Category Archives: Promotions

The Reading Cafe 9th Anniversary-Alexandrea Weis Prize Package

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The Reading Cafe 9th Anniversary Giveaway Celebration-Alexandrea Weis prize package

NOTE: All giveaways require a comment to qualify

Please be aware some of the books offered may be ARC copies from the publisher which may or may not have gone through final edits or final cover copy.

Alexandrea Weis is graciously offering an ebook copy of one of the following books to THREE (3) winners

There will be 3 winners, each receiving 1 ebook from Alexandrea Weis

1. If you have not previously registered at The Reading Cafe, please register by using the log-in at the top of the page (side bar) or by using one of the social log-ins.

NOTE: If you are having difficulty commenting after logging onto the site, please refresh the page (at the top of your computer).

2. If you are using a social log-in, please post your email address with your comment.

3. Please tell us to enter you into the giveaway.

4. Please LIKE and FOLLOW Alexandrea Weis on FACEBOOK.

5. LIKE us on FACEBOOK and then click ‘on’ NOTIFICATION under ‘liked’ for an additional entry.

6. LIKE us on Twitter for an additional entry.

7. Please FOLLOW us on GOODREADS for an additional entry.

8. Please follow The Reading Cafe on Tumblr

9. Giveaway ebook copies INTERNATIONAL

10. Giveaway runs until February 6-15, 2021

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The Reading Cafe 9th Anniversary Giveaway Celebration 

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The Reading Cafe 9th Anniversary Giveaway Celebration 

On February 2, 2012 The Reading Cafe was born. From our love of books, an idea came to life and our adventure began. The success has been phenomenal-reviews, interviews, authors and  giveaways, cover reveals to behind the scenes-we offer something for everyone. We cannot contain our heartfelt thanks to everyone who has made The Reading Cafe a great place to visit.

At this time, our 9th Anniversary Celebration Giveaway is a smaller affair due to the pandemic, and the lack of available prizes from our regular sources. 2020 was a year of struggle, pain, loss of life and jobs for so many.

To show our appreciation and to celebrate our 9th Anniversary we are offering you a chance to WIN a number of anniversary prize packages throughout the month of February, as well as our regularly scheduled promotions and giveaways.

Remember to drop by The Reading Cafe  to enter for your chance to WIN.

••••••••••••••••••

RULES AND REGULATIONS

1. ALL GIVEAWAYS REQUIRE A COMMENT to be eligible. Please leave a comment under each giveaway you would like to enter. Nothing much-‘ enter me in the giveaway’- is fine. Please follow the giveaway instructions under the daily posts. If you are entering through this page, click on the different giveaways below ( by date) and the link will take you the to individual giveaways.

NOTE: If you have not previously registered at The Reading Cafe, please register using the log-in at the top of the page (side bar) or by using one of the social log-in. If you are using a social log-in such as Twitter or Facebook etc, please post your email address with your comment, as Twitter etc does not account for email contact.

If you are having difficulty commenting after logging onto the site, refresh the page (at the top of your computer screen). This should solve some of the difficulty.

2. Most of the paper giveaways are open to USA only unless otherwise specified. (it will be highlighted)

3. The ebook giveaways are open INTERNATIONALLY unless otherwise specified. (it will be highlighted)

4. Winners of all giveaways will be notified by email at the end of the promotion. Winners will have 72 hours to respond to the email notification. If the winner does not respond to the email within 72 hours, another name will be drawn.

5. Giveaway promotion will run February 1 to February 14, and February 15 to March 4, 2020. Read each giveaway for end dates.

Again, we want to thank you for making The Reading Cafe a success.

Sandy, Barb and The Reading Cafe Team
( Georgianna, Julie B, Erin, Carmen, Marcie, Sarah and Vickie)

NOTE: All giveaways require a comment to qualify

Please be aware some of the books offered may be ARC copies from the publisher which may or may not have gone through final edits or final cover copy

FOREVER ROMANCE is graciously offering a 9 paper book prize package to ONE (1) commenter at The Reading Cafe

1. If you have not previously registered at The Reading Cafe, please register by using the log-in at the top of the page (side bar) or by using one of the social log-ins.

NOTE: If you are having difficulty commenting after logging onto the site, please refresh the page (at the top of your computer).

2. If you are using a social log-in, please post your email address with your comment.

3. Please tell us to enter you into the giveaway.

4. LIKE on FOREVER ROMANCE on FACEBOOK and then click GET NOTIFICATION under ‘liked’ .

5. LIKE us on FACEBOOK and then click GET NOTIFICATION under ‘liked’ for an additional entry.

6. LIKE us on Twitter for an additional entry.

7. Please FOLLOW us on GOODREADS for an additional entry.

8. Please follow The Reading Cafe on Tumblr

9. Giveaway open to USA and CANADA only

10. Giveaway runs until February1-15, 2021

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Someone’s Listening by Seraphina Nova Glass-Review,Excerpt & Q&A

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Someone’s Listening by Seraphina Nova Glass-Review,Excerpt & Q&A

 

Amazon / B&N / Kobo / Google Play / BAM / Book Depository/ Harlequin

 

Description:
She wrote the book on escaping a predator… Now one is coming for her.

Faith Finley has it all: she’s a talented psychologist with a flourishing career, a bestselling author and the host of a popular local radio program, Someone’s Listening, with Dr. Faith Finley. She’s married to the perfect man, Liam Finley, a respected food critic.

Until the night everything goes horribly wrong, and Faith’s life is shattered forever.

Liam is missing—gone without a trace—and the police are suspicious of everything Faith says. They either think she has something to hide, or that she’s lost her mind.

And then the notes begin to arrive. Notes that are ripped from Faith’s own book, the one that helps victims leave their abusers. Notes like “Lock your windows. Consider investing in a steel door.”

As the threats escalate, the mystery behind Liam’s disappearance intensifies. And Faith’s very life will depend on finding answers.

 

 

Review:

Someone’s Listening by Seraphina Nova Glass is a standalone thriller. Faith Finley, our heroine, is a famous psychologist, who is also a bestselling author and tv personality; Faith writes or talks about abused women and how to leave their abusers.  The story switches between two POV’s (all Faith), but ‘then’ and ‘now’.  It begins with the ‘then’ Pov, where there is a horrific car crash after she and her husband, Liam left a party.  When Faith regains conscious, she tries to find out how Liam is, with everyone avoiding her. Finally, the police tell her that she was alone in the car, and her husband was not there.  Faith has a long recovery ahead, but she knows something is wrong, as she fully remembers Liam in the car with her.  What is going on?  Where is Liam?

