Holding Out for A Hero by T E Kessler - blog tour

Today is my turn on the blog tour for "Holding out for a Hero by T E Kessler.




Hosted by Rachel's Random Resources.




About the book:

When she was a child, her mother was murdered and subconsciously ever since, journalist Macy Shaw has been searching for a hero.

​ She found one, but the hero she found was a Jelvia.

​ Undeterred, she used her connections to go after the biggest story of her life.

​ Narcifer saved a woman by merely being a Jelvia—his presence causing terror and making the assailants flee.

​ And it amused him when his “heroism” created a national stir, so when a pretty little red-head asked to interview him for a story, Narcifer felt compelled to grant it to her, especially when she gave all the signals that she wanted more than a story.

However, on the night Narcifer inadvertently became a hero, he had been tracking a scientist with orders to kill, and strangely no matter where Narcifer’s line of investigation took him, his search always brought back to the red-headed journalist, Macy Shaw.


Buy link from Amazon - out to buy NOW.




About T. E Kessler :​

Tina Kessler writes steamy romance for the 18+ market and is the pen name of Louise Wise.

Louise Wise is a British author from the Midlands in England. Her debut novel is the acclaimed sci-fi romance titled EDEN, which was followed by its sequel HUNTED in 2013.

Forthcoming, JELVIA: NOT HUMAN series is themed on the above Eden and Hunted books.

HOLDING OUT FOR A HERO book 1

SURVIVING HER DOMINANT book 2

SPIDER book 3 will be released late spring, 2020.

Wise took the decision to write under the name of T. E Kessler for her JELVIA: NOT HUMAN series to separate them from her regular novels to the mature material. Her other works include:

Eden (sci-fi romance) – slight sex references

Hunted (sci-fi romance) slight sex references

A Proper Charlie (romantic comedy)

Oh No, I’ve Fallen in Love! (dark, comedy romance)

Wide Awake Asleep (time travel, romance)

Wise enjoys writing comedy and finds a place for it in ALL her books. She has written numerous short stories for women’s magazines such as Take a Break and Woman’s Own.

​ Follow T. E Kessler

​ Blog: https://louisewise.blogspot.com/

Website: https://louisewis3.wordpress.com/

For my stop I have an extract, enjoy.

Macy Shaw, a journalist, has become obsessed with Jelvias—another species living alongside the human—and is certain they aren’t the heinous assassins the media claim them to be.

Taking advantage of her obsession, her boss calls on her to interview Narcifer, a Jelvian man. Ultimately, Macy falls for the handsome Jelvia until it becomes clear to her that she’s a pawn between her world and the world of the Jelvias.

An extract from chapter thirty-nine

There was a commotion behind her. Knowing Narcifer had discovered her missing and was coming after her, she pushed past Samuel and began to run towards the front entrance of the hotel where the hotel’s carpark, and Narcifer’s Ranger, was located.

Behind her, the foyer doors bashed open and she turned to look; a brief second to see that Narcifer, bare-footed like her, wearing only jeans, his body and hair still wet from the shower, was pounding across the foyer after her. She turned for the doors, pushing through them, hearing but not hearing the panicked shouts and screams behind her as everyone became aware of the Jelvia in the building.

She ran towards the carpark’s gated doors and pushed through them. The last time she had been in his car was after he rescued her from the cellar, and she’d been exhausted. She couldn’t remember which floor it was parked on, and only knew it wasn’t the first.

‘Macy!’

The sound of him crying her name was partially drowned by someone screaming, but she didn’t look round. She sprinted up the stairs towards the second floor of the carpark. She had almost made it when his arm circled her waist and pulled her back against him. She struggled, kicking his shins but his hold only tightened. His breath fanned her right ear.

‘Macy, stop it.’

‘Let me go!’

‘Hey!’ someone shouted.

Macy and Narcifer looked up. A man was looking out of his car’s window, about to pull into a parking space. A woman was looking on anxiously in the passenger seat, and two kids in the rear were looking agog at them. The man’s choice of words was audible as he noticed Narcifer’s all-black eyes.

‘Help me!’ screamed Macy, and she began to kick and wriggle in Narcifer’s arms.

But screeching tyres rang in Macy’s ears.

‘There goes your hero,’ Narcifer said.

One of his hands was around her waist, the other was around her chest, flattening her breasts and pinning her arms. She lowered her head and sank her teeth into his bare arm.

