Private Investigator Rebecca Marte doubted it. Since when would the president and CEO of a highly successful company find the criticisms of his subordinates so destructive to his self-image that he would commit suicide? That, however, was what her new client, Nicole Veles, claimed.
Nicole painted a toxic, if not criminal, picture of defamation leading up
to the man’s death. His problems were more than just the company’s bottom line. They ranged from public ridicule of some of his out-of-date marketing concepts that had been leaked to the press to a police report from a young man who claimed the president and CEO had propositioned him. And after his demise, one of his most vocal detractors ascended to his position. That was enough to raise Rebecca’s suspicions. She took the job.
But as she began her investigation, hints that Nicole’s beliefs were tainted by her history became difficult for Rebecca to ignore. Two years earlier, Nicole had been kidnapped, and she still bore the mental and emotional scars of abuse and captivity. She’d cut all connections to her friends and fled her past by relocating to Colorado where no one knew her. She took a job where long-term relationships were impossible, save one stubborn older woman who wouldn’t take no for an answer—and who just happened to be the wife of the suicide victim
While everyone else thought the man’s death, while tragic, was just the consequence of high-pressure business and depression over the loss of the company he had founded, could Rebecca trust anything to the contrary that her new client told her?
“Tension is well-developed, whether it’s psychological revelations that involve Rebecca more deeply in her client’s life than she’d imagined, the wedge between client and investigator driven home by the victim’s wife, or the probe of a business structure that supports dangerous undercurrents.”
-Midwest Book Review
About the Author
Until ten years ago, I was a human factors psychologist doing research on cutting edge technologies like virtual reality and artificial intelligence at a major aerospace company. The aim? Fit these technologies to the way people learn, remember, and do their jobs, not the other way around. But if the world can be shaped to work with us, it can just as surely be molded to destroy us.
Now, I’m an author writing “The Mind Sleuth Series”, stories where the evil side of research and science too often surface. Sometimes the devastation is unintentional. Sometimes, it’s motivated by greed or passion, but it’s always a race to see if and how my heroes—Doc, Nicole, Rebecca—can turn the tide.
For special features, giveaways, and previews of my upcoming books, subscribe to my newsletter at brucemperrin.com.
Congratulations to author Ehmbee Way on the release of Compunction! Read on for more details!
Compunction
Publication Date: March 28th, 2023
Genre: Psychological Thriller/ Suspense/ Terror
In a relatively short amount of time, James Singer has lost his wife, his job, his home and his subsequent place in the world. Now, with appearance of a shadowy phantasm who has taken to terrorizing him every night, he’s beginning to fear that he, like his schizophrenic aunt, is also on the verge of losing his ability to discern what is real and what is not.
As James’s condition continues to grow worse, he begins to mysteriously and uncontrollably phase in and out of several different worlds-all of which seem to be inhabited by quirky, non-conventional and often down-right absurd characters. James doesn’t know if he’s dreaming, overmedicated, in the throes of a nervous breakdown or if he’s already dead but one thing he does know is that, one way or another, it all ends on Monday.
Compunction combines the suspense of M Night Shyamalan, the psychological melancholy of Edgar Allen Poe and the absurdist vibe present in Netflix’s Midnight Gospel. The result is a suspenseful, character-driven, upmarket fiction that’s all about redemption and second chances. Or, as USA Today bestselling author Pamela Crane says, “Compunction reaches new literary heights as it bends the genres of psychological thriller with fantastical misadventures. You’ll relish its delectable prose and timeless theme of self-discovery, wrapped in an urgent plot that will hook you.”
Ehmbee Way is a former corporate success who earned his undergraduate degree in the field of education. For many years, he battled internal feelings of nihilism, alcoholism and depression. He wrote Compunction with the hope that it would help others affected by similar issues.
Dysfunctional Family Saga that escalates into Psychological Thriller
Date Published: Sept 13, 2022
Family. The people who destroyed Gavin’s self-esteem are the ones he must save.
‘Secrets In The Mirror’ is a sweeping saga of one family’s journey to rise above the toxicity of multigenerational domestic abuse and crime. Gavin struggles to salvage his identity from Dad’s bullying, and narcissistic abuse by his identical mirror twin. But when Devon gets into drugs and trouble with the Mob, people start dying. Gavin flees far away to protect himself and his new family. But he can’t escape his sociopathic brother, or the Mob. Yet inextricable bonds tie him to Devon, and Gavin vows to break the lethal chain of family dysfunction and rescue his twin from his self-destructive path. Can he save
his brother before Devon destroys them both?
EXCERPT
Gavin would always remember that weekend as the turning point, when day turned to night and the earth erupted, cleaving brothers apart. It all began innocuously enough, but forces had been building unnoticed for years, like the gradual movement of tectonic plates.
On that Friday, a ruthless July sun reflected serpentine heat waves into motionless air above a parched field, where the gothic buildings of nearby Wellesley College punctuated the horizon. Gavin’s brow glistened sweat beads as he tossed baseballs into the air and batted them into the distance. With each hit, he cast a worried look toward his twin and wished the ball’s trajectory would go higher, farther, longer.