The ‘Now” POV picks up with Faith having recovered and desperately trying to find out what happened to Liam.  At first the police do suspect Faith, since there is no sign of Liam anywhere.  But when Faith begins to received veiled threats, the police change tactics to look if he left town, or who is behind the strange notes she keeps getting.  Despite the police, her sister, and friends telling her to leave the investigation to the experts, Faith continues to do her own investigations.

During the ‘Then’ Pov we also learn that a former client, a teenage boy, claims that Faith had sexual relations with him; she is shocked, and knows this is not true. This causes her to lose her show, and receive a lot of negative feedback; Liam believes and supports her. The story about half way in stays in the “Now” time period, as Faith makes friends with her neighbors upon moving back to her condo, and begins to investigate rumors about Liam, missing money and his card.  In time, as we get past the first half of the book, we learn some surprising truths, which will have the police pushing for more information on Liam.

The last third of the book is exciting, but I did have some mixed feelings.  Faith was a good character, but did come across not totally likeable.  I thought the story started a bit slow, and confusing at times, going back and forth; which didn’t really win me over.

Overall, Someone Listening was a suspenseful thriller, that kept us glued, unable to put the book down, as I needed to find out who the villain was.  If you like thrillers, and don’t mind going back and forth between time periods, I suggest you read this book.

Reviewed by Barb

Copy provided by Publisher

 

 

PROLOGUE

WHEN I WAKE UP, IT’S BLACK AND STILL; I FEEL A light, icy snow that floats rather than falls, and I can’t open my eyes. I don’t know where I am, but it’s so quiet, the silence rings in my ears. My fingertips try to grip the ground, but I feel only a sheet of ice beneath me, splintered with bits of embedded gravel. The air is sharp, and I try to call for him, but I can’t speak. How long have I been here? I drift back out of consciousness. The next time I wake, I hear the crunching of ice under the boots of EMTs who rush around my body. I know where I am. I’m lying in the middle of County Road 6. There has been a crash. There’s a swirling red light, a strobe light in the vast blackness: they tell me not to move.
“Where’s my husband?” I whimper. They tell me to try not to talk either. “Liam!” I try to yell for him, but it barely escapes my lips; they’re numb, near frozen, and it comes out in a hoarse whisper. How has this happened?
I think of the party and how I hate driving at night, and how I was careful not to drink too much. I nursed a glass or two, stayed in control. Liam had a lot more. It wasn’t like him to get loaded, and I knew it was his way of getting back at me. He was irritated with me, with the position I’d put him in, even though he had never said it in so many words. I wanted to please him because this whole horrible situation was my fault, and I was sorry.
When I wake up again I’m in a hospital room, connected to tubes and machines. The IV needle is stuck into a bruised, purple vein in the back of my hand that aches. In the dim light, I sip juice from a tiny plastic cup, and the soft beep of the EKG tries to lull me back to sleep, but I fight it. I want answers. I need to appear stabilized and alert. Another dose of painkiller is released into my IV; the momentary euphoria forces me to heave a sigh. I need to keep my eyes open. I can hear the cops arrive and talk to someone at a desk outside my door. They’ll tell me what happened.
There’s a nurse who calls me “sweetie” and changes the subject when I ask about the accident. She gives the cops a sideways look when they come in to talk to me, and tells them they only have a few minutes and that I need to rest.
Detective John Sterling greets me with a soft “Hello, ma’am.” I almost forget about my shattered femur and groan after I move too quickly. Another officer lingers by the door, a tall, stern-looking woman with her light hair pulled into a tight bun at the base of her skull. She tells me I’m lucky to be alive, and if it had dropped below freezing, I wouldn’t have lasted those couple hours before a passing car stopped and called 911. I ask where Liam is, but she just looks to Sterling. Something is terribly wrong.
“Why won’t anyone tell me what happened to him?” I plead. I watch Detective Sterling as he picks his way through a response.
“The nurse tells me that you believe he was in the car with you at the time of the accident,” he says. I can hear the condescension in his voice. He’s speaking to me like I’m a child.
“They said ‘I believe’ he was? That’s not a— That’s a fact. We came from a party—a book signing party. Anyone, anyone can tell you that he was with me. Please. Is he hurt?” I look down at my body for the first time and see the jagged stitches holding together the bruised flesh of my right arm. They look exaggerated, like the kind you might draw on with makeup and glue for a Halloween costume. I close my eyes, holding back nausea. I try to walk through the series of events—trying to piece together what happened and when.
Liam had been quiet in the car. I knew he’d believed me after the accusations started. I knew he trusted me, but maybe I’d underestimated the seeds of doubt that had been planted in his mind. I tried to lighten the mood when we got in the car by making some joke about the fourteen-dollar domestic beers; he’d given a weak chuckle and rested his head on the passenger window.
The detective looks at me with something resembling sympathy but closer to pity.
“Do you recall how much you had to drink last night?” he asks accusingly.
“What? You think…? No. I drove because he… No! Where is he?” I ask, not recognizing my own voice. It’s haggard and raw.
“Do you recall taking anything to help you relax? Anything that might impair your driving?”
“No,” I snap, nearly in tears again.
“So, you didn’t take any benzodiazepine maybe? Yesterday…at some point?”
“No— I— Please.” I choke back tears. “I don’t…” He looks at me pointedly, then scribbles something on his stupid notepad. I didn’t know what to say. Liam must be dead, and they think I’m too fragile to take the news. Why would they ask me this?
“Ma’am,” he says, standing. He softens his tone. This is it. He’s going to tell me something I’ll never recover from.
“You were the only one in the car when medics got there,” he says, studying me for my response, waiting to detect a lie that he can use against me later. His patronizing look infuriates me.
“What?” The blood thumps in my ears. They think I’m crazy; that soft tone isn’t a sympathetic one reserved for delivery of the news that a loved one has died—it’s the careful language chosen when speaking to someone unstable. They think I’m some addict or a drunk. Maybe they think the impact had made me lose the details, but he was there. I swear to God. His cry came too late and there was a crash. It was deafening, and I saw him reach for me, his face distorted in terror. He tried to shield me. He was there. He was next to me, screaming my name when we saw the truck headlights appear only feet in front of us—too late.Excerpted from Someone’s Listening by Seraphina Nova Glass, Copyright © 2020 by Seraphina Nova Glass.
Published by Graydon House Books

Q&A with Seraphina Nova Glass

Q: Please give the elevator pitch for Someone’s Listening.

