McAllister Series 2019 Silver Dagger World Book Blog Tour: Sep 17-Oct 17

Here we are, at the kick off for the McAllister Series 2019 Silver Dagger World Book Blog Tour. This is actually the first blog tour I’ve done and it’s kind of terrifying.

What happens on a book blog tour? The blog tour was put out there, managed by Silver Dagger Book Tours, open to anyone and everyone interested in participating. Bloggers sign up and get a free copy of the book(s), in this case four-book McAllister series, in exchange for blogging and/or reviewing the book(s). The idea is to get unbiased reviews and commentary on your books in the hopes readers will discover and love them.

Over the next 31 days 62 bloggers will have unfettered access to read, review, and blog about the four-book McAllister Series. 61 of these people are total strangers! (I recognize one name on the list, but I won’t tell you which one).

Why is it so terrifying? Well, to start these are strangers. Ever heard of “stranger danger”? Of course you have. But this is the author’s version of “stranger danger”. With the single exception, these are people I don’t know. They don’t know me. They have no reason to be nice to me, although this is kind of the point of unbiased reviews. They are not supposed to write rosy blog posts and reviews just to be nice. They are supposed to give the good, the bad, and the ugly of what they really think of your book.

What they say about the McAllister Series is going to tell people whether it’s rubbish or not. (A lot of us writers secretly think everyone else will think our writing is rubbish.) Their views will either possibly potentially maybe hopefully drive readers to actually buy and read your books, or tell them why they should absolutely run the other way and spend their book fund on someone else’s books. And this, getting readers to find your books (and even more so to actually buy them), is no mean feat with the overwhelming exploded at the seams Cthulhu on steroids sized market of available books out there.

It is kind of terrifying. Okay, a lot terrifying. 61 book bloggers over 31 days reading and commenting on my 4-book series. To add to the, ‘will they hate it,’ fear, I’m not entirely a conventional writer. I’m not a follow the rules writer. I don’t conform to the status quo, the norms; the overall expectations of, ‘This is how it has always been done, so this is how you have to do it,’ mindset. I write entirely by the seat of my pants, outlining only after to keep details straight, and use a style, tense, first, second, or third person as it feels it fits the story.

So yes, I am going into this with that little bit queasy feeling of dread. The dark pall of knowing you are about to find out what people (who you don’t know) are going to actually think of your books that you labored so many hours over, putting pieces of your soul that you will never get back into (literally, I AM an author of dark fiction, after all). Half of me thinks they will hate them. The bigger half. A little piece is in wonder and awe. People, strangers, are going to read them. That makes the fearful half grow. Somewhere in there the writer in you tries to find the silver dollar, the silver lining, the little golden nugget of hope, whatever you want to call it. Maybe they won’t hate it.

Okay, time to push the doubts back into the darkness where they belong and talk about the more interesting than a writer’s self-doubts part of a book blog tour.

Photo by BSD on Unsplash

You, my wonderfully dark-loving readers, if you follow the tour will get to learn little tidbits about the author. That’s right. You get to learn some of my not so dark secrets and inner thoughts.

Part of the tour is a Q & A, which is doled out in bits to the book bloggers to share with their readers. Things like what is my favorite color. Okay, that one wasn’t actually on there, but to share the secret I actually have more than one. I love colors for different reasons. Green; for being the color of summer, green grass, trees, leaves, life living at its fullest. Purple, I just like purple. It’s kind of like a best of worlds in between pinks and reds and blues all melded together. But I do answer some questions about me, me as an author, writing, and writing the McAllister Series.

I tried to make my answers honest and entertaining at the same time. Unfortunately, I’m usually the only one who actually thinks my humor attempts are funny, so please humor me (and forgive the pun).

You also get the inside scoop, and hopefully not too many spoilers, on the stories that make up the four McAllister books.

So let’s kick this thing off, and please try to be gentle with my writer’s self-bruised ego (we authors tend to be our worst cynics, critics, and ego beaters). Visit Silver Dagger Book Tours to see more about the tour and follow the book bloggers’ good, bad, ugly, and hopefully not too dark views on why or why you should not want to read The McAllister Series.

Along with the Silver Dagger kickoff, the first stop today is a blogger called Insane Books. Let’s see what they have to think about the McAllister Series . . . just as soon as I pour this big glass of wine. I think I’m going to need it.

And in the meantime, Old Mill Road is just now brand new sparkling and shiny in a dark horror fiction monster kind of way NEWLY RELEASED! This book is the free giveaway (ebook) part of this book blog tour! (Other available to buy books include Garden Grove, The Gypsy Queen, and, yeah that’s it except for the McAllister Series. I’m working on finishing The Woods for the new year.)