“That’s not how you do it,” Devon said. “Remember when we were little, Dad said I was the champ?” He took the bat and positioned himself opposite Gavin to demonstrate in mirrored alignment how to swing. Devon was left-handed, his brother was right-handed. Their signature red cowlicks peaked Devon’s left crown and Gavin’s right. When one looked into a mirror, he saw an exact replica of the
other.
“You’re hopeless, Baby Brother,” Devon laughed and messed Gavin’s curly mop. “You’re just a loser without me!”
Gavin cringed at the reminder of his brother’s ten-minute seniority over him, although he’d become numb to the jokes that were less than funny. “Coach says I have a great swing, and I had two base hits in our last game,” he protested, and stabbed the toe of his sneaker into a clump of crabgrass.
“Coach is just humoring you, Gav. And you got lucky.” Devon threw his arm around Gavin’s neck in a controlling headlock.
Gavin pulled away. “Hey, we have to get home and clean up before everyone comes,” he said, as he gathered balls from the field. “And Mom and I have to set up all the food.”
“Oh, yeah, our own little Julia Child,” Devon snickered.
That day was the boys’ sixteenth birthday. They would have a party with their friends the next day, but the first celebration was with their extended family.
“Race you!” Gavin called out and bounded forward, for once getting a few steps ahead of his brother. Even carrying the bat and balls, his long legs conditioned by running cross-country easily outmatched Devon, who had channeled his energy into wrestling. Whenever Gavin ran, he felt distinct and unique, not just the other half of a set of twins. He became larger, better, stronger with each stride, each breath. He wanted to run forever. Some day he would.
“Hey, wait! You cheated,” Devon yelled. “We had to start at the same time!”
Gavin arrived home first, followed by his panting brother nearly fifty yards behind. While he enjoyed a brief sense of victory, Devon disregarded the evidence of that gap and objected, “I’d have kicked your ass if you hadn’t cheated.”
Gavin had already taken the stairs two at a time to the second floor of the house and jumped into the shower. He was in the middle of shampooing when he was startled by muscled arms circling him from behind.
“You’re a real wuss, Gav,” Devon hissed into his twin’s ear, simultaneously grabbing Gavin’s genitals.
Gavin yelled and jumped away, swung his arm around but missed his target, with shampoo stinging his eyes. But Devon was gone, leaving him enraged and frozen in disbelief.
After Gavin finished his shower, still seething, he stomped down the hall to their bedroom and confronted his brother. “Why’d you do that, Dev?”
“Do what?”
“Your sick little joke in the shower.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“You know, asshole. You grabbed my balls, pulled on my dick―”
“I think you’re having some wishful fantasies, Gav.”
“Don’t ever do anything like that again,” Gavin spat, while some invisible force restrained his twitching arms from flailing at his tormentor. He stormed out of the room and slammed the door behind him. Devon’s mocking guffaw echoed down the hall in his wake.
~~~~
About the Author
Leslie Kain was always writing something when she was a kid – fantasies, poems, essays, plays, secret plans; culminating in running away
across country at fifteen, never looking back. But in her careers (psychology, business, Government Intelligence, nonprofits), her writing was
limited to nonfiction: professional, technical, research. Finally dabbling in fiction during spare moments above the clouds, her short stories found their way into literary journals and anthologies. She developed personal relationships with her characters, who relentlessly nagged her into longer stories. Her second novel, ‘Secrets In The Mirror’ is the first to be published. She leverages her complicated background and her education, training and experience in psychology to write stories of inner conflict and emotional transformation. Kain earned degrees in psychology from Wellesley
College and an MBA from Boston University. Originally from “all over” the U.S. (although a piece of her heart remains in Boston), she now resides in Mexico with her husband and 16-year-old cat Sheba.
Welcome to the book tour for gritty crime thriller, Dark Obsessions by Marie Sutro! Read on for more details and a chance to win a great giveaway!
“…a taut and terrifying descent into madness and redemption…brilliant psychological thriller—pop culture entertainment at its absolute best…”
—Jon Land, USA Today Bestselling Author of Strong Cold Dead
Dark Obsessions
Genre: Crime Thriller
Publication Date: April 26th, 2022
Reeling from the trauma of her last case, SFPD Detective Kate Barnes heads to the Olympic Peninsula hoping to heal the present by resolving the past. When the ravaged corpse of an unidentified teen is discovered, her search for personal peace takes a back seat to the quest for justice.
As Kate digs deeper, she discovers the victim was not the only one who had been taken against her will. Racing against the clock to rescue the remaining girls, she uncovers a complex series of ever-increasing horrors. In the darkest corners of Washington state, Kate Barnes will come face-to-face with an adversary so ruthless and powerful that it will take everything she has to save herself, let alone the girls.
DEPUTY JENNA WHEATON slammed the door of the patrol car shut. The sound bounced off the walls of the abandoned quarry, doubling and trebling before finally fading in the late afternoon stillness. Spinning on her heel, she cast a final warning glare at the two teenage passengers huddled in the backseat. Exhaling, she turned toward the abandoned warehouse which stood across from the edge of the vast mining pit.