A: Faith Finley has survived a lot of trauma in her own past, so in her current profession, she helps victims of abuse. Her career is just starting to take off when a very public sex scandal stops it in its tracks. She hopes her husband, Liam, believes her when she says she says the accusations against her are lies, but when he disappears and she becomes a suspect, her world falls apart.

She doesn’t handle the crisis well. It’s easy to give advice to others, but as things escalate, she leans on alcohol and pills to cope with her anxiety and her worst fears. She decides to take matters into her own hands and search for the real reason behind Liam’s disappearance. The closer she gets to the truth, the more she is putting herself in danger.

 Q: What’s the “story behind the story”?

A: In October of 2018, I was directing the Fall play at the university where I teach. It’s a bit of a commute, and since I was to be there every evening for rehearsal, I decided to listen to audiobooks. A Ruth Ware novel was the first thriller I had ever read/listened to. I like thriller movies, but never meandered outside literary fiction much as a reader. I was immediately in love and said, “that’s what I am going to do. I’m gonna write a thriller.” The play closed mid- October, and I started writing immediately afterward. I finished Someone’s Listening ten weeks later.

I was annoyed that it was Christmas time because I had to wait until after the new year to send it out and try to get an agent. Yes, it was completely crazy that I thought I’d just send out a first draft and get anywhere. I really didn’t expect to, but I didn’t know how to revise it. I’d written the story I wanted to write and would put it out there and see. A few weeks later I signed with Folio Literary Management, and my agent quickly sold it to Harper Collins, Graydon House imprint.

It’s still surreal. I had been writing screenplays and had a bunch of Hallmark scripts under option, and I was getting nowhere, really. It was just a lot of waiting and disappointment, but I found that writing thrillers is exactly where I want to be. My second book will come out next summer, and I’m about halfway through writing my third book now.

Q: Which came first: the characters or plot line?

A: I always start with plot. Well, I start with atmosphere first which is not intentional, forming the idea for the book just seems to always begin with a feel–winter in Chicago or summer in rural Louisiana. I really think about the world the characters are in–the sensory details and how that will feel to a reader. Then plot because I’m an outliner. I have to know exactly where the plot is going, how it will end, what chapter each twist and turn will be in and how that will lead to the next. I cannot imagine winging any of that. I think the characters sort of materialize in my peripheral while I am plotting, and I know who they are by the time I am familiar with the plot.

 Q: Why do you love Faith and why should readers root for her?

A: Faith is suffering an unthinkable loss. I think everyone knows what loss feels like, and we all handle it differently. Simply because Faith is a psychologist doesn’t mean she has the coping skills to handle the love of her life missing on top of the scandal and suspicion surrounding her. Her occupation also doesn’t mean she doesnt struggle with addiction and might turn to sleeping aids or booze when her life is falling apart the way many people might do to numb some of the pain.

She’s carved out a great career for herself and enjoyed some local fame, but ultimately, she is going through the darkest time of her life. When someone critiques her as “not likable” I think, would you be very likable in the midst of this much loss and uncertainty?” I don’t think she needs to be a protagonist who does and says the right things to be the hero of the story. I think we root for her because she screws up and makes desperate and flawed decisions because she is desperate and flawed. We root for her because she’s out there risking quite a lot to uncover the truth about her husband despite the danger, and who wouldn’t want that kind of love –someone who would go to any length for their partner no matter what the cost?

 Q: Which character is most like you and why?

A: Writing in first person gives me a pretty strong bond with all of my protagonists. I think, inevitably, there is a lot of me in all of them, so I have to say I’m most like Faith. The way she sees the world and navigates her insecurity with her professional drive and ambitions is a constant balancing act. She’s a natural introvert trying to live outside of her comfort zone in order to meet success which makes managing her anxiety an ever present struggle.

 Q: What was your last 5 star read?

A: I really enjoyed the Sundown Motel by Simone St. James, and I recently started reading Lisa Jewell. It’s like Christmas discovering an author you really like and you’re late to the party, so they have several other books you still get to read. I just finished The Family Upstairs, and loved it.

 Q: What is one thing about publishing you wish someone would have told you?

A: It’s really, really slow. I finished writing this book a year and a half ago, and finally it’s getting released. It will be another year’s wait for the second book. If you write fast, this is sort of torture.

Also, as a private person who only just signed up for Twitter and Instagram recently and find it hard to remember to even check, all of a sudden having your work out here for public opinion is tough. No matter how many good reviews, you can’t obsess over the readers who don’t like your work. Not everyone will, of course, but you have to get quickly comfortable with being out there and try not to obsess over every comment.

 Q: Do you have any specific writing rituals?

A: Not really. I don’t write every day or keep a journal or anything. I don’t have multiple projects or ideas going at once. I guess the only thing consistent, is that when I am working on an idea, I keep really fixated on developing it, and I have to write it quickly. I feel like too much time away and I’ll lose my understanding of the world and the characters and I need to stay totally engaged and invested in the story until it’s all out on paper. I can’t spend months doing that. I have to dedicate large chunks of time and get it done in a handful of weeks. Revise later.

 Q: What can you tell us about your next project?

A: My next book comes out summer 2021. It was titled The Seduction, so you’ll notice an excerpt in the back of Someone’s Listening with that title, but that will be changing. Another unexpected part of publishing, but I trust the marketing team knows more than me about that!

It’s another mystery revolving around a woman in small town Louisiana who had dreams of being a scholar, and having a career as a writer, but she puts that on hold when she and her husband have their second child and he has special needs. She finds herself a stay-at-home mom which she loves on one hand because she adores her family, but she also finds it hard to see herself in this role she never expected. When she meets a semi-famous romance writer, she feels guilty at how taken she is with him–jealous of his jet-setting life and freedom. She gets too close to him and makes a string of bad decisions that put her marriage and family in danger, and someone ends up dead. The lengths she goes to distance herself from this suspicious death shocks even herself.

 

 


Seraphina Nova Glass is a professor and Playwright-in-Residence at the University of Texas-Arlington, where she teaches Film Studies and Playwriting. She holds an MFA in playwriting from Smith College, and has optioned multiple screenplays to Hallmark and Lifetime. Someone’s Listening is her first novel.


Social Links:
Author Website
Twitter: @SeraphinaNova
Instagram: @SeraphinaNovaGlass
Facebook: @SeraphinaNovaGlass
Goodreads

 

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This is How I Lied by Heather Gudenkauf – Review & Excerpt

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This is How I Lied by Heather Gudenkauf – Review & Excerpt

 

Amazon / B&N / Kobo / Google Play / Apple / BAM / Book Depository

Description:
Everyone has a secret they’ll do anything to hide…

Twenty-five years ago, the body of sixteen-year-old Eve Knox was found in the caves near her home in small-town Grotto, Iowa—discovered by her best friend, Maggie, and her sister, Nola. There were a handful of suspects, including her boyfriend, Nick, but without sufficient evidence the case ultimately went cold.

