Dec 8, 2014 | Blog, December 2014
The Shocking Secret of a Guest at the Wedding (A Milworth Manor Book) by Victoria Alexander is a charming and magical love story. Even more intriguing is when the wedding planner has a few secrets of her own! There are so many twists and turns that you will be asking questions right up until the very end.
Jackson “Jack” Quincy Graham Channing is a banker from New York City and suddenly discovers that his biological father is alive. Even more shocking is that his parents are still married and that his mother never bothered to tell anyone. Everyone is surprised by the turn of these events and that’s where the book takes off, with twists and turns and excitement galore! Will this new found discovery change everything? Will Jack be able to trust his mother? Will he be receptive to his newly discovered “father?”
As fate would have it, Jack is now the Channing Heir, and in England that is everything! The only request his father asks of Jack is to travel with him to England for a few weeks to meet the family. Rather the family he just discovered he had. Poor Jack has so many questions for his mother, himself and the man he thought was lost to him forever. Will a few weeks be enough time to sort out this new revelation?
Committed and with an open mind, Jack is amiable to traveling and meeting his new family. Consequently, Jack leaves everything behind including one unanswered question. Is he ready for marriage? Once in London, he meets an attractive woman Lady Theodosia “Teddy” Winslow, a wedding planner and friend of the Channing family in England. It seems Jack isn’t the only one who’s facing family issues and decisions. For Teddy, marriage can’t be for love, in her mind it’s all about survival.
Unfortunately for Teddy, she must build a new life out of need rather than fulfill her childhood dreams. Exhausted from her Mother’s constant nagging to marry, Teddy dodges it anytime it’s brought up for discussion. As a wedding planner she’s content and for now, it provides enough money to support them both.
Perhaps it’s all about timing and taking a chance on the unknown. What Teddy and Jack need is an adventure together. Is it possible that they can finally discover themselves and who they were meant to be? Suddenly, things aren’t quite as they’d thought. It all comes down to just one kiss. This one kiss will push these two heartwarming characters on a different path than they’d envisioned and will surprise everyone, including themselves!
I received this ARC for an honest review and hope that you will purchase your copy now. Once again, Victoria Alexander delivers a fantastic story with adventure, family, friendships, self discovery and a wedding! A perfect book to get wrapped up in this holiday season!
BIO:
New York Times bestselling author Victoria Alexander was an award winning television reporter until she discovered fiction was much more fun than real life. She turned to writing full time and is still shocked it worked out.
Since the publication of her first book in 1995, she has written thirty-two full length novels and six novellas. The Perfect Wife—originally published in 1996 and reissued in March 2008—hit #1 on the New York Times list. The best selling, award winning author has books translated into more than a dozen different languages and readers around the world. Victoria credits much of her writing success to her experiences as a reporter.
Her years as a broadcast journalist were spent in two radically different areas of the country: Nebraska and West Virginia. In West Virginia, she covered both natural and manmade disasters. She was on the scene when a power plant construction accident in a small town left 52 men dead. She once spent the night on a mountain waiting to learn of the fate of coal miners trapped in a mine collapse. Victoria was producing a newscast when her husband (who worked at the same television station) and several other journalists were held hostage by a disturbed Vietnam veteran. In Nebraska, she reported on the farm crisis and watched people lose land that had been in their families for generations. She covered the story that was the basis of the movie BOYS DON’T CRY and once acted as the link between police and a gunman who had barricaded himself in his home. Her investigative work exposed the trucking of New York City garbage to a small town dump in rural Nebraska.
During her journalism career, Victoria covered every president from Ford to Clinton. She knows firsthand what it feels like to be surrounded by rising floodwaters and inside a burning building. She’s interviewed movie stars including Kevin Costner, ridden an elephant and flown in a governor’s helicopter. She’s covered a national political convention and Pope John Paul II’s historic visit to Denver as well as small town festivals celebrating everything from walnuts to Glen Miller. Her work was honored by numerous organizations including the Associated Press who called a feature about a firefighter’s school “story telling genius”. It was the encouragement she needed to turn from news to fiction. She’s never looked back.
Victoria claims her love of romance and journalism is to due to the influence of her favorite comic book character: Lois Lane, a terrific reporter and a great heroine who pursued Superman with an unwavering determination. And why not? He was extremely well drawn.
Victoria grew up traveling the world as an Air Force brat. Today, she lives in Omaha, Nebraska with her husband and two bearded collies—Louie and Reggie. They all live happily ever after in a house under constant renovation and the accompanying parade of men in tool belts. And never ending chaos. Victoria laughs a great deal—she has to.
Dec 6, 2014 | Blog, December 2014
All day long on Twitter I’ve been reading your tweets about the various traditions that you’re all doing to get ready. Everything from going to the Nutcracker, trimming trees and putting up lights, or debating about what family recipe to use. There are so many traditions for Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa.