The setting sun reflected off a narrow row of windows running above the structure’s main entrance, lighting the surrounding forest ablaze in a fiery glow. Averting her gaze, she strode toward the set of stairs leading up to the double door entry. Bits of gravel crunched softly under her boots as she walked, amplifying the overall sense of desolation.
Jenna’s shadow kept pace with her as she moved—exaggerating her lean, lanky, features topped off by a shoulder-length mop of blonde hair. Exuding the air of a woman not to be trifled with, she remained convinced she was on a fool’s errand. There was no way the old warehouse would yield the unimaginable find the teenagers had reported when they had burst through the doors of the sheriff’s office over an hour ago.
She had been finishing up a domestic violence report on the other side of town when the call had come in. The DV complaint had been a farce—an adolescent attempt to punish a parent for failing to buy a new cell phone.
Jenna had finally convinced the ill-mannered fifteen-year-old daughter to apologize to her overworked mother when her radio had come to life, recalling her to the station. Once there, two more teens had been dumped in her lap. There was every reason to believe the two wanna-be skater boys sitting in her patrol car were fueled by the same adolescent angst, wayward hormones, and abject stupidity.
Foregoing the rusted railings on either side of the stairs, she jogged up to the porch. The right-side door stood open; a broken chain dangled from the handle—the padlock still intact. Beyond the first few feet of the doorway, darkness pervaded.
She unholstered her flashlight and stepped up to the threshold, glad she had taken the time to lock the boys securely in the car. The last thing she needed was for the miscreants to pop up from behind and scare the shit out of her—just their way of passing a boring Friday afternoon.
Truth be told, she could not really blame them. Eagle’s Nest was high on nature but low on things to do. Other than the bowling alley downtown, there was little going on within the town limits. It was a reality she knew all too well.
Divorced at thirty-eight, with a nine-year-old son in tow, Jenna had ached for a change from the predictability of life in small-town America. She had been about to accept a position with the Seattle PD when a sudden heart attack had prompted Sheriff Selby to retire early. With no local candidates for the position, the town had been forced to look elsewhere.
After three months, they had found a unanimous favorite. Far more handsome than any of the local singles, Sheriff Luchasetti, who was only a few years older than Jenna, had immediately infected her with some form of Disney-esque brain fever. Abandoning her senses, she had turned down the Seattle offer.
In hindsight, it had been a ridiculous move. After a few months of intense flirting on her part, Tony had made his disinterest clear by turning down Jenna’s invite for a nightcap at her place. He had claimed he could not risk his new position by fraternizing with a deputy. But Jenna knew better. Any man who made it to forty-four without signing a marriage license or siring a child had no sincere interest in either one.
Swallowing past the year-old frustration, she stepped over the threshold into the cavernous space. Her right hand settled on the butt of her Glock as she entered, evidence of good training and experience rather than anticipation of actual trouble.
The beam from her flashlight was not strong enough to reach the back of the building, but she moved ahead anyway. Had she even partially believed the boys’ outlandish story about finding a dead body in the concrete pit up ahead, she may have proceeded with more caution.
She had only made it about five feet before a vile stench—reminiscent of a cross between motor oil and animal fat—hit her like a semi. Steeling herself against the aroma, Jenna focused on the goal ahead. If the boys had seen something, it was certainly nothing more than a sick animal that had sought refuge here in its final moments.
As she continued, the rubber soles of her shoes squeaked softly against the dusty concrete. Arriving at the fifteen-foot-square opening in the floor, Jenna pointed her flashlight down. Her eyes tracked the circle of visibility as it traveled down the opposite wall of the shaft.
A moment later, the light revealed a pale arm. As it swept over a mutilated breast, then worked its way across the rest of the slender human form, the deputy staggered backward. Her right hand clawed at her shoulder, grasping for the radio affixed to her uniform. When her fingers finally closed around the device, it took an entire minute before she was confident she could speak without shrieking.
First, let me say I’ve never read this author before, and jumped into the series with book 2. While I didn’t exactly feel lost, I think I would have understood the character better (and been able to immerse myself in the story more from the beginning) had I read the first installment to the Kate Barnes series.
The writing was well done, and the story itself kept me entertained. I liked that Kate wasn’t perfect. She had her flaws, which made her seem more real. The story wasn’t predictable and kept me guessing.
If you enjoy psychological thrillers, and want a gripping read that will pull you in, then you can’t go wrong with Dark Obsessions.
*Disclaimer: I received an ARC from R&R Book Tours in exchange for an honest review. The review above is only my opinion.
About the Author
Marie Sutro is an award-winning and bestselling crime fiction author. She is also a member of Sisters in Crime whose writing has been inspired by the combined service of her great-grandfather, grandfather, and father in the San Francisco Police Department.
Her bestselling debut novel, Dark Associations, was awarded the Benjamin Franklin Award for the Best New Voice in Fiction. A proponent for literacy, she volunteers with California Library Literacy Services, helping adults learn to read and write.
She resides in Northern California and is currently at work on the next Kate Barnes story. To learn more about Marie, visit her website at mariesutro.com.
It starts with Just Watching. But danger emerges when Just Watching ends.