For decades Maggie was haunted by Eve’s death and that horrible night. Now a detective in Grotto, and seven months pregnant, she is thrust back into the past when a new piece of evidence surfaces and the case is reopened. As Maggie investigates and reexamines the clues, secrets about what really happened begin to emerge. But someone in town knows more than they’re letting on, and they’ll stop at nothing to keep the truth buried deep.

 

 

Review:

This is How I Lied by Heather Gudenkauf is a standalone intense thriller.  The storyline switches between 1995 and the present, 2020, with three POV’s.  Police officer Maggie O’Keefe becomes involved in the reopening of a murder that took place 25 years ago, when new evidence is found.  In 1995, Maggie’s best friend Eve Knox was found murdered in a cave discovered by Maggie, and Eve’s sister Nola;  we do get the POV in both time periods for Maggie and Nola.

In flash backs, Eve, who is 15 years old, lives at home with her mother and her sister and has a boyfriend, Nick who has become obsessive and abusive.  Nola is considered weird, showing sociopathic things with animals, and she also taunts Eve over the abusive marks on her body.   Maggie and Eve are together a lot, until Eve discovers something very wrong that Maggie is involved in.

In present time, Maggie is pregnant, and is assigned to work on the newly opened case, since she is better off staying at her desk or doing local interviews during the last stages of the pregnancy.  Maggie’s father was the police chief, who handled the case in 1995, but now he is in the stages of Alzheimer, so it is difficult for Maggie to ask him questions.  

What follows is an amazing gripping thriller filled with so many shocking secrets and twists along the way.  There are so many suspects, including Maggie with her own secrets; Nola was a scary character who you knew was dangerous.  From start to finish, this was an intense, heart pounding, exciting, nonstop action story that had me unable to put the book down, especially with the many surprises that threw us for a loop, and kept us confused as to who really was the murderer. 

Heather Gudenkauf wrote a fantastic adventure, as she kept throwing us so many surprise revelations and suspects that kept changing the game in this gripping thriller. This is How I Lied was an amazing read that was so well written, as well as being an intense twisty exciting thriller with some fantastic characters, and a mystery to the very end.

Reviewed by Barb

Copy provided by Publisher

 

 

Monday, June 15, 2020

As I slide out of my unmarked police car my swollen belly briefly gets wedged against the steering wheel. Sucking in my gut does little good but I manage to move the seat back and squeeze past the wheel. I swing my legs out the open door and glance furtively around the parking lot behind the Grotto Police Department to see if anyone is watching.
Almost eight months pregnant with a girl and not at my most graceful. I’m not crazy about the idea of one of my fellow officers seeing me try to pry myself out of this tin can. The coast appears to be clear so I begin the little ritual of rocking back and forth trying to build up enough momentum to launch myself out of the driver’s seat.
Once upright, I pause to catch my breath. The morning dew is already sending up steam from the weeds growing out of the cracked concrete. Sweating, I slowly make my way to the rear entrance of the Old Gray Lady, the nickname for the building we’re housed in. Built in the early 1900s, the first floor consists of the lobby, the finger printing and intake center, a community room, interview rooms and the jail. The second floor, which once held the old jail is home to the squad room and offices. The dank, dark basement holds a temperamental boiler and the department archives.
The Grotto Police Department has sixteen sworn officers that includes the chief, two lieutenants, a K-9 patrol officer, nine patrol officers, a school resource officer and two detectives. I’m detective number two.
I grew up in Grotto, a small river town of about ten thousand that sits among a circuitous cave system known as Grotto Caves State Park, the most extensive in Iowa. Besides being a favorite destination spot for families, hikers and spelunkers, Grotto is known for its high number of family owned farms – a dying breed. My husband Shaun and I are part of that breed – we own an apple orchard and tree farm.
“Pretty soon we’re going to have to roll you in,” an irritatingly familiar voice calls out from behind me.
I don’t bother turning around. “Francis, that wasn’t funny the first fifty times you said it and it still isn’t,” I say as I scan my key card to let us in.
Behind me, Pete Francis, rookie officer and all-around caveman grabs the door handle and in a rare show of chivalry opens it so I can step through. “You know I’m just joking,” Francis says giving me the grin that all the young ladies in Grotto seem to find irresistible but just gives me another reason to roll my eyes.
“With the wrong person, those kinds of jokes will land you in sensitivity training,” I remind him.
“Yeah, but you’re not the wrong person, right?” he says seriously, “You’re cool with it?”
I wave to Peg behind the reception desk and stop at the elevator and punch the number two button. The police department only has two levels but I’m in no mood to climb up even one flight of stairs today. “Do I look like I’m okay with it?” I ask him.
Francis scans me up and down. He takes in my brown hair pulled back in a low bun, wayward curls springing out from all directions, my eyes red from lack of sleep, my untucked shirt, the fabric stretched tight against my round stomach, my sturdy shoes that I think are tied, but I can’t know for sure because I can’t see over my boulder-sized belly.
“Sorry,” he says appropriately contrite and wisely decides to take the stairs rather than ride the elevator with me.
“You’re forgiven,” I call after him. As I step on the elevator to head up to my desk, I check my watch. My appointment with the chief is at eight and though he didn’t tell me what the exact reason is for this meeting I think I can make a pretty good guess.
It can’t be dictated as to when I have to go on light duty, seven months into my pregnancy, but it’s probably time. I’m guessing that Chief Digby wants to talk with me about when I want to begin desk duty or take my maternity leave. I get it.
It’s time I start to take it easy. I’ve either been the daughter of a cop or a cop my entire life but I’m more than ready to set it aside for a while and give my attention, twenty-four-seven to the little being inhabiting my uterus.
Shaun and I have been trying for a baby for a long, long time. And thousands of dollars and dozens of procedures later, when we finally found out we were pregnant, Shaun started calling her peanut because the only thing I could eat for the first nine weeks without throwing up was peanut butter sandwiches. The name stuck.
This baby is what we want more than anything in the world but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I’m a little bit scared. I’m used to toting around a sidearm not an infant.
The elevator door opens to a dark paneled hallway lined with ten by sixteen framed photos of all the men who served as police chief of Grotto over the years. I pass by eleven photos before I reach the portrait of my father. Henry William Kennedy, 1995 – 2019, the plaque reads.
While the other chiefs stare out from behind the glass with serious expressions, my dad smiles showing his straight, white teeth. He was so proud when he was named chief of police. We were all proud, except maybe my older brother, Colin. God knows what Colin thought of it. As a teenager he was pretty self-absorbed, but I guess I was too, especially after my best friend died. I went off the rails for a while but here I am now. A Grotto PD detective, following in my dad’s footsteps. I think he’s proud of me too. At least when he remembers.
Last time I brought my dad back here to visit, we walked down this long corridor and paused at his photo. For a minute I thought he might make a joke, say something like, Hey, who’s that good looking guy? But he didn’t say anything. Finding the right words is hard for him now. Occasionally, his frustration bubbles over and he yells and sometimes even throws things which is hard to watch. My father has always been a very gentle man.
The next portrait in line is our current police chief, Les Digby. No smile on his tough guy mug. He was hired a month ago, taking over for Dexter Stroope who acted as the interim chief after my dad retired. Les is about ten years older than I am, recently widowed with two teenage sons. He previously worked for the Ransom Sheriff’s Office and I’m trying to decide if I like him. Jury’s still out.