He cursed and let her go. She fell to the floor, on her knees.

‘Macy!’ he said. He sounded concerned, but she jumped up and broke into a run.

She saw the Ranger and aimed the key fob at it, bleeped it open.

She ran for the door, but Narcifer was quicker. Using the full length of his body, he pinned her against the car with her face pressed against the window. He flipped her around.

‘Please, Macy, stop.’

Both were breathing hard.

She couldn’t look at him, and fixed her gaze to the centre of his chest, where it rose and fell rapidly.

‘Tell me you haven’t been hired by Johnsten to sleep with me for information,’ he said.

‘What!’ Shocked, she glared at him, her eyes sparkling with unshed tears. He stared back at her. He looked so tense, and his usually twinkling eyes were dry, black orbs. There was no trace of his boyish grin on his face. He looked rigid and unfriendly.

‘Have you been hired by Johnsten to use me for information of the whereabouts of Aldarn?’

‘Yes,’ she said.

A small muscle jerked in his cheek.

Rogue Killer by Leigh Russell Blog Tour

Today is my turn on the blog tour for Rogue Killer by Leigh Russell, a Random Things Tour.


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About the author




Leigh Russell is the author of the internationally bestselling Geraldine Steel series: Cut Short, Road Closed, Dead End, Death Bed, Stop Dead, Fatal Act, Killer Plan, Murder Ring, Deadly Alibi, Class Murder and Death Rope. The series has sold over a million copies worldwide. Cut Short was shortlisted for the Crime Writers Association (CWA) John Creasey New Blood Dagger Award, and Leigh has been longlisted for the CWA Dagger in the Library Award. Her books have been #1 on Amazon Kindle and iTunes with Stop Dead and Murder Ring selected as finalists for The People’s Book Prize. Leigh is chair of the CWA’s Debut Dagger Award judging panel and is a Royal Literary Fellow. Leigh studied at the University of Kent, gaining a Masters degree in English and American Literature. She is married with two daughters and a granddaughter, and lives in London.


About the book




Blurb

The new novel in the million-copy selling Detective Geraldine Steel series

A man is killed in apparently random attack, and suspicion falls on a gang of muggers. Only Detective Sergeant Geraldine Steel thinks this is the work of a more deliberate murderer.

Two more victims are discovered, after further seemingly indiscriminate attacks. The muggers are tracked down, with tragic consequences. And all the while the killer remains at large. When Geraldine finally manages to track down a witness, she finds her own life is in danger...

For fans of Martina Cole, Mel Sherratt and LJ Ross

Look out for more DI Geraldine Steel investigations in Cut Short, Road Closed, Dead End, Death Bed, Stop Dead, Fatal Act, Killer Plan, Murder Ring, Deadly Alibi, Class Murder and Death Rope, plus the special Christmas short story, Killer Christmas

Don't miss the DI Ian Peterson series: Cold Sacrifice, Race to Death and Blood Axe

Out to buy from tomorrow, from AMAZON

For my stop I have a wee extract from Chapter one, you lucky things! Enjoy.

Chapter 1

Striding home through the dark streets of York with a bloody plastic cape and rubber gloves concealed inside a polythene bag in his rucksack, he congratulated himself on a successful outing. He had come a long way since leaving the house where he had spent his unhappy childhood. He had done his best, but even then he had known that the cats he killed had been paving the way for other victims. At that time he had been forced to suffocate his victims, as he couldn’t return home covered in blood. Because the most annoying aspect of his life back then was that whenever he flung himself through the front door, bag on his back and blond fringe flopping over his forehead, his parents would be there, waiting…

He turned away from his parents, refusing to look at them, certain they would crush his excitement. Glancing up, he gave a defiant smile at his father’s reflection frowning at him in the mirror. If they persisted in worrying about him when he stayed out late, that was their problem. It wasn’t fair of them to spoil his fun.

He had given up insisting that it was his life to live as he pleased. Instead he had resolved to ignore them. In any case, they didn’t know the half of it. He took risks they knew nothing about. But the pay-off was worth all the preparation. His parents would never understand. No one would. In their smallminded way, people like them would assume he was driven by a sordid sexual urge, but nothing could be further from the truth. More intense than anything they could imagine, his pleasure was momentous; he had learned to exercise power over life itself. Compared to the triumph of a kill, all other experiences were petty.