When the “wild child” Xavier first encounters Cass Harwood and her dogs in the woods of West Quebec, he is enthralled. Unknown to them, he Just Watches them in a lengthy ongoing surveillance, before finally staging a meeting. His motives are uncertain – even to him.
The intersection of the lives of Cass, a competitive dog-handler, her dogs, her cousin Lori and the complex and enigmatic Xavier, leads them all into a spiral of danger. It starts when Just Watching ends – when Cass and her crew encounter tragedy in the bush. Xavier’s involvement in the tragedy, unknown to Cass, sets off a chain of potentially lethal events, that begin in the dark woods of Lac Rouge, when hiking, skiing, hunting, trapping, marijuana grow-ops, and pedophilia, collide. It matures in the suburbs of both Ottawa and Baltimore, and culminates back in Lac Rouge, when danger arrives uninvited at Cass’ isolated cabin in the woods. In the night. In the cold. In the heavily-falling snow. Xavier observes it all. His motives are again uncertain, but his propensity for action is not.
Join Xavier, Lori, Cass and the realistic and compelling dogs that are essential players in this dark drama, as their fates converge in a deadly loop of revenge, fear, guilt, and hope.
Excerpt from Emergence
From Chapter 13 – Xavier – Secrets
Our cabin doesn’t have a basement. It is raised on cinderblocks, and is only maybe a foot off the ground…That has allowed me to have an excellent place to hide things I don’t want Stefan to know about. There are boards underneath where the kitchen is, that I’ve had to explore when working with insulation. I now have my own special board, where I’ve hollowed out a space where I can hide stuff. My secret stuff incudes extra notebooks with the drawings of Cassie and the dogs, that would reveal how much time I spend observing them. But it also includes special stuff I’ve liberated, that I don’t want Stefan to know about.
Liberation is a game Stefan taught me when I was littlelittle. He told me that good equipment deserves to be well cared-for. When he was teaching me how to Just Watch, he’d find hunting stands where we could watch campers, fishermen, and hunters. And he would explain when they did things right, and when they didn’t. Not looking after your equipment is not right. So when people were careless, and particularly when they were careless and drunk, or even better – careless, drunk and asleep ( which happens pretty often!) he taught me how to do a super-quiet “leopard crawl”, which means crawling really low to the ground on your belly. And I would have to leopard crawl to liberate the good equipment. It was scary and very fun! I got us lots of good stuff. As far as Stefan knew, it all went into a big wooden chest in the book room.
But I have liberated some stuff on my own – things I never told Stefan about. And that stuff goes into my hiding space under the house. Most of it is small stuff. My favorite little liberation was a system for carrying water in a pack with a hose you can sip it through. But the main thing, the big thing in my hiding space, is the rifle I liberated a year ago, when Stefan was away.
I was Just Watching a little clearing off the main road where hunters often met up with each other. It was early in the season, and I was there before any one arrived. But as the sun rose, four SUVs showed up. They were all big, expensive looking vehicles. Six men got out, all dressed in in the kind of clothes that hunters from the city wear and that Stefan makes fun of. One of the men, who I think maybe was younger than the others, acted really excited. He reminded me of how bullshit dogs like Zeke try to act tough but end up wagging their tails really fast and low and licking the mouths of the no-bullshit dogs. He was the guy with the biggest SUV. While they were getting ready to go, he took two rifles out of the car and showed them to the other men. There was a lot of discussion. I’m pretty sure they were deciding which one he should use that day. They decided on the fancier, newer-looking one, with a powerful-looking scope. The guy put the other one back in the SUV…
It never occurred to me to liberate it. Breaking into a car was not something Stefan had taught me to do. But the guy never locked his vehicle! I couldn’t believe it!
About the Author
Ellie Beals grew up Baltimore, Maryland and moved to Canada when she was 20. She spent the majority of her professional career as a management consultant in Ottawa, Ontario. Plain language writing was one of her specialties.
Dogs have been a constant in Ellie’s life from the time she was a child. In the mid-1990s, she started to train and compete in Obedience with Golden Retrievers, with considerable success. In 2014, she had the highest-rated Canadian obedience dog (Fracas – upon whom Chuff is modeled), and her husband David Skinner had the second-rated dog. During a ten-year period, both Ellie and David were regularly ranked among Canada’s Top Ten Obedience competitors. They have an active obedience coaching practice in Ottawa, having retired from their previous professional careers in order to spend more time playing with their dogs and their students.
Like Cass and Noah Harwood, Ellie and David have a log cabin in the wilds of West Quebec, where Ellie is an avid wilderness recreationist, constantly accompanied by her dogs. As Covid19 spread in March of 2020, she and David temporarily shut down their coaching practice and retreated to their cabin, where Emergence was written. Lac Rouge is not the real name of the lake on which they live. Everything else about the locale for Emergence is faithful to the character of the gentle Laurentian mountains of West Quebec.
Generation of Vipers Maria Ann Green
Publication date: June 18th 2021
Genres: Adult, Gothic, Psychological, Thriller
Rosabella Moore-Davis has just moved her husband halfway across the world, with a spur of the moment purchase–a glorious gothic mansion–while on vacation in France. It was love at first sight, and somehow she knew it was more than just some huge house; it was meant to be her home.