For me December is a time where family and friends can hopefully come together to learn and embrace what makes us so unique. I love the baking, crafting, cooking and quality time we get with the family after a busy week. Once the weather cools enough that coats are a must, it means that the fireplace will soon be filled with logs and the fire roaring. The coffee and hot cocoa will be poured and sweet treats will be baked or brought home from those cookie exchanges to enjoy.
I’m looking forward to sitting down with a cup of coffee later tonight and diving into a holiday book or two from some amazing authors! I may even try a few tasty cookie recipes from the Romance Bandits’ cookie blogs and members only recipe book! I hope you will take a few minutes to browse your favorite e-book site, or go to a great brick and mortar bookstore and support your favorite authors! They’ve whipped up a few fabulous stories that will help satiate that holiday reading craving and a new book goes great with a few cookie recipes.
So, if you’re looking for some fantastic ideas, books and even recipes, check out these sites as well as my resource section for some fantastic links to some AMAZING Authors!
https://romancebandits.com/decembers-coming-attractions/
https://jauntyquills.com/
https://reddoorreads.com
https://JewelsOfHistoricalRomance.com
So….how are you getting ready for the Holiday Season? We would LOVE to know!
Dec 5, 2014 | Blog, December 2014, Nancy Northcott
Warrior by Nancy Northcott is a colorful and magical tale with on sexy mage, a determined archaeologist and a lot of heat! Audra Grayson is deep in the Okefenokee Swamp hoping to keep her career alive. When her team discovers a metal object in the middle of a Native American dig site they fear someone is out to sabotage them. When she seeks out some help Will Davis, a famous archaeologist and Mage, shows up. For Will, working with the Mundanes (non-magic using folk) can be challenging but he’s determined to help her find out how the metal object appeared at a site where none should be.
A mysterious fire and magic permeating in the air send Will’s senses on overdrive. Is dark magic at work? It’s when a bronze axe is discovered that Audra’s team starts scrambling and Will’s interest is now heightened. How did it get here? For Audra the presence of a hunky man at her site creates a challenging work environment and results in an unfortunate Ghoul attack.
Is there enough trust between Will and Audra that they can confide in each other? There is fear that someone close to Audra is betraying her. Audra’s hiding something that could damage the results of her dig. Afraid to confide in anyone she’s unable to discuss her unexplained visions and the dark shadows that are surrounding her. Will she reach out to Will and let him help? Is she prepared for him to discover her secret?
Once again the dig site is attacked and destroyed. Audra fears that the park rangers will accuse her team of vandalism. With her reputation on the line and concern for her team and Will, she has to make a decision. Can she confide in Will completely? What will they do when they discover someone they both trusted has betrayed them?
Will offers a solution but is it enough? Eventually Audra decides to act when the presence yet again of the shadows come for her for what she hopes is the last time. After all this time will she find out what has left a shadow over everything?
Ghouls, Mages, secret powerful artifacts and sizzling chemistry make this another intense story. Thank you Nancy! I received this ARC from the author for an honest review and am super excited that I did! I am so happy that I did- I look forward to the next installment of the Light Mage Series soon.
BIO:
Nancy Northcott’s childhood ambition was to grow up and become Wonder Woman. Around fourth grade, she realized it was too late to acquire Amazon genes, but she still loved comic books, science fiction, fantasy and YA romance. A sucker for fast action and wrenching emotion, Nancy combines the romance and high stakes she loves in the books she writes.
Her debut novel, Renegade, received a starred review from Library Journal. The reviewer called it “genre writing at its best.” Nancy is a three-time RWA Golden Heart finalist and has won the Maggie, the Molly, the Emerald City Opener, and Put Your Heart in a Book.
Married since 1987, Nancy and her husband have one son, a bossy dog, and a house full of books.
Dec 4, 2014 | Blog, Coffee With, December 2014, paranormal
First, if we were meeting at a coffee shop I’d be drinking a Latte:) What would you order? A caramel Frappuccino or its equivalent. I love caramel!
Thanks so much for taking the time to answer a few questions. How many books are you planning in this Series? The Light Mage Wars continues an earlier series, The Protectors, which included two novels and a novella. The two series are part of one story arc, which has a total of seven novels in it. So there are four more novels to come. There’ll also be a couple more novellas and some short stories.
Readers who want to go through the events in the order the characters do should ignore the series labels and start with Sentinel, which is set three years before Renegade, then read Renegade, Protector, Guardian, and Warrior in that order. The books are show in reading order on my website, https://www.nancynorthcott.com/category/books .