Despite all their questions, he never told them where he was going or who he was seeing. For a long time he had simply told them he was meeting his ‘mates’. They didn’t need to know more than that. ‘Have you any idea what time it is?’ his father asked severely. When he didn’t answer, his mother spoke, her voice shrill with anxiety. ‘You know it’s nearly two o’clock. Where have you been? One night you’re going to get yourself in trouble. You could be attacked, and left for dead in a gutter, and we’d know nothing about it until the police knocked on the door to tell us you’d been killed. You have to come home at a sensible time. You’ll be the death of us with all this staying out late. We need to get to bed –’ ‘Oh, give it a rest, will you? If you want to go to bed, who’s stopping you? Did I ask you to wait up for me? What’s your problem? Nothing’s going to happen to me.’ Even though he was not quite sixteen, he hated the way they made him sound like a petulant teenager. He was so much more than that: a master of life and death. ‘You can’t say that,’ she replied.

‘Well, I just did.’ ‘Don’t be flippant with us, son,’ his father snapped. ‘The point is, however independent you think you are, you don’t know what might happen to you. No one does. A youngster like you, out on the streets on your own, you’ve no idea who might be out there, and what they might be after. People get assaulted, and young boys are especially vulnerable.’ They had been through the argument many times without reaching a resolution, but his parents refused to give up.

Forcing a smile, his father said, ‘Why don’t you at least let me come and pick you up, when you want to stay out late?’ ‘You’re having a laugh. You? Come and pick me up? Not bloody likely. You’d spoil everything.’ ‘Well, I could come and meet you somewhere then, if you like. Jesus, you must know you’re putting yourself at risk going out on your own at night. You’re only fifteen, and you don’t know anything of the world yet. Why don’t you at least tell me where you are, so I can come and give you a lift home? For your mother’s sake, if nothing else. You know she worries about you being mugged.’ ‘What if one of these muggers you’re so worried about attacked you?’ He spat the words out. He wasn’t laughing now. ‘You’re just as likely to be mugged as me, you know. Now, stop pestering me, because I told you nothing’s going to happen. Not to me, anyway.’ He turned away to hang up his coat. ‘I know what you’re trying to do,’ he resumed, turning back to face them. ‘It’s not going to work. You don’t own me. I’m not a child. You can’t control me anymore.’ Seeing his father cower backwards when he lifted his hand to pull off his scarf, he grinned, his good humour restored.

‘You thought I was going to hit you just then! You did, didn’t you? And you think you can scare me! Ha!’ He snapped his fingers in the air with a faint click. His mother stepped forward, one hand raised, but he stood his ground, taunting her. ‘What are you going to do? Hit me? That’s why you go on and on and on about something happening to me, because that’s what you want, to see me punished. You’d like me to suffer, just to prove you were right.’ ‘Don’t talk such nonsense. You know that’s not true.’ ‘Isn’t it?’ He held out his arm to display a series of scratches. ‘What’s this then?’ His father shook his head in disgust. ‘You know perfectly well you told us a cat scratched you. Now, I’ll ask you again, where have you been all this time?’ ‘Oh, give it a rest, old man. Have you got any idea how stupid you sound, asking the same questions, over and over again?’

With a flick of his head he tossed their sour protests aside and his long fringe spun around his head. He stroked it into place with the flat of his hand, enjoying the feel of its sleek softness. Until he was old enough to do as he pleased, his parents had never allowed him to grow his hair long enough to cover his ears. That was just one of many reasons why he hated them. As though it should be up to them to control his appearance! Now they had lost their authority over him, they were nothing in his eyes. Less than nothing. He understood their efforts to confine him were driven by anxiety, but he was different from them. He was fearless. Ordinary people like his parents could have no idea what he was capable of achieving. They didn’t know him at all. No one did. They were never going to understand that there was no need to be concerned on his account. They should be worrying about their own safety while he was living under their roof.

Bone Lines by Stephanie Bretherton Blog Tour

Today I am closing the tour for Bone Lines by Stephanie Bretherton, if you missed the previous stops please check them out as everyone offers different material. Out to buy NOW, ebook and treebook format, CLICK HERE.





I do like this book cover, remember when I never used to bother with covers and now I am a bit of a cover tramp, love so many of them now!