But not all things that are meant to be end happily ever after.
Rosabella soon finds herself waking in the middle of the night from more than just wind and creaking pipes. In the dark she discovers ghostly figures looking up into her windows from outside, rooms and treasures previously hidden for centuries, creeping crawling guests, and too many dark shadows lunging toward her. And still, somehow, instead of screaming and running away she researches, choosing knowledge over fear, and learns more about the house and the history of this place she loves so much.
Only when she stumbles into the past, meeting an aristocrat hiding enough deadly secrets to take down the patriarchy, does Rosabella start to regret her choices. And after having come this far, she worries it’s too late to turn back and save herself from a house that has more skeletons in its vast amount of closet space than anyone expected.
Rosabella isn’t the fleeing type, but she’s not sure she’ll survive the fight. Especially against a place with so many stories buried beneath it, burned into every fiber of the edifice, a house with a portal to dark places and troubles that shouldn’t be stirred up.
Generation of Vipers is a mix of crimson peak and Mike Flanagan’s Haunting of Hill House, with elements of Marisha Pessl’s Night Film mixed throughout.
If you like dark thrillers that border on horror, gothic elements, and deliciously dark twists that will keep you guessing, then Generation of Vipers might be your next favorite book. It’ll keep you reading just one more page all night long, too afraid to turn out the light and go to sleep.
It appeals to lovers of suspenseful plots, all things dark like thrillers and horrors, stories with murder and mayhem, dark romance elements, fans of American Horror Story, Shirley Jackson, Gilian Flynn, Ruth Ware, Tana French, J.A. Konrath, and the Timothy Blake Series by Jack Heath.
*Content Warning: graphic violence, sexual content, and language*
There’s no disorientation, even though there should be.
Between stone walls and wallpaper older than my three decades, the cold air isn’t a surprise.
But what does scare me isn’t the new setting or the snoring of my sweet husband but the feeling that something just left. Like I’d been watched and only noticed after it ended.
Or—okay, well that’s crazy.
Though, I don’t know if I was dreaming or if something external woke me up.
Milos’s breath is soft, even if it rumbles in the back of his throat just a little. And I’ve slept next to it for years without jarring awake like this. As another creak sounds, followed by a tiny clunk, I know I’m right.
Maléfique has old bones, and they must protest changes in temperature as we take our trips around the sun.
Though…
The little noises aren’t really enough to have woken me up either. I don’t think so anyway.
Still, whatever the reason, I’m up now. Wider awake than I was when we were taking in the newness of our manor earlier. My eyes flick to the clock Milo insists on bringing with us every vacation, and I correct myself. It was now yesterday that we bought this beautiful space, considering it’s three in the morning.
And I’m fucking wide awake.
I’ll never get back to sleep right now.
So I slip out from under the comforter and let my toes touch the chilly wood of the floor. I move slowly, quietly, even though I doubt Milo would wake up for anything less than my screaming.
Heaviest sleeper I’ve ever met. Which he proves with a snort as he moves to face the other way, still very much unconscious.
And as I move toward the huge window of our new bedroom, I roll my eyes at Milo for the second time in the last twenty-four hours. It happens without forethought, and of course I feel instantly guilty after.
That’s when a kinder smile touches my lips just before my fingertips, then my forehead, touch the thick glass, as I lean against the window and look down at the greenery of our property.
Well, it’s all shades of gray and black at the moment, with the moon behind the clouds.
I can still make out plenty, though.
The woods just beyond an overgrown garden, a path starting just between two picturesque weeping willows—the kind that beg for a swing, or a hammock strategically placed for reading. I can see all of it well enough, but when the moon peeks out between two wisps of cover, my eyes scan harder, searching for something. I’m not even sure what.
Maybe for what could have woken me up if it wasn’t Maléfique.
And I’ve all but given up as the tall grass waves in a darkening breeze when something sparkles and pulls my eyes back to the opening of the track, the archway between hanging branches.
Though, not something. No.
Someone.
Author Bio:
Maria, a badass USA Today and internationally bestselling indie author, lives in Minnesota despite the frozen winters. Actually, she prefers snow drifts and icicles over summer and all that sweat running everywhere. She writes about bitches, breakups, and bloodbaths – not in any particular order. She lives with her husband and little family, which includes a few lazy cats who make great lap warmers. You can usually find her whishing that she lived in a secret cabin in the woods where she could be a hermit reading and writing all of the time. Instead she lives the suburban life where she pretends to her neighbors and the other moms around that she doesn’t swear like a sailor, have hidden tattoos, and loves a good bottle of wine. She absolutely believes in unicorns and ghosts and hopes vampires and monsters are real too. She’s a coffee-in-the-morning and alcohol-in-the-evening kind of person, preferably with a nap in between. Maria prefers cats over dogs, books over people, and late nights over early mornings. She probably shouldn’t talk to anyone until she’s had her first cup of coffee, extra sugar. And if you ever want to hang out with her, you’ll have to be game for a horror movie or just a quick run to target for two (hundred) little things. Also, you couldn’t pay her to be in her twenties again; Thirties is where it’s at. She’s a creative, mouthy, introverted, proud bisexual, highly-sensitive INFJ, chronic pain spoonie warrior, Slytherpuff, dork with a sweet-tooth.