How do you research for a series like this? I grew up in a small town, so creating Wayfarer, Georgia, was easy. Devising the magic system was also fairly easy. I wanted it to be nature-based, so I kept that in mind as I read about many different kinds of magic and energy healing. What I ended up with is an amalgamation of all of it, spun to fit my particular world.
Using the Okefenokee Swamp was more challenging. It’s not the focus of the series, but each book touches on it, some more than others. I hit upon the idea of using it because I wanted to set this series in the South but not in Atlanta, which is popping up more often as a setting now. Jana Oliver’s wonderful Demon Trapper’s Daughter series has a couple of scenes in the Okefenokee, but so far as I know, no one else has use it in any major way as a paranormal romance or fantasy setting.
I remembered visiting the Okefenokee with my family when I was in grade school, though I didn’t remember much about it other than the name and the fact that we didn’t take a boat ride because my mom was afraid a snake would fall into the boat. When I shared this with my brainstorming group, one of the members said, “The energy is different in a swamp.” That kicked off a round of ideas about how that could matter with magic, and the swamp became an integral part of the series world.
Because I hadn’t been there since childhood, I barely touched on it in the first book that sold, Renegade. Soon after that sale, I visited the Okefenokee with my family and totally fell in love with it.
This astounds my friends, who know I like my surroundings climate-controlled and my wildlife safely distant. I am seriously Not Nature Girl. But the swamp is an astounding ecosystem unlike anything else I’d ever seen. It’s a huge (about 700 square miles) blackwater peat bog, not actually a swamp. It has its share of bugs, but it doesn’t smell. When the water is undisturbed, it’s a perfect mirror, something that’s definitely going to matter in a book at some point.
I’ve taken a number of excursions with guides from Okenfenokee Adventures, the official concessionaire for the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, and talked to rangers in the refuge and at the state park on the swamp’s west side. I wanted to learn as much as possible about the swamp because you never know what’s going to spark an idea.
To flesh out the characters’ backgrounds, I reached out to a number of people who generously shared their time and expertise. Writing Warrior involved not only visiting Billy’s Island in the Okefenokee, the inspiration for Mystery Island in the book, but contacting archaeologists, a historian who has studied the swamp and its inhabitants, and a gamer.
As is often the case with writers and research, much of what I learned will never appear on a page. But having it in my head helps me immerse myself–and, I hope, the reader–in the world these characters inhabit.
I always ask every question I can think of, and I can only hope I don’t trip over the question that never occurred me!
**Here is a photo of the Okefenokee, showing what a perfect mirror the water is**
Nancy, this is so fascinating! I’m not a nature girl myself but would probably dive in for the safe of research 😉 I hope your readers are as excited as I am to read this too! Thank you for the insight into your series and reading order. For some, the only way the read a series is in sequential order!
8 Tantalizing Tidbits:
1. A MUST read book and why? To Kill a Mockingbird. It’s my all-time ever favorite book. The family relationships and the friendships are beautifully drawn. It also depicts most of its characters as nuanced, caught between the social imperatives of their time and their senses of what is right. It’s a also a brilliant portrait of small-town life in the South during the Depression.
2. What is one place that I should see if I visit your hometown? I’m from Davidson, North Carolina, a college town about 20 miles north of Charlotte. It has burgeoned in size but still has it’s old-fashioned Main Street, with various shops and eateries, so I’d pick that. Though parking might be a challenge.
3. Castles or Beaches? Oooh, toughie! I love both. Since it’s easier for me to get to a beach than to a castle though, I’ll go with castles. I love the history that reverberates from the walls.
4. One thing readers would be surprised to know about you. I eaerned an FCC third-class radio operator license. When I was in college, I worked at the campus radio station, and the station manager arranged for a bunch of us to take the test. I think it was so we could be unsupervised in the control room or sign our own logs or something, but I’ve forgotten the exact reason now.
5. If you had an all expenses paid trip anywhere in the world for research, where would you go? Hawaii. I’ve always wanted to go there, and I would be more than happy to set many stories there to justify the trip. Nature-based magic, which my mages use, would have a lot of fuel there. I sent one of my mage couples to Hawaii for their honeymoon. Too bad I couldn’t check locations for them ahead of time!
6. Organized or Free Floating? That depends on what day of the week you ask me. Some days, when I have a lot that has to be done at a specific time, I’m very organized. That’s the only way I can check off the entire list. Other days, I tend to go at a slower pace and am open to sudden ideas like going to the bookstore to see what came in.
7. What’s your favorite TV show and why? I love NCIS-LA. The plots are usually interesting, often with unpredictable twists, and I enjoy the banter among the characters. The evolving Kensi/Deeks relationship (#Densi on Twitter) intrigues me. I’m rooting hard for them to get together. On top of that, the explosive action element feeds my need for boom, as we call it in the Romance Bandit’s Lair.