Excerpted from This is How I Lied by Heather Gudenkauf, Copyright © 2020 by Heather Gudenkauf
Published by Park Row Books


 

 


Heather Gudenkauf is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of many books, including The Weight of Silence and These Things Hidden. Heather graduated from the University of Iowa with a degree in elementary education, has spent her career working with students of all ages. She lives in Iowa with her husband, three children, and a very spoiled German Shorthaired Pointer named Lolo. In her free time, Heather enjoys spending time with her family, reading, hiking, and running.

 

Social Links:
Author Website  /
Twitter: @hgudenkauf
/Instagram: @heathergudenkauf
Facebook: @HeatherGudenkaufAuthor
Goodreads

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First Cut by Judy Melinek & T.J. Mitchell – Review, Excerpt & Q&A

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First Cut by Judy Melinek & T.J. Mitchell – Review, Excerpt & Q&A

 

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Description:
A hard-nosed medical examiner. A suspicious case. An underworld plot only she saw coming.

San Francisco’s newest medical examiner, Dr. Jessie Teska, has made a chilling discovery. A suspected overdose case contains hints of something more sinister: a drug lord’s attempt at a murderous cover-up. But as Jessie digs deeper, she faces unexpected pushback from her superiors—and pressure to stay in her lane, close the case and move on.

For Jessie, San Francisco was supposed to be a fresh start, a chance to escape her troublesome past in Los Angeles. Instead she finds herself overworked and underpaid, working in a dingy morgue and living under the fog in a cramped converted cable car. Now, despite warnings from her colleagues and threats from her boss, she is determined to find the truth.

As more bodies land on her autopsy table, Jessie uncovers a constellation of deaths that point to a plot involving opioid traffickers and San Francisco’s shifting terrain of tech start-ups. Autopsy means “see for yourself,” and Jessie Teska won’t stop until she has seen it all—even if it means the next corpse on the slab could be her own.

 

 

Review:

First Cut by Judy Melinek and T.J. Mitchell is a standalone novel.   We meet our heroine, Jessie Teska, immediately as she arrives for her first day as an assistant medical examiner in San Francisco.  Jessie left her old job in Los Angeles because she needed to be on her own, and not close to the man she had fallen in love with.  We will learn a bit more about that relationship and why she left nearer to the end, but he technically has nothing to do with this story line.

Jessie is immediately bombarded with a number of cases, with one being an overdose that is considered an accident.  As Jessie takes control of the case, she discovers some other deaths being similar, causing her to delve deeper in to the overdose case.   Her superiors want her to close the case as an accident, putting pressure on her, despite her belief that something was wrong.  Jessie begins to suspect her boss as knowing more than he is letting on, trying to push her off the case.  In a short time, with bodies showing up in the lab, Jessie begins see that this could be a murder and drug case, which now puts her own life in danger.  Despite no help from her superiors, Jessie does work closely with some of the detectives to try and find the truth.

What follows is an intense, gritty, exciting story line about the world of medical examiners, with a lot of detailed descriptions.  Melinek is a forensic pathologist in real life, and uses much of her knowledge in detailing everything throughout the book.  First Cut is a complex and fast paced story that kept our attention from start to finish, also giving me a feel similar to Patricia Cornwall. I enjoy mysteries and thrillers, which this was, but there was so much detail and explicitly gory scenes as they dissect on the human body, which gave me mixed feelings about how much I needed to know. Lol   However, this was a good compelling mystery and very well written.     

Reviewed by Barb

Copy provided by Publisher

 

 

 

                                    PROLOGUE

Los Angeles
May
The dead woman on my table had pale blue eyes, long lashes, no mascara. She wore a thin rim of black liner on her lower lids but none on the upper. I inserted the twelve gauge needle just far enough that I could see its beveled tip through the pupil, then pulled the syringe plunger to aspirate a sample of vitreous fluid. That was the first intrusion I made on her corpse during Mary Catherine Walsh’s perfectly ordinary autopsy.
The external examination had been unremarkable. The decedent appeared to be in her midthirties, blond hair with dun roots, five foot four, 144 pounds. After checking her over and noting identifying marks (monochromatic professional tattoo of a Celtic knot on lower left flank, appendectomy scar on abdomen, well-healed stellate scar on right knee), I picked up a scalpel and sliced from each shoulder to the breastbone, and then all the way down her belly. I peeled back the layers of skin and fat on her torso—an ordinary amount, maybe a little on the chubby side—and opened the woman’s chest like a book.
I had made similar Y-incisions on 256 other bodies during my ten months as a forensic pathologist at the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroner’s Office, and this one was easy. No sign of trauma. Normal liver. Healthy lungs. There was nothing wrong with her heart. The only significant finding was the white, granular material of the gastric contents. In her stomach was a mass of semidigested pills.
When I opened her uterus, I found she’d been pregnant. I measured the fetus’s foot length and estimated its age at twelve weeks. The fetus appeared to have been viable. It was too young to determine sex.
I deposited the organs one by one at the end of the stainless-steel table. I had just cut into her scalp to start on the skull when Matt, the forensic investigator who had collected the body the day before, came in.
“Clean scene,” he reported, depositing the paperwork on my station. “Suicide.”
I asked him where he was going for lunch. Yogurt and a damn salad at his desk, he told me: bad cholesterol and a worried wife. I extended my condolences as he headed back out of the autopsy suite.
I scanned through Matt’s handwriting on the intake sheet and learned that the body had been found, stiff and cold, in a locked and secure room at the Los Angeles Omni hotel. The cleaning staff called the police. The ID came from the name on the credit card used to pay for the room, and was confirmed by fingerprint comparison with her driver’s license thumbprint. A handwritten note lay on the bed stand, a pill bottle in the trash. Nothing else. Matt was right: There was no mystery to the way Mary Walsh had died.
I hit the dictaphone’s toe trigger and pointed my mouth toward the microphone dangling over the table. “The body is identified by a Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s tag attached to the right great toe, inscribed LACD-03226, Walsh, Mary Catherine…”
I broke the seal on the plastic evidence bag and pulled out the pill bottle. It was labeled OxyContin, a powerful painkiller, and it was empty.
“Accompanying the body is a sealed plastic bag with an empty prescription medication bottle. The name on the prescription label…”
I read the name but didn’t speak it. The hair started standing up on my neck. I looked down at my morning’s work—the splayed body, flecked with gore, the dissected womb tossed on a heap of other organs.
That can’t be, I told myself. It can’t.
On the clipboard underneath the case intake sheet I found a piece of hotel stationery sealed in another evidence bag. It was the suicide note, written in blue ink with a steady feminine hand. I skimmed it—then stopped, and went back.
I read it again.
I heard the clipboard land at my feet. I gripped the raised lip of my autopsy table. I held tight while the floor fell away.