Maria devours books, reading mostly in bed or listening to audiobooks in the car. Writing has been one of her passions for pretty much her whole life. So creativity is a necessity for her, always. After working in the mental health field for almost a decade, she’s now living her dream as a stay-at-home writer, kiddo wrangler, professional snuggler, and constantly-tired-person. When it comes to her writing, she specializes in dark and twisted thrillers or gritty, angsty contemporary romances. But no matter the genre, she always prefers writing deeply flawed characters with dysfunctional relationships. She’s pretty sure the whole “unlikable character” thing is a conspiracy because every character she loves have been labeled this way. Ridiculous. And because of this, she’s pretty much found it impossible to write anything without at least a little mayhem.
Maria was once told she painted with her words, and that phrase stuck with her – because writing really is an art, and good stories are true masterpieces. She’s always trying to grow and improve in her craft, shooting for a masterpiece of her own someday. And she plans to write forever because writing gives Maria the ability to disappear into new worlds and create people within twisting plots, all from the comfort of her couch. She will always believe that though not every story is for her, and her stories aren’t for everyone, every story has a reader.
For more from Maria find all of her links, including a link to get more content at her newsletter, here: linktr.ee/mariainmadness
Inherent Truth Alicia Anthony
(Blood Secrets, #1)
Publication date: January 14th 2020
Genres: Adult, Suspense
A woman with buried secrets…
An agent with an impossible mission…
An inheritance that will destroy them both…
When Liv Sullivan’s grandmother beckons for help from beyond the grave, the reluctant psychic returns to her small Ohio hometown. Scrambling to make sense of the clues left by the vision, Liv finds herself face to face with undercover agent, Ridge McCaffrey.
Assigned to protect a woman whose gifts unnerve him, for a covert psychic intelligence operation he doesn’t understand, Ridge struggles to place duty over desire. But when a gruesome discovery is unearthed at Sullivan Farm, the truth becomes clear…
Some family secrets are best left buried.
Inherent Truth is the first book in the gripping new Blood Secrets psychological thriller series about the cost of truth and the price we pay for love. If you like pulse-pounding page-turners laced with a touch of romance, and shocking twists that will leave you dying for the sequel, Alicia Anthony’s thrilling debut is for you.
I was ten when I watched my cousin die. Granted, at the time I didn’t know the kid I’d seen through a light blue haze was a member of my family. To me, he was just a stranger, like all the rest. A specter sent from the depths of my brain to wake me up in the middle of the night. I still remember like it was yesterday.
The dream sent our household into a sleep deprived frenzy. Me, screaming for my parents to turn on the lights, tears running in rivers down flushed cheeks. My dad, sitting on the edge of the bed, rubbed his hand in circles across my shoulders, consoling me. It took a long distance phone call the following morning for my mom and dad to understand that the dream had been more than a figment of my overactive imagination.
“How did it happen?” My mother’s voice was tight, wobbly as she spoke into the kitchen telephone receiver. It was the only one in the house that was still corded. I watched from the living room couch as she twisted the stretched curlicues of cord around her index finger.
When she slid into a chair at the kitchen table with her hand planted firmly over her lips, heaviness descended on the room, blanketing the air with cold finality. To this day I remember the lead weight in my chest, the struggle for breath. Maybe that’s what he’d felt in his last moments. My mother was still holding the phone in one hand when she turned to stare at me. Eyes wide with some emotion I couldn’t yet interpret. Now, sixteen years later, I can tell you for certain it was terror.
My sixteen-year-old cousin, Curt, had been killed racing home from a party to make curfew. I’d seen it all. Told my parents every detail. The skid on the damp roadway. The slam into a poorly placed telephone pole. Even the good Samaritans who’d stopped in the dead of night to try to dig him out of the twisted wreckage. Smoke filtered up from the heap of metal before I saw him, standing on the other side of the car, smiling at me.
“Tell Mom, I’m sorry,” he’d said. His voice cut short by the wail of a siren.
It’s funny. I can still picture that dream in lifelike detail. But now, instead of terror, there’s a peaceful comfort attached to the memory. I think that’s how it works for me. The visions can’t hold any power over me once I work them out–figure out how to help.
In those early days, I’d been scared senseless. I’d wake up in a cold sweat, flailing to turn a light on, to familiarize myself with reality again. For a while I slept with the bedside lamp on, hoping the luminescence would create some kind of barrier between this world and the next. It was my grandmother who helped me realize it was useless, of course. The dreams were a part of reality–my reality, anyway.
But that awareness of what my dreams were–what that made me–changed everything. The energy in our household sparked with frustration. My mother and father argued. Family outings trickled to a rare occurrence. My life consisted of school, home, homework, and bed, praying to whatever god would listen to let me sleep through the night. Every once in a while some deity would listen, most times, not. I learned to keep what I saw to myself. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Within two years, my mother had run through all the psychiatrists and magic pills she could find to make me normal again. By the time I was twelve, I was spending the majority of my time at my grandparents’ farm, away from the family I’d disgraced and the marriage I’d destroyed. At least, that’s how it seemed to twelve-year-old me.