For younger (middle grade/teens) readers of dark drama fiction, you can check out these books by Vivian Munnoch:

The Latchkey Kids

The Latchkey Kids: The Disappearance of Willie Gordon

Madelaine & Mocha

Do you know #WhereTheBodiesAre?

McAllister Series 2019 Silver Dagger World Book Blog Tour:

Sep 17

Kickoff at Silver Dagger Book Tours

Insane Books

Sep 18

The Sexy Nerd 'Revue'

The Book Dragon

Sep 19

Readeropolis  - GUEST POST

Java John Z's

Sep 20

Casey's Corner

Bedazzled By Books

Sep 21

A Pinch of Bookdust

Book Corner News and Reviews

Sep 22

Always Love Me Some Books Blog - GUEST POST

Reviews and Promos by Nyx- GUEST POST

Sep 23

Lost in a Book – GUEST POST

Book Review Virginia Lee (BRVL)

Sep 24

Literary Gold

nanasbookreviews

Sep 25

Authors From Everywhere

2 chicks and a book

Sep 26

3 Partners in Shopping, Nana, Mommy, &, Sissy, Too!

Books a Plenty Book Reviews

Sep 27

Books all things paranormal and romance

books are love

Sep 28

Books, Authors, Blogs

Craving Lovely Books

Sep 29

Drako's Den

Keep on Booking

Sep 30

Dragon's Den

eBook Addicts

Oct 1

TNT Book Promotions

A Blend of Sass and Class Blog

T.L. Gray Blog

Oct 2

Tome Tender

Breanna Hayse Romance

Oct 3

Girl with Pen

Inside the Insanity - GUEST POST

Oct 4

b for bookreview

Book-Lover

Oct 5

A Wonderful World of Words

Maiden of the Pages- GUEST POST

Oct 6

Chapters through life

Luv Saving Money

Oct 7

4covert2overt ☼ A Place In The Spotlight ☼

Midnight Book Reader

Oct 8

Momma Says: To Read or Not to Read

Paranormal Palace of Pleasures

Oct 9

❧Defining Ways❧

Paranormal Romance Trance

Oct 10

Sapphyria's Book Reviews

Scrupulous Dreams

Oct 11

Valerie Ullmer | Romance Author

ⒾⓃⓉⓇⓄⓈⓅⒺⒸⓉⒾⓋⒺ ⓅⓇⒺⓈⓈ- GUEST POST

Oct 12

Stormy Nights Reviewing & Bloggin'

Sylv.net

Oct 13

T's Stuff

Taryn Jameson

Oct 14

Anna del C. Dye official page

Teatime and Books 

Oct 15

The Bookshelf Fairy

Yearwood La Novela

Oct 16

Better Read Than Undead

Twisted Book Ramblings

Oct 17

Casia Schreyer - Author – REVIEW ALL

Word Processor, Romance, Cats, Kids and Creed

Book Review: The Girl Who Watched Over Dreams by Jeff Russell

Life for Kat (Doctor Katrina Hammond) is not turning out the way she envisioned.  Despite her misgivings, she agrees that her mother going into E.D.E.N.’s perpetual sleep program is the best choice for her mother, who is suffering from chronic rheumatoid arthritis.

Engulfed with sorrow over her loss of her mother, plagued by doubts about the program, and uncertain about the science and the quality of life her mother will have in a forever dream state, Kat agrees to take a job at E.D.E.N. This, at least, allows her to be near her mother and watch over her.

Soon after taking the job at EDEN, Kat is approached by a reporter, Morgan Brewer, who is investigating EDEN.  Distrusting his role as a reporter and suspicious his interest is only a pretense to get information from her to use against her employer; she unwillingly turns to him when she has no other options.

It doesn’t take Kat long to become suspicious that EDEN is not the idyllic sanctuary promised for the faceless residents of their perpetual sleep program.  There is something darker happening behind the scenes of EDEN, and Kat’s inability to let it go pulls her deeper into that secret.

Jeff Russell creates a believable character in Kat, a recent graduate doctor of Neuroscience.  She is grounded by her newness to the field, filled with enough self-doubt to add to the challenges she faces, and likeable.  As she presses on with her clandestine investigations over her suspicions, she is pulled in opposing directions.  She doubts her own suspicions, becomes newly suspicious of her employer, convinces herself EDEN really is helping, and becomes disturbed again by her discoveries at EDEN.

