’4”, ex-NFL football hero who believes he has CTE), and protagonist Mimi (tiny, a former gymnast and these days, a big-time computer geek) and the villain Anna (a corporate executive who’s also a martial-arts master). The challenge was not only managing that male point of view, but distinguishing the points of view of two women.
Yes, it was more of a challenge to write from Ben’s pov. But my process helps a lot in that regard. I don’t begin the story with my focus on the protagonist. I begin with the villain, the crime and the why of the crime. I include the protagonist’s action, motives, reactions, etc. in that first draft but I don’t sit in his skin until I have that crime and the complicated mid-section and resolution of the story mostly worked out. With the first draft pretty solid, then I do a separate revision for each point of view character. Each pass through of Trap Play (one for Ben, one for Mimi, one for Anna) brought me closer to the motivations, fears and strengths of each of the pov characters.
I’m following the same process in my current suspense/thriller: (1) step sheet, (2) draft the villain’s story, (3) draft the protagonist’s story and (4) finish up with the complex interface of the protagonists and villain.
- Three things we’d find if we looked under my hero’s bed. My heroine’s bed.
Ben (before the murder): 1. One torn and moldy raincoat, belt missing
- Sports Section of the New York Daily News
- 6-page search printout: “Seattle, bars, taverns”
Ben (after meeting Mimi): 1. a half-eaten mega-pack of peanut butter cookies,
- “Computer Programming for Dummies I”
- “Everything You Need to Know About Investigation”
Mimi (in Minneapolis): 1. size 4 slippers neatly parked on the left side of the bed
- a single vitamin D capsule that the cleaning lady missed
- the sales slip from the purchase of Tracy Kidder’s non-
fiction book “Strength in What Remains.”
Mimi (in Seattle): 1. size 4 running shoes with a curl of pale gray socks
tucked in the top
- “Strength in What Remains” by Tracy Kidder
- a printout of Frank Leit’s notes on Rex Sports’ antitrust
crimes.
Tell us a little about Trap Play.
Set in Seattle, suspense/thriller Trap Play is a mash-up of corporate espionage and family conflict and a touch of football. The story introduces one of the snappiest wicked women to hit the page in a long time. Anna Thorsen, martial arts master and former beauty queen, is the kind of villain that moviegoers long for. And taking her on is Ben Leit, the NFL’s golden boy quarterback until a concussion took him out of the game permanently.
As Ben struggles to cope with his wrecked life, his father is murdered and it’s up to Ben to do something about it, because the Scottsdale, AZ cops are not. Once he goes into action to lure his dad’s killer, he meets Mimi Fitzroy, a computer geek who stumbled on the crimes the killer was trying to hide by killing Ben’s dad.
Start to finish, it’s the manipulative and dangerous Anna who literally kicks off the action and keeps it going—from Scottsdale to Minneapolis, to the waters of Seattle’s Lake Washington.
After one concussion too many, Ben Leit is done as the NFL’s golden boy quarterback. Then his father, who was about to expose a bombshell sports scandal, is murdered. While Ben sets himself up as the killer’s next target, Mimi Fitzroy, CIO for Rex Sports International, panics when she discovers somebody was using Rex to stalk the recently murdered Frank Leit. Worse, she finds thousands of stolen emails that prove Rex is breaking a ton of federal laws. Ben and Mimi find a connection they didn’t want and weren’t looking for. As for whether they can trap the killer before the killer takes them out? The three of them are headed for an explosive showdown in Seattle…and not everyone will walk away.
Buy Links!
Amazon Powells Books Barnes & Noble Goodreads
How about a sneak peek between the pages of Trap Play?
Ben drove the six miles from the hospital to his dad’s house convinced he’d find blood, busted furniture, punched-out walls, and who knew what else. But he had to see for himself what happened.
Turned out, the desert scape yard was no different than when his folks had it laid out five years earlier. If he hadn’t known better, he would’ve figured his dad was home pulling together another piece for the website. He walked up the driveway, swung a leg over the crime scene tape and, with no patrol cars in sight, unlocked the front door and stepped in.