“I will not allow my daughter to be a freak.” My mother’s words after a particularly heated exchange with my father regarding my condition are what drove me to become the Liv Sullivan I am today.
The “f” word, as I’d taken to calling it, hummed in my skull now, just as it had when I was a girl. Hunkered down on the steps of my parents’ home, eavesdropping through tears, the people I loved arguing about an affliction I didn’t fully understand and over which I had no control.
Of course, if it wasn’t for all of that, I might never have learned I had two choices in life–remain the small-town freak or reinvent myself as a big city fraud. I chose the latter, finding out pretty quick that the best place to hide was in plain sight.
Author Bio:
Alicia Anthony’s first novels were illegible scribbles on the back of her truck driver father’s logbook trip tickets. Having graduated from scribbles to laptop, she now pens novels of psychological suspense in the quiet of the wee morning hours. A full-time elementary school Literacy Specialist, Alicia hopes to pass on her passion for books and writing to the students she teaches.
A two time Golden Heart® finalist and Silver Quill Award winner, Alicia finds her inspiration in exploring the dark, dusty corners of the human experience. Alicia is a graduate of Spalding University’s School of Creative & Professional Writing (MFA), Ashland University (M.Ed.) and THE Ohio State University (BA). Go Bucks! She lives in rural south-central Ohio with her amazingly patient and supportive husband, incredibly understanding teenage daughter, two dogs, three horses, a plethora of both visiting and resident barn cats, and some feral raccoons who have worn out their welcome.
When she’s not writing or teaching, Alicia loves to travel and experience new places. Connect with her on Facebook or Instagram @AliciaAnthonyBooks. She’d love to hear from you!
I’ve always been fascinated by dark psychological thrillers that mess with your mind and keep you on the edge of your seat. I toyed with the genre writing my debut novel Wild Hearted, but labeled it a crime drama. Its sequel, Carnivora, evolved over six years to become a full-blown hold-your-breath thriller that deals with grave issues such as kidnapping, child sex trafficking, and self-harm.
Telling five parallel stories with as many voices, it gives you the perspectives of a police informant, a hunted gangster, a mad avenger, an inconsolable girlfriend, and a psychotic kidnapper. I pull no punches weaving these stories, so be prepared for a dark, gritty, and graphic read – a little dirty on the erotic side – that I hope will play with your strings and stick with you for a long time.
Please note that this is part 1 of Carnivora and I am currently working on parts 2 and 3, so if those cliffhangers at the end are killing you, be patient. The continuation is right around the corner!
Blurb
Fight evil with evil.
TOMOR
Crime lord Tomor is serving a life sentence behind bars. Without warning, he’s abducted by mysterious men. A sick manhunt is on, with people around him dying like flies. He will need all his street flair and gangster skills to prevent his loved ones from ending up on the death list.
LUZ
Luz grieves the loss of her lover while striving to take care of their baby. The last thing she needs is to fall for the new neighbor.
DAVID
A year after he betrayed his adoptive father and sent him to jail, David is slowly rebuilding his life. Then everything falls apart again: he learns that Tomor has escaped, and his police connections lead him to a child sex trafficking ring involving cold, powerful men.
The cops are in over their heads with “Project Carnivora” … Perhaps the only one who can help bust the pedophile predators is an equally vicious devil: Tomor, the country’s most hunted criminal.
See photos that inspired me to write the book onPinterest
Excerpt
“Time to change your bandage again,” the nurse mutters, voice cool, and pulls my orange-colored sleeve up to the elbow.
She unrolls the long strip of bandage from my wrist and tugs at one corner of the gauze plastered on my wound. It sticks as if glued to the freshly grown skin, and instead of removing the gauze carefully, she tears if off hard, discharging pain through my arm, wrist-to-shoulder.
I open my eyes and lift my head off the pillow. “What the fuck are ya doing, trying to reopen the wound or something?”
“Like you care.” She stops pulling and glares, gauze between her fingers. “I can see who you are inside. You’re playing tough, aren’t you, bad guy? But you can’t fool me.”
“Shut up.” I lay down again, huffing, and stare at the white ceiling above me with its rows of long neon lights.
“You’re a good man.”
I glance back. “I said, shut the fuck up.”
Her eyes shine. She rips off the remaining gauze, ignoring my grunt of pain, and throws it in a bin. “Look.”
No fuck.
“Look at it,” she insists, voice low and demanding.
No. I know what I’ve done, and I can imagine what it looks like. A six centimeter-long deep, reddish, scratched-up ridge along my artery. Layers of skin, fat, meat, and whatnot must be visible and sweating a pinkish liquid from the reborn pores. I don’t need to see it.
I guess the girl wants me to be so horrified, I’ll never attempt suicide again. That’s right. She wants to shock me into acceptance.
You gotta be fucking kidding me, little thing.
She shakes her head. “I don’t understand why they gave you the life sentence.”
“You mean they shoulda given me the chair?”
Instead of responding to my sarcasm, she pivots to look up at the clock and widens her eyes as if realizing she forgot an appointment. Face tense, she returns to her work, applies some cool, gel-like liquid on the wound, and bandages it with quick routine moves.