 

Q&A with Judy Melinek and T.J. Mitchell

Q: Do you plan your books in advance or let them develop as you write?

A:The idea for First Cut was prompted by some of Judy’s actual cases when she worked as a San Francisco medical examiner. She has real experience performing autopsy death investigation, and she also has the imagination to apply that experience to a fictional framework for our forensic detective, Dr. Jessie Teska. Judy invented the story, and together we worked it up as an outline. Then T.J. sat in a room wrestling with words all day—which he loves to do—to produce the first complete manuscript. That’s our inspiration plus perspiration dynamic as co-authors.

 Q: What does the act of writing mean to you?

A: It is, and has always been, something we can do together, an important part of our marriage. We’ve collaborated as a creative team since we were in college together many years ago, producing and directing student theater. We’ve also spent twenty years raising our four children, and have always approached parenting as a partnership. We find it easy to work together because we write like we parent: relying on one another, each of us playing to our strengths. It helps that, in our writing process, we have no overlapping skill set!

 Q: Have you ever had a character take over a story, and if so, who was it and why?

A: Oh, yes! That’s our heroine, Dr. Jessie Teska. She has elements of Judy in her, and elements of T.J., but Jessie is a distinct individual and a strong-willed one. We’re often surprised and even shocked by the ways she reacts to the situations we put her in. There are times we’ll be writing what we thought was a carefully laid-out scene, and Jessie will take us sideways. She’s coming off T.J.’s fingertips on the the keyboard, both of us watching with mouths agape, saying, “What the hell is she up to?”

Q: Which one of First Cut’s characters was the hardest to write and why?

A: Tommy Teska, Jessie’s brother. He’s a minor character to the book’s plot, but the most important person in Jessie’s life, and he’s a reticent man, downright miserly with his dialogue. Tommy carries such great emotional weight, but it was hard to draw it out of him, especially because so much of his bond to our heroine is in the backstory of First Cut, not in the immediate narrative that lands on the page. We’re now working on the sequel, Cross Cut, and finding that Tommy has more occasion to open up in that story.

Q: Which character in any of your books (First Cut or otherwise) is dearest to you and why?

A: The late Dr. Charles Sidney Hirsch, from our first book, the memoir Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner. Dr. Hirsch is not just a character: He was a real person, Judy’s mentor and a towering figure in the world of forensic pathology. Dr. Hirsch trained Dr. Melinek in her specific field of medicine and imbued in her his passion for it. He was a remarkable man, a great teacher and physician and public servant—a person of uncompromising integrity coupled with great emotional intelligence.

 Q: What did you want to be as a child? Was it an author?

A: Judy’s father was a physician, and though she never wanted to follow in his immediate footsteps—he was a psychiatrist—she has always wanted to be another Dr. Melinek. T.J. has always been a writer, but also has theater training and worked in the film industry. As much as we enjoyed authoring the memoir Working Stiff, and as happy as we have been with its success, we are even more thrilled to be detective novelists.

Q: What does a day in the life of Judy Melinek and T.J. Mitchell look like?

A: Judy is a morning person and T.J.’s a night owl, so we split parenting responsibilities. Judy gets the kids off to school and then heads to the morgue, where she performs autopsies in the morning and works with police, district attorneys, and defense lawyers in the afternoon. T.J. takes care of the household and after-school duties. If we work together during the day, it’s usually by email in the late afternoon. T.J. cooks dinner, Judy goes to bed early, and he’s up late—at his most productive writing from nine to midnight or later.

Q: What do you use to inspire you when you get Writer’s Block?

A: We go for a long walk together. Our far corner of San Francisco overlooks the Pacific Ocean, bracketed by cypress trees and blown over with fog, and serves as an inspiring landscape. We explore the edge of the continent and talk out where our characters have been and where they need to get, tossing ideas back and forth until a solution, what to do next on the page, emerges. Getting away for a stroll with our imaginary friends is always a fruitful exercise!

Q: What book would you take with you to a desert island?

A: T.J. would take the Riverside Shakespeare, and Judy would take Poisonous Plants: A Handbook for Doctors, Pharmacists, Toxicologists, Biologists and Veterinarians, Illustrated.

 Q: Do you have stories on the back burner that are just waiting to be written?

A: Always! We are inspired by Dr. Melinek’s real-life work, both in the morgue and at crime scenes, in police interrogation rooms, and in courtrooms. Our stories are fiction—genre fiction structured in the noir-detective tradition—but the forensic methods our detective employs and the scientific findings she comes to are drawn from real death investigations.

Q: What has been the hardest thing about publishing? What has been the most fun?

A: The hardest thing is juggling our work schedules to find uninterrupted time together to write. The most fun is meeting and talking to our readers at book events, especially those who have been inspired to go into the field of forensic pathology after reading our work.

Q: What advice would you give budding authors about publishing?

A: It’s all about connectivity. Linking up with other writers, readers, editors, and research experts is a crucial way to get your work accomplished, and to get it out to your audience. Yes, ultimately it’s just you and the keyboard, but in the course of writing your story, you can and should tap into the hive mind, online and in person, for inspiration and help.