His dad had been gone over seven hours.
The house smelled like the day after a week-long frat party. Maybe his dad still had a glass or two of wine when Ben wasn’t there. But his dad had never liked beer. And after the trouble in Seattle, his dad refused to have it around.
Ben shut the front door, headed down the hall and bumped the air system on high to blow the place out: house, garage, even the attic. Once he’d hit the lights and scanned the place, he realized what he’d missed when he’d first walked in. Tagging, thick as a railroad yard full of freight cars. Could kids do that to his dad? And where were the signs of a fight? And—hold it— the front door lock had worked just fine. Would it, if somebody’d forced it? He checked. Not a scratch on the front doors, nothing on the French doors, meaning his dad must’ve let his killer in. And he wouldn’t have let in a stranger, not his dad, not a stranger.
About the Author:
Davis Kroon fell in love with football watching games with her father. During her university years, she wrote the book and lyrics to the musical comedy, The Lady’s Game, and subsequently spent several years acting and working in theatre as a producer/director. To support her theatrical life, she worked in law (where she did technical writing, trial work, and designed and built databases to support complex litigation). -+
Davis Kroon has published numerous poems in literary journals, as well as one section of the book of poetry, Millennial Spring. She and her husband remain dedicated football fans and travel extensively to support their favorite college team. Trap Play is her first suspense novel.
You can find her at:
Facebook: facebook.com/bdaviskroon
Twitter: twitter.com/@daviskroon1
It was wonderful having you with us today. Please feel free to stop by anytime. Good Luck with Trap Play!
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Posted in Authors' Secrets Blog and tagged B. Davis Kroon, Damaged Hero, football, Mainstream Thriller, Psychopath, Seattle, Techno Thriller, Trap Play by Tena Stetler with 14 comments.
Never Enough by Kristian M. Sanchez – Cover Reveal
Never Enough cover reveal is organized by Goddess Fish Promotions. Kristina M. Sanchez will award a randomly drawn winner a $20 Amazon/BN GC. Click on the tour banner to see the other stops on the tour.
At thirty-seven, Valentin Belmonte returned to his mother’s house with his tail between his legs. No surprise there. His life had been a long line of bad choices, failures, and trouble. Also returning home, freshly graduated and on the hunt for a job, was Mina Toussaint, the orphan Val’s mother and stepfather had taken in when he was already grown. She’d been the only person who’d ever really liked him, but he’d screwed that up a long time ago.
Mina’s adoptive family had treated her like the perfect princess and little girl they always wanted. Val was the only one who’d ever seen her for who she really was; she’d never wanted to be a princess. But after what happened when she was sixteen, she thought she hated him. Now, six years later, things were different. She wasn’t the child she’d been when she got so angry. The trouble was that Val hadn’t changed. He still saw her.
About the Author:
Author Bio: Kristina M. Sanchez began her life-long love of writing as a small, insomniac child, making up stories about Bugs Bunny to occupy herself when everyone in the house was asleep. She lives now in Southern California with two cats and an enchanting hurricane—err—toddler. An enchanting, smarty-pants, bewildering toddler. Kristina is an asexual, happily single mother by choice. You might think that’s a weird kind of person to be writing romance novels, but the best science-fiction writers have never been to space, so there you go.
It was wonderful of you to share the cover of Never Enough with us. Good luck with Never Enough!
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Posted in Authors' Secrets Blog and tagged Contemporary Romance, Cover Reveal, Kristina M. Sanchez, Never Enough by Tena Stetler with 4 comments.
Letters & Lies from Colleen L Donnelly
Give a warm welcome to Colleen L. Donnelly, author of Letters and Lies new release. Pull up a chair, grab a drink of your choice from the cooler, a Chocolate Chip or Peanut Butter cookie from the plate, and let’s find out a little about Colleen and her Letters & Lies.
Thank you, Tena, for letting me air my newest characters and the smiles they still give me, even after two years of wrestling them to the page. “Letters and Lies” is a humorous divergence and stretch from my normal serious historical novels, a fun read I wrapped around matters of the heart, utter disappointment, and the staggering realization that going left when you should have gone right can still spawn a measure of success amidst a glut of failures.