8. If you could invite 5 people to dinner (not friends and family- that’s too easy) who would you invite? It could be anyone past or present.
Hmmm. There are so many people I’d like to interrogate–uh, talk to! This list might be different on a different day, but for now, let’s go with these:
I would invite Richard III of England because I’d like to know the truth about how he came to the throne in 1483. I don’t subscribe to the traditionalist view, but I don’t think the man was purer than the driven snow, either. So I have lots of questions he could answer. Assuming a king would condescend to do so.
Next would be whoever carved the word Croatoan on a tree on Roanoke Island, North Carolina, in the late 1500s. The mystery of Sir Walter Raleigh’s Lost Colony has intrigued me since childhood. There are many theories about the colonists’ fate, and it would be great to learn what actually happened to them.
Elizabeth I would round out the historical contingent. I’d like to know how she managed the delicate dance that kept her both unmarried and on the throne for 70 + years. Queen or not, she might welcome a chance to brag after all this time.
Nathan Fillion would be welcome because I adore both Firefly and Castle. I think he would add a lighter note to balance the weightiness of the historical figures.
Finally, I would have Amanda Tapping of Stargate: SGI and Sanctuary to round out the table. She’s a terrific actress and is funny and quick enough to keep up with Fillion as well as helping to lighten the atmosphere. Her character on SGI, Captain (and then Major and then Colonel) Samantha Carter was an action heroine when they weren’t so common. She was also the science geek of the team, an unusual role for an attractive woman on TV in the series’ early days.
Of course, these people might not care to talk to each other, or even be able to, seeing as how pronunciation changes over the centuries, but I would find a way to talk to all of them! If we were having imaginary people, the DC Comics universe would come into play, and that would make choosing even harder. But I figured you wanted me to stick to actual people.
Thanks for having me, Rae, and for taking the time to review my books.
BIO:
Nancy Northcott’s childhood ambition was to grow up and become Wonder Woman. Around fourth grade, she realized it was too late to acquire Amazon genes, but she still loved comic books, science fiction, fantasy and YA romance. A sucker for fast action and wrenching emotion, Nancy combines the romance and high stakes she loves in the books she writes.
Her debut novel, Renegade, received a starred review from Library Journal. The reviewer called it “genre writing at its best.” Nancy is a three-time RWA Golden Heart finalist and has won the Maggie, the Molly, the Emerald City Opener, and Put Your Heart in a Book.
Married since 1987, Nancy and her husband have one son, a bossy dog, and a house full of books.
Dec 3, 2014 | Blog, December 2014, Nancy Northcott
Sentinel: A Light Mage Wars Novella by Nancy Northcott is a seamless story with on sexy mage, a talented artist with a secret and some fantastic chemistry! Rick Moore, a Mage reporter has been desperately trying to find out the truth surrounding his father’s death and refute the accusation that he was involved in dark magic. In order to get the support to uncover his family scandal from the web magazine he works for, he must first find out what happened to one of the most wanted fugitives in the Mage world, artist Caroline Dare’s brother.
Fighting ghouls and an unintended intoxicating attraction only deepens the connection between them. What will Caro do when she discovers the real story he’s after? Will he loose her forever? Rick needs to get the inside scoop on Caro’s brother Griffin Dare, but at the rate Rick’s going that could be lethal.
When Rick’s boss betrays him, in the most unforgiveable way by publishing damaging information with Rick’s name attached to it, everything changes. It now paints Rick as a callous, uncaring and media driven journalist out for blood. Caro is left questioning his feelings and intentions towards her.
Too much is at stake for Caro, with the publication of personal information can she trust Rick? Are they both being set up? Or was he just interested in her for “the story?”
With nothing left to lose, Rick seeks out help from an unexpected source. He must now have faith in the Mage judicial system, and pray that the truth will be exposed.
When I read stories I usually have a pretty good idea of how they will end but this time….whoa!!!! Dear readers you must read this book now! I gasped at the ending! I’m so grateful that no one was home as I screamed a bit loud! Absolutely superb Nancy! Well done! I received this ARC from the author for an honest review and am super excited that I did! I am so happy that I did- it was the perfect book to read on a crisp winter day!
BIO:
Nancy Northcott’s childhood ambition was to grow up and become Wonder Woman. Around fourth grade, she realized it was too late to acquire Amazon genes, but she still loved comic books, science fiction, fantasy and YA romance. A sucker for fast action and wrenching emotion, Nancy combines the romance and high stakes she loves in the books she writes.
Her debut novel, Renegade, received a starred review from Library Journal. The reviewer called it “genre writing at its best.” Nancy is a three-time RWA Golden Heart finalist and has won the Maggie, the Molly, the Emerald City Opener, and Put Your Heart in a Book.
Married since 1987, Nancy and her husband have one son, a bossy dog, and a house full of books.