Q: What was the last thing you read?

A: Judy last read The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist by Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington, and T.J. last read The Witch Elm by Tana French.

Q: Your top five authors?

A: Judy’s are Atul Gawande, Henry James, Kathy Reichs, Mary Roach, and Oliver Sacks. T.J.’s are Margaret Atwood, Joseph Heller, Ed McBain, Ross Macdonald, and Kurt Vonnegut.

 Q: Book you’ve bought just for the cover?

A: T.J.: Canary by Duane Swierczynski. Judy: Mütter Museum Historical Medical Photographs.

Q: Tell us about what you’re working on now.

A: First Cut is the debut novel in a detective series, and we’ve recently finished the rough draft of Cross Cut, its sequel. We are in the revision phase now, killing our darlings and tightening our tale, working to get the further adventures of Dr. Jessie Teska onto bookshelves next year!

 


Judy Melinek was an assistant medical examiner in San Francisco for nine years, and today works as a forensic pathologist in Oakland and as CEO of PathologyExpert Inc. She and T.J. Mitchell met as undergraduates at Harvard, after which she studied medicine and practiced pathology at UCLA. Her training in forensics at the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner is the subject of their first book, the memoir Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner.

T.J. Mitchell is a writer with an English degree from Harvard, and worked in the film industry before becoming a full-time stay-at-home dad. He is the New York Times bestselling co-author of Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner with his wife, Judy Melinek.

SOCIAL:

TWITTER:

Facebook: @DrWorkingStiff

Insta: Judy: @drjudymelinek

Goodreads  Judy: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7382113.Judy_Melinek

 

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The Little Bookshop on the Siene by Rebecca Raisin – Review

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The Little Bookshop on the Siene by Rebecca Raisin – Review, Excerpt & Q&A

 

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Description:
Le Vie En Rose

Bookshop owner Sarah Smith has been offered the opportunity to exchange bookshops with her new Parisian friend for 6 months! And saying yes is a no-brainer – after all, what kind of a romantic would turn down a trip to Paris? Even if it does mean leaving the irresistible Ridge Warner behind, Sarah’s sure she’s in for the holiday of a lifetime – complete with all the books she can read!

Picturing days wandering around Shakespeare & Co, munching on croissants, sipping café au laits and people-watching on the Champs-Elysees Sarah boards the plane. But will her dream of a Parisian Happily-Ever-After come true? Or will Sarah realise that the dream isn’t quite as rosy in reality…

 

 

Review:

The Little Bookshop on the Seine by Rebecca Raisin is the first book in her new The Little Paris Collection series.  Sarah Smith, our heroine, lives in the small town of Ashford and owns her own bookstore (The Little Bookshop on the Corner).  Sarah loves her life, especially being surrounded by her favorite thing…books.  She has some great friends, and a boyfriend (Ridge), who is constantly away traveling on news stories across the globe.  When Sarah’s friend in Paris (Sophie), who also owns a book store, calls her to plead for help, her life will change.  Seems Sophie is trying to recover from a failed romance, and is desperate to get away from Paris, and offers Sarah a 6-month exchange; Sophie comes to Ashford to run her bookstore, and Sarah goes to Paris to run the Once Upon a Time bookshop.  With an opportunity to get to see Paris, Sarah agrees to the exchange; and feels this will also give her a chance to see Ridge a lot more, as he is usually on assignments in Europe.

When Sarah arrives at the book store in Paris, she is immediately caught by surprise at the size of the shop, which was constantly busy, but the worse part is the staff is unfriendly and disorganized, many of them picking their own hours, leaving Sarah to try do everything, with little or no time for her to enjoy some of Paris. She is also buried with paperwork, and discovers someone on the staff is stealing money. Sarah is also unhappy that Ridge continues to be busy, not visiting her or even calling; making Sarah unsure of where their relationship was going. 

What follows is watching Sarah learn to stand up to her staff, eventually earning the respect and friendship with a few of the staff, with them taking turns to take Sarah to see the many sights and delights of Paris.  Those were fun and interesting trips that I did enjoy. It was great to see Sarah’s growth over time, as she slowly turned things around in the shop, changing many things along the way, as well as beginning to enjoy her new friendships, and the sights of Paris.  I also liked how Sarah was able to discover who was stealing, and find a way to help the culprit, who was in dire need.  Nice addition to this story.

The Little Bookshop on the Seine was a charming, delightful and heartwarming story that allowed us to not only learn all about Paris, but also seeing the wonderful friendships in both Ashford and Paris, as well as a nice romance that has a happy ending. I suggest you read The Little Bookshop on the Seine, which was very well written by Rebecca Raisin.

Reviewed by Barb

Copy provided by Publisher

 

 