Jeff Russell does not overburden his medical thriller with technical descriptions, keeping the story flowing and compelling.  I read this story in less time than I usually do, laying back and putting off the things I really should be doing so I could keep reading.

I received a free copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

Book Review - The Wind Guardian by Frank Scozzari

I received a free copy of this book in exchange for reviewing it.  It took a bit of time to get through this book with trying to read it over the busy and highly distracting Christmas season.  The terrorist action plot is not my favorite genre, but I have no regrets in taking the time to read The Wind Guardian.  This is an honest and unbiased review.

The Wind Guardian is the first Frank Scozzari book I have read.  If you are looking for a terrorist threat action story that is driven by the characters and does not get lost in the details then you will enjoy this book.

This story is set in the comfort of a United States nuclear power facility where years of living comfortably safe leaves bored security officers with a lackadaisical attitude towards their jobs and the painstaking planning and work that goes into the security of the plant.  Despite the best efforts of their supervisor, John Harkin, to keep his security officers alert and performing diligently to their by-the-book routine, some of his staff continually take a careless approach to their jobs, sneaking off for illicit rendezvous and naps.  The reason for their jobs, threat of terrorist attack, is a world away for our characters.

In The Wind Guardian, Frank Scozzari brings the self-absorbed lives of two characters, newly enamored lovers and co-workers, Cameron and Grace crashing down in a seeming unstoppable catastrophe.  Other developments are in play while Cameron communes with nature in the “bone yard”, a protected archeological and burial site of the native Chumash, who he came to feel an affinity with, and Grace and he focus on trying to find ways to communicate on the shared open radio channel and meet up on the job.  The pair makes the most unlikely of heroes, and are thrust in the center of events by their own selfish choices to put their mindless lust and an obsession with each other worthy of teenagers over their duties.

While Frank Scozzari pauses in the action to fill the reader in on the workings of the nuclear facility and the bureaucracy, planning, routine, and weapons behind keeping it safe, he does it expertly without bogging down the story in the details.  If anything, the tedium of guarding the plant and all the details that ago into it is a good set up for what is coming.  The obvious tedium of the characters jobs and their lack of interest in performing them makes the events that unfold, and how easily, more believable.

Frank Scozzari brings home in a realistic way just how easily the safety we take for granted can be taken away.

The Wind Guardian by Frank Scozzari is available through various online retailers.

Book Review - Twin Powers by David Pereda

Twin Powers starts with the kidnapping of ten year old Stephanie while on vacation in Cuba with her mother and twin sister by a mysterious stranger who appears to be an Arab tourist.  Her mother, Sonia, is given a message from a street vendor who happened to be there.

  “He said to tell you that this is payback,” the old man said, his voice cracking.  “That you would never see your daughter again.”

This leaves Sonia and the authorities wondering who could possibly have a grudge against her that they would kidnap her daughter to punish her for.

From there the reader is pulled along as Stephanie’s estranged parents, along with a professional assassin called in by the Cuban government, try to learn the identity of the kidnappers and track Stephanie down.

As the drama unfolds, suspicions shift, and they discover that a human trafficking ring has kidnapped the girl.  The deeper they go into the world of Middle East human traffickers, the more it begins to look like there is something more than sex slavery behind the kidnapping.

In Twin Powers, David Pereda has created a world of international intrigue that runs deeper than the story initially suggests, centering on the kidnapping of a child.

Twin Powers by David Pereda is published by Second Wind Publishing, LLC, and is available on their web site, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords.

Book Review: UnAlive by Kevin J. Fitzgerald

UnAlive is hailed as “Night of the Living Dead meets The Book of Eli.”  I had to watch Book of Eli after reading UnAlive to see if the comparison fits.  I would have to say that UnAlive is better than the comparison to Night of the Living Dead suggests, but The Book of Eli is not a bad comparison.

UnAlive starts with a decent hook; the mysterious character, Cian of the Nomos, the half-lives.  It sets the tone that something unusual is going to happen in a way that leaves you curious to learn more.

Something is happening in the world and, at first glance, it seems to be some kind of an attack.  General Pitman Grady leads the military investigation.  Dr. Kwom Thomas joined them as an unwilling guest brought in at the suggestion of Susan Grey.

Meanwhile Adam Gardner’s world is turned upside down and destroyed during what would have been a peaceful afternoon in the country with his wife and two sons, if not for the sudden withering death of the vegetation around him, followed by the movement of frightening shapes coming from the woods accompanied by terrible noises.  But this seems to be a dream and Adam awakes in prison.  We soon learn that it is memories, not a dream.