What’s up with her? In my three days in this woman’s company, I’ve noted the things that make her tick. Maybe she’s upset because I’m leaving the infirmary soon. Earlier, she said she didn’t know when I’d be ready to go back to my cell. She probably knows now, but doesn’t want to tell me.
The door opens. She jumps.
A uniformed guard pokes his head in, checks the small room, and exits.
She seems frozen in place, features tense. Staring ahead and taking deep breaths as if trying to regain composure.
I cock my head a little. “What’s going on? They gonna transfer me?”
She visibly swallows and fixes her gaze on some point on the wall.
I snicker. “Are you sad ‘cause I’m leaving?”
Ha, I can be so ugly, when the girl clearly likes me.
As she sits there avoiding me, I take the time to check out her tits, and drink in the amazing sight of their pressing against her green blouse with each breath. She doesn’t have a name tag. Come to think of it, none of the personnel do. Evidently, so the inmates can’t identify their ‘caretakers’, and should they by some miracle leave the premises, track them down.
I nod to her blouse. “What’s your name?”
She twists back to me, brows raised, before shaking her head. “I can’t tell you that.”
“C’mon, I’ll never see you again.” I grin, then add with an ironic snicker, teasing her, “They’ll never let me slash my wrists, or hang myself.”
She looks away and busies herself collecting the medical stuff, throwing a quick, almost invisible glance to the door. What the hell is making her so nervous?
Coldness fills my chest. Something’s up.
“Come on, Babe,” I coax with my most gentle, sensual voice, wanting to buy time. “Tell me your name.”
“Why?” she whispers, fidgeting with the roll of bandage.
“’Cause I want a name to your pretty face when I jack off in my cell.”
About the author
Lea Bronsen likes her reads hot, fast, and edgy, and strives to give her own stories the same intensity. After a deep dive on the unforgiving world of gangsters with her debut novel Wild Hearted, she divides her writing time between romantic suspenses, dark erotic romances, and crime thrillers.
Between submitting THROUGH HER EYES for publication and completing the final edits, I found myself reading a lot of true crime books. Lots of stuff on criminal profiling, unsolved cases, and serial killers. It was coincidence, but it was also great timing when the edits came in! I didn’t want to make the story procedural-heavy, but as the hero, Dom, is a police detective, I think I was able to make him a little more real by working in some of the facts I’d picked up. I was also able to flesh out the villain of the story by adding in little behavioural cues based on real-life serial killers. I didn’t want to shoehorn anything in, like “look at me, I read some stuff!!!”, but hopefully the extras I did squeeze in help to build the tension and chills in the story!
ABOUT THE BOOK
Six years ago, Keira nearly died at the hands of a serial killer. The experience left her with more than just physical scars. She was psychically linked to the killer, a helpless witness to all his crimes. Now the man known as the Shoreditch Slasher has killed again, and Keira is dragged right back into his path. Detective Dom Abbott believes Keira’s link to the killer will help the police finally catch him, even if it means putting the woman he loves in danger. With Dom to protect her, Keira is willing to risk almost anything…But where will her strange gift lead her?
EXCERPT
His intentions were fiercely clear when he kissed her.
She gasped into his mouth, thrilled by the heat of his kiss. He knotted one hand in her hair, forcing her head back. At the same time, he backed her against the wall, pinning her in place while he devoured her mouth with his, forceful and almost painfully demanding. She moaned, a mixture of pleasure and pain. His touch, his kiss, his hands… It was all exquisite, but this position – forced against the wall, held firm by a powerful man… It stirred dark memories.
Dom must have sensed her inner turmoil, because he broke the kiss, stepping back with a groan. “Dammit, Keira—”
“I don’t want you to stop,” she said quickly, afraid he’d end things before they’d even begun.
“I’m not bloody stopping.” He gripped her shoulders, pulling her in close. “Believe me, I’m not. But all the times I imagined fucking you, Keira Swanson, I never once imagined doing it in my front room with a half-eaten pizza at our feet.”
She laughed, heart hammering and making her feel bold and reckless. “How did you imagine it?”
“All kinds of ways.” He traced her lips with his finger. “Rough, slow, in silk sheets, in the shower, with blindfolds, strawberries, ice cubes, handcuffs…” He ground against her and nipped her earlobe. Keira shivered in delight, pressing back against him. “Drove myself mad imagining all the things we could do. But pizza boxes were definitely never involved.”
She shivered pleasurably, electricity seeming to zip between her clit and her nipples at his words and his touch. She’d imagined it too – all those scenarios and countless more, and the thought of actually doing it was as surreal as any outer-body experience. It made her fears about initiating intimacy fall away. Dom wanted her. It was plain in every line of his body, in the way he pushed his hips against her, the way he stared at her so hungrily. She didn’t need to wonder how to do this. It would be as natural as breathing.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Amber is the secret identity of a writer who normally pens urban fantasy, but feels like stretching her wings. Amber loves darker romance, anti-heroes, good red wine, and expensive chocolate (sometimes all at once). She’s based in the UK and lives in an adorable cottage with her dream man and a demanding cat.