You can find Stephanie on Twitter and on Facebook


My stop offers a wee extract post for the book, enjoy!

BONE LINES - EXTRACT


As the dawn tumbled through her tall windows and nestled beside her in the empty spaces of her bed, Eloise awoke, long before her alarm. Even before the plaintive cries of Newton, the belly-bloated old cat that seemed to love her. Although she knew this was also the kind of ‘love’ that was spread liberally around the neighbourhood and to anyone who would feed him. Eloise also knew that this was a sad old cliché. Single woman with cat. Oh well, never mind, she comforted herself in her habitual fashion. She cared little for what anyone thought of her anymore (the sabotage of self-loathing notwithstanding) and she had, for the most part, made peace with her decisions. But perhaps the time had come to consider getting a dog?

Dogs had been the consistent company of her childhood. Her surrogate sisters and brothers, how could her parents have denied her? Often these had been strays adopted at some foreign archaeological dig, against all advice, against all reason and always with the warning that she (and the poor bewildered hound) would suffer through six months of quarantine to bring it back to England. But Eloise was nothing if not determined when it came to saving things – and it always felt more than worth the trouble in the end. Especially with Won Ton, the mangy but determined little mongrel rescued from a cage at the back of a restaurant in Kuala Lumpur one summer, while on their way home from a sweat-soaked dig in the Bujang Valley.

This love of animals had been painfully tested along the scientific path and some terrible compromises had been made, even if Eloise had always been persuaded of the ‘greater good’ and, wherever possible, had avoided that kind of research. She could not deny, however, that innocence had been lost – and she felt unworthy these days of all that trust. All that unquestioning love.

Even when Newton had come into her life and chosen to stay it had seemed like his decision more than her own. Was she ready for a trip to Battersea, for a tour of the adoption cages and the agony of choosing? Oh Lord, she asked herself, how on earth would Newton cope with a canine interloper? Probably by deserting her for good in favour of less treacherous neighbours. No. No dog, not yet. Better not. Not with the start of this exhilarating new endeavour. Eloise knew she would be unable to offer the kind of dedication that such genuine devotion deserved.

Was it so important to be loved, she wondered? Better to be respected and remembered, surely. To be of service. (If not always agreed with.) Certainly her work as part of the team that had unravelled the human genome had not always been well-received. The full picture had confirmed not only how closely humanity was related but also how recently connected by common ancestry, indicating a global population crash, or series of crashes, in particular between 70,000 and 80,000 years ago. No one cause for this was clear but geological and climatic volatility, or other natural crises, seemed to have reduced humanity to barely viable populations at times. It seemed incredible that Homo sapiens had succeeded as a species at all. And yet, it was these kinds of genetic ‘bottleneck’ and ‘drift’ events that had influenced both DNA and human destiny so profoundly.

At first, colleagues in China had not been best pleased with some of the revelations from the genome project, local orthodoxy preferring to believe they had evolved entirely separately, from a much older stock of humanity. But most had acknowledged a more recent shared heritage with stoicism, if not complete conviction. For apart from tiny traces of DNA from archaic hominins who’d made earlier explorations, it was clear that all modern humans owed the majority of their blueprint to those few Homo sapiens in Africa who’d survived such crises, before spreading out once more.

Yet controversy arose with each new piece of the archaeological puzzle. Eloise was given to despair on several occasions as fringe elements found excuses in the latest evidence to interpret or justify some cherished belief. And as for the die-hard racists, how could they ever accept that we all owed so much to a handful of African mothers? That we remained so similar, so brotherly bound and demonstrably equal in potential. The New Age fantasists, although well-intentioned at least, were little better in her estimation, with their hare-brained hallucinations about extra-terrestrial or angelic intervention.

To Eloise, the knowledge of our tightly knit kinship was priceless. Mere fractions of differentiation. She might be growing increasingly grumpy with each diminishing ovum, but she remained a humanitarian at heart. Obviously the fundamentalists, of any faith, were out of the equation before you could say Darwin (or Dawkins) but ultimately, with time and the opening up of minds, she hoped that this molecular siblinghood would bring only good. Unity in diversity, the Galapagoan bequest. Perhaps in only another generation or so?

Eloise peeled herself away from the creamy tangles of her bedlinen, keen to prepare for a momentous day. Newton, aware now that something had shifted in the mood of this large and well-loved but little-changing home, followed her around with an insistent curiosity.