UnAlive jumps between the military’s attempts to find out what is going on in a world that seems to be dying en mass, Dr. Kwon Thomas’ The Two Natures study from his attempts to research the strange mass deaths of flora and fauna and worldwide collapse of life, an old priest, and Adam Gardner’s life in jail and flashbacks to his life before.

When the zombies, dubbed the UnAlive, take over the world, it becomes a race for survival and against extinction of the human species.  Meanwhile the Nomos, or half-lives, have their own agenda.  I would describe the Nomos as vampires before I would call them zombies. 

I was wary when I was asked to review a zombie apocalypse book.  I couldn’t help the inward groan.  I hoped for the best and was ready for the worst.  The obsession with zombies since Walking Dead made its debut has resulted in a saturation of bad zombie everything, and there have been too many bad zombie movies and books before that.  For the record, I do not dislike zombies themselves.  It’s just that the majority of zombie movies  and my few attempts at reading a zombie book have been B movie grade at best - B for B.A.D.  I do, however love The Walking Dead.  So you have some idea where my standards lie in the zombie world.  This book was worth the read.

In UnAlive Kevin J. Fitzgerald gives us a zombie vampire apocalypse with some good descriptions of faces eating themselves from the inside and some scenes that would be Walking Dead worthy if they were adapted to film by a good director and film team.  The book has enough suspense to draw you deeper into the story.

UnAlive is self-published by Kevin J. Fitgerald and is available on Amazon and Goodreads.

You can follow Kevin J. Fitzgerald on Goodreads and Facebook.

Book Review: Your Life with Rheumatoid Arthritis by Lene Andersen

Your Life with Rheumatoid Arthritis by Lene Andersen is raved as an insightful resource for people living with rheumatoid arthritis.

 

Check out this review  of Your Life with Rheumatoid Arthritis written by Wren on RheumaBLog

 

 

Your Life with Rheumatoid Arthritis is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo books, iBooks, Smashwords, CreateSpace

 

 

Lene Andersen blogs at  The Seated View

 

Lene and her book can also be found at:

Lene’s Amazon Author Page
And
The Your Life with Rheumatoid Arthritis website

 

Book Review - Everybody's Daughter by Michael John Sullivan

Michael Stewart is obsessed with finding something that was hidden in the basement of an old church.  He also faces his own demons, worried he isn’t being a good enough father to his teenage daughter Elizabeth and punishing himself for his belief he failed his wife before her death.

 

Unfortunately, nobody else seems to believe this hidden secret exists.  And how could they?  They believe he is crazy, his talk about travelling to the past through a tunnel in the church basement the delusions of a man who is not coping with reality.   But Michael knows it is real because he has gone through it before.

 

When Michael re-discovers the hidden passageway through time he vanishes.   Realizing what happened; Elizabeth is determined to follow her father.  Elizabeth finds the passage and emerges in Jerusalem centuries in the past just as she hoped, but her father is nowhere to be found.

 

Michael returns to the present to find Elizabeth missing.  He can only guess what happened to her, that she had followed him through the tunnel.  The world that was Jerusalem centuries ago is a dangerous world ruled by Roman soldiers and brutality.

 

Michael immediately realizes the danger his daughter in.  He has to find the way back.  He has to find her and bring her back!

 

But the tunnel has vanished and Michael cannot find it.  Complicating things more, he is everyone’s suspect in the disappearance of his daughter Elizabeth.  The three women in his life make it even more difficult.  His deceased wife’s friend blames him for her death and is convinced he is to blame for his daughter’s disappearance.  His sister and a woman who seems caught between being his friend and wanting more are both torn between his craziness, being unable to decide if he is guilty or innocent, and the need to help him find his daughter.

 

With the FBI investigating and following him, and the three women holding him back, it doesn’t seem that Michael will ever find his daughter.  The more Michael tries to convince those around him that his daughter is trapped in time; the more convinced they are that he is crazy and has done something to her.

 

His only real ally is his friend Dennis, the priest of the church who has his own reasons to believe this passage to the past exists.

 

While Michael fights his own battles in the present, desperate to find a way to return to Jerusalem in the time of Christ, Elizabeth faces the greatest danger of her life centuries in the past.  She reconnects with Leah, a woman she and her father met on their previous visit to Jerusalem in the time of Christ.  With no one who can save them the two women fight for their lives against a sadistic Roman soldier determined to own and control them both in his prison of savage cruelty.