I scratch my head at slapstick comedy, and maybe some will at my dry sense of humor. But it worked well when it came to creating a determined heroine I think we can all relate to, one with a blind eye to her own foibles. Louise Archer wanted what she couldn’t have, and wanted it badly enough she gave herself permission to lie, assume a false identity, take over someone else’s family business, upend a small town’s economy, and throw suspicion at a haughty banker in order to get it. Red-faced every time one of her schemes backfires, and horrified at the woman she has become, Louise’s broken heart and social humiliation propel her forward through a plethora of wrongs to make a single right…the right she thought she wanted…something, again, I think we can all relate to, and I hope many enjoy.
Speed Round (one word only answer): Yep, I know torture for a writer!<evil laugh>
Favorite movie: Follow the Stars Home
Favorite book: The Monk (the really old story by Matthew Lewis)
Last book read: Where the Crawdads Sing
Favorite color: Yellow
Stilettos or flipflops: Flipflops
Coffee or tea: COFFEE
Ebook or audiobook or paperback: Paperback
Pencil or pen: Pen
Favorite song: For Those Tears I Died
Streak or not: Once
Favorite dessert: Icebox Dessert
Favorite junk food: Fritos
Favorite thing to do to relax: Walk
Champagne or gin: Don’t drink
Paranormal or Historical: Historical
Wonder Woman or Top Model: Uhhhh…
Favorite TV show: Seinfeld
Hot or cold: Hot
POV: First
I’d die if I don’t have: Coffee
Review or Not: Review
Now give us the scoop on Letters & Lies.
Louise Archer boards a westbound train in St. Louis to find the Kansas homesteader who wooed and proposed to her by correspondence, then jilted her by telegram – Don’t come, I can’t marry you. Giving a false name to hide her humiliation, her lie backfires when a marshal interferes and offers her his seat.
Marshal Everett McCloud intends to verify the woman coming to marry his homesteading friend is suitable. At the St. Louis train station, his plan detours when he offers his seat to a captivating woman whose name thankfully isn’t Louise Archer.
Everett’s plans thwart hers, until he begins to resemble the man she came west to find, and she the woman meant to marry his friend.
Buy Link: https://amzn.to/2yNFGNv
A sneak peek between the pages of Letters & Lies!
“Kansas Concoctions.” Cook burst into the dining area with a shout, a tray in one hand and a spatula in the other. The tray clattered on the side table. Every head turned, every brow raised, surely every eye spotted the butt of his pistol that jutted from his apron. The gasp which issued from the civilized sector told me they had.
Drat. “Confections,” I said to Joshua. “He means Kansas Confections. Excuse me.” I marched in Cook’s
direction, a steady but civilized step which quickened when the spatula thudded next to the tray. “Cook,” I
hissed. He turned, his surly glare stopping before it reached me. He leveled a gaze on Rudy, and Lizzy next
to him. “Cook,” I hissed even louder. He set out Rudy’s direction. I switched my course and saw Deputy Joshua come to his feet. Now three sets of footsteps marched through the hush which fell over Eat Here. Travelers I had worked so hard to make comfortable stopped eating and talking, everyone’s attention on the Wild West show which promised to ruin everything.
Drat Cook.
About the Author:
Scientist gone rogue, Colleen has left the world of black and white facts for the mushy swamp of broken hearts, betrayals, and impossible relationships she mixes together on the page instead of in a test tube.
Way to go Colleen!
Now you can find Colleen at:
http://www.colleenldonnelly.com/
https://www.facebook.com/ColleenLDonnelly
https://twitter.com/colleenLdonnell
http://www.Goodreads.com/colleenldonnelly
It was wonderful having you with us today. Please feel free to stop by anytime. Good Luck with Letters & Lies.
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Posted in Authors' Secrets Blog and tagged Colleen L. Donnelly, Contemporary Romance, Letters & Lies, Western Romance by Tena Stetler with 16 comments.