 

 

Everybody’s Daughter mixes religion with the paranormal in a blend of miracles and sacrifice and the lesson that faith in the unbelievable is sometimes the only answer.  Michael John Sullivan treats the reader with a story of hope and despair, and finding salvation, all in a story that any reader can relate to.

 

 

Everybody’s Daughter is published by The Story Plant.

 

Book Review: Scorpion Bay by Michael Murphy

Working as an investigative reporter and a prosecuting attorney respectively, Parker Knight and his wife both had jobs requiring secrecy and chasing down sensitive information.




Unfortunately for Parker, his wife has been more secretive lately.



Worse, his investigative reporting instincts bring him racing to the scene of an explosion that would rip his life apart.



Crassly snapping off photos of the scene, including an injured woman; Parker stops by the woman only to come face to face with the horror of the reality of the situation.



The woman is his wife Erica. He is helpless as she dies in his arms.



This is the start of events that pull Parker deeper into the mystery surrounding his wife’s death.



Parker is compelled to find out why his wife died and bring whoever planted the bomb to justice. With the help of his friend from his days in the Special Forces, Justin Kendall, and Justin’s girlfriend Tina Banks, he starts digging into the secrets behind Biotech and its CEO Harrison Bradley.



Together they follow the one elusive lead he has, Wildflower, a path that leads Parker into being dubbed a vigilante. Parker finds himself unwillingly embracing his identity as a vigilante despite its hindering his efforts to avenge his wife’s murder and bring the man he believes is responsible to justice.





The thing that initially drew me to want to read Scorpion Bay was a comment the author made once about how he was so charmed with Scorpion Bay, a real place, that it inspired him to write a book about it.



Michael Murphy did justice to both the place and the dangerous feel of the name. Scorpion Bay is more than an action packed mystery, it draws you into its web of intrigue and plays on sub plots that make you wonder where they will take you. Just when you think you figured it out you learn not to make any assumptions.




Scorpion Bay is published by Second Wind Publishing, LLC.

Book Review - Dragon Tears by Dean Koontz

Dragon Tears by Dean Koontz draws you along three parallel stories.


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Harry Lyon was having a fine day until he had to shoot someone.

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Harry was a cop and the opposite of his partner Connie Gulliver. They were the odd couple of peace enforcement. Where he was particular about his appearance and surroundings, rational, calm and orderly, Connie was unconcerned with these things. Instead, she chose her clothes by favorites regardless of their appearance, cluttered her desk, and seems to be angry with the world.

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After six months working together Connie remained a closed book to Harry, refusing to reveal even the smallest glimpse into her personal life.

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At the moment they are searching for Doyle Durner, a drifter surfing the subculture of the surfer world and main suspect in a series of violent attacks on women.

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Sammy Shamroe, known as “Sam the Sham” when he was a Los Angeles advertising agency executive, now lives in a box. He lost his world to an addition to high end drugs and now lives in a fog of cheap wine.

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Sammy is also haunted by a monster he calls The Ratman. The ratman has the appearance of a street person and is a bully. He beats Sammy and leaves him with a promise, “You’ve got thirtysix hours to live… Ticktock, ticktock.”

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That’s right before the ratman turns into a squirming pile of rats.

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Harry and Connie are eating lunch when a citizen in gray cords enters the restaurant. Dean Koonz loses me a little here when the man in gray cords assaults a waitress and the scene quickly turns into a firefight between him and the two cops with hand grenades and an upper level filled with mannequins in an act of random violence. The battle devolves into a game of hide and seek through the endless maze of mannequins with Connie communicating with the man by yelling Elvis song titles at each other.

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Janet Marco is homeless and lives in her car with her five year old son Danny and a stray dog that adopted them. Living in a world of fear and on the run after escaping the brutality of an abusive husband the only way she could, by killing him, she does her best to look after herself and her son.

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Now Janet is tormented by a new thug, a cop. This cop has a promise for her, “At dawn, I’m going to kill you and your boy.”

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Harry is approached by a vagrant with a strange message. “Ticktock, ticktock. You’ll be dead in sixteen hours.”

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Without knowledge of each other, the three are in a race against time to evade an impossible stalker who is going to kill them by morning. In a surreal world where mud and rats can turn into a man and time stops for everyone but them, time is running out to find a way to stop the ratman/cop/ticktock.


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While Dean Koontz momentarily lost me with the battle among mannequins above a small restaurant with the perpetrator lobbing grenades, the story returns to drawn you through a strange series of events in a race against time and death at the hands of a merciless monster.