CHAPTER ONE
October
With a heavy heart I placed the sign in the display window.
All books 50% off.
If things didn’t pick up soon, it would read Closing down sale. The thought alone was enough to make me shiver. The autumnal sky was awash with purples and smudges of or¬ange, as I stepped outside to survey the display window from the sidewalk.
Star-shaped leaves crunched underfoot. I forced a smile. A sale wouldn’t hurt, and maybe it’d take the bookshop figures from the red into the black—which I so desperately needed. My rent had been hiked up. The owner of the building, a sharp-featured, silver-tongued, forty-something man, had put the pressure on me lately—to pay more, to declutter the shop, claiming the haphazard stacks of books were a fire risk. The additional rent stretched the budget to breaking level. Something had to change.
The phone shrilled, and a grin split my face. It could only be Ridge at this time of the morning. Even after being together almost a year his name still provoked a giggle. It suited him though, the veritable man mountain he was. I’d since met his mom, a sweet, well-spoken lady, who claimed in dulcet tones, that she chose his name well before his fa¬mous namesake in The Bold and the Beautiful. In fact, she was adamant about it, and said the TV character Ridge was no match for her son. I had to agree. Sure, they both had chis¬eled movie star cheekbones, and an intense gaze that made many a woman swoon, but my guy was more than just the sum of his parts—I loved him for his mind, as much as his clichéd six-pack, and broody hotness. And even better, he loved me for me.
He was the hero in my own real-life love story, and due back from Canada the next day. It’d been weeks since I’d seen him, and I ached for him in a way that made me blush.
I dashed inside, and answered the phone, breathlessly. “The Bookshop on the Corner.”
“That’s the voice I know and love,” he said in his rich, husky tone. My heart fluttered, picturing him at the end of the line, his jet-black hair and flirty blue eyes. He simply had to flick me a look loaded with suggestion, and I’d be jelly-legged and lovestruck.
“What are you wearing?” he said.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” I held back a laugh, eager to drag it out. So far our relationship had been more long-distance than anticipated, as he flew around the world report¬ing on location. The stints apart left an ache in my heart, a numbness to my days. Luckily I had my books, and a sweep¬ing romance or two helped keep the loneliness at bay.
“Tell me or I’ll be forced to Skype you and see for myself.”
Glancing down at my outfit, I grimaced: black tights, a black pencil skirt, and a pilled blue knit sweater, all as old as the hills of Ashford. Not exactly the type of answer Ridge was waiting for, or the way I wanted him to picture me, after so many weeks apart. “Those stockings you like, and…”
His voice returned with a growl. “Those stockings? With the little suspenders?”
I sat back into the chair behind the counter, fussing with my bangs. “The very same.”
He groaned. “You’re killing me. Take a photo…”
“There’s no need. If you’re good, I’ll wear the red ones tomorrow night.” I grinned wickedly. Our reunions were al¬ways passionate affairs; he was a hands-on type of guy. Lucky for him, because it took a certain type of man to drag me from the pages of my books. When he was home we didn’t surface until one of us had to go to work. Loving Ridge had been a revelation, especially in the bedroom, where he took things achingly slow, drawing out every second. I flushed with desire for him.
There was a muffled voice and the low buzz of phones ringing. Ridge mumbled to someone before saying, “About tomorrow…” He petered out, regret in each syllable.
I closed my eyes. “You’re not coming, are you?” I tried not to sigh, but it spilled out regardless. The lure of a bigger, better story was too much for him to resist, and lately the gaps between our visits grew wider. I understood his work was important, but I wanted him all to myself. A permanent fixture in the small town I lived in.
He tutted. “I’m sorry, baby. There’s a story breaking in
Indonesia, and I have to go. It’ll only be for a week or two, and then I’ll take some time off.”
Outside, leaves fluttered slowly from the oak tree, swaying softly, until they fell to the ground. I wasn’t the nagging girl¬friend sort—times like this though, I was tempted to be. Ridge had said the very same thing the last three times he’d canceled a visit. But invariably someone would call and ask Ridge to head to the next location; any time off would be cut short.
“I understand,” I said, trying to keep my voice bright. Sometimes I felt like I played a never-ending waiting game. Would it always be like this? “Just so you know, I have a very hot date this afternoon.”
He gasped. “You better be talking about a fictional date.” His tone was playful, but underneath there was a touch of jealousy to it. Maybe it was just as hard on him, being apart.
“One very hot book boyfriend…though not as delecta¬ble as my real boyfriend—but a stand-in, until he returns.”
“Well, he better not keep you up half the night, or he’ll have me to answer to,” he faux threatened, and then said more seriously, “Things will slow down, Sarah. I want to be with you so much my soul hurts. But right now, while I’m freelance, I have to take whatever comes my way.”
“I know. I just feel a bit lost sometimes. Like someone’s hit pause, and I’m frozen on the spot.” I bit my lip, trying to work out how to explain it. “It’s not just missing you—I do understand about your job—it’s…everything. The bookshop sales dwindling, the rent jacked up, everyone going on about their business, while I’m still the same old Sarah.”
I’d been at this very crossroad when I’d met Ridge, and he’d swept me off my feet, like the ultimate romance hero. For a while that had been enough. After all, wasn’t love al¬ways the answer? Romance aside, life was a little stagnant, and I knew it was because of my fear of change. It wasn’t so
much that I had to step from behind the covers of my books, rather plunge, perhaps. Take life by the scruff of the neck and shake it. But how?
“You’ve had a rough few weeks. That’s all. I’ll be back soon, and I’m sure there’s something I can do to make you forget everything…”
My belly flip-flopped at the thought. He would make me forget everything that was outside that bedroom door, but then he’d leave and it would all tumble back.
What exactly was I searching for? My friends were getting married and having babies. Buying houses and redecorating. Starting businesses. My life had stalled. I was an introvert, happiest hiding in the shadows of my shop, reading romances to laze the day away, between serving the odd customer or two—yet, it wasn’t enough. In small-town Connecticut, there wasn’t a lot to do. And life here—calm, peaceful—was fine, but that’s just it, fine wasn’t enough anymore. I had this fear that life was passing me by because I was too timid to take the reins.
It was too hazy a notion of what I was trying to say, even to me. Instead of lumping Ridge with it, I changed tack. “I hope you know, you’re not leaving the house when you get home. Phones will be switched to silent, computers forgotten, and the only time we’re leaving the comfort of bed is when I need sustenance.” A good romp around the bedroom would suffice until I could pinpoint what it was that I wanted.
“How about I sort out the sustenance?” he said, his voice heavy with desire. “And then we’ll never have to leave.”
“Promises, promises,” I said, my breath hitching. I hoped this flash of longing would never wane, the sweet torture of anticipation.
“I have to go, baby. I’ll call you tonight if it’s not too late once I’m in.”
“Definitely call tonight! Otherwise, I can’t guarantee the book boyfriend won’t steal your girlfriend. He’s pretty hot, I’ll have you know.”
“Why am I jealous of a fictional character?” He laughed, a low, sexy sound. “OK, tonight. Love you.”
“Love you too.”
He hung up, leaving me dazed, and a touch lonely know¬ing that I wouldn’t see him the next day as planned.
I tried to shake the image of Ridge from my mind. If anyone walked in, they’d see the warm blush of my cheeks, and know exactly what I was thinking. Damn the man for being so attractive, and so effortlessly sexy.
Shortly, the sleepy town of Ashford would wake under the gauzy light of October skies. Signs would be flipped to open, stoops swept, locals would amble down the road. Some would step into the bookshop and out of the cold, and spend their morning with hands wrapped around a mug of steaming hot tea, and reading in any one of the cozy nooks around the labyrinth-like shop.
I loved having a place for customers to languish. Comfort was key, and if you had a good book and a hot drink, what else could you possibly need to make your day any brighter? Throw rugs and cushions were littered around seating areas. Coats would be swiftly hung on hooks, a chair found, knit¬ted blankets pulled across knees, and their next hour or two spent, in the most relaxing of ways.
I wandered around the shop, feather duster in hand, tick¬ling the covers, waking them from slumber. I’m sure as soon as my back was turned, the books wiggled and winked at one another, as if they were eager for the day to begin, for fingers of hazy sunlight to filter through and land on them like spotlights, as if saying, here’s the book for you.
Imagine if I had to close up for good, like so many other shops had in recent times? It pained me to think people were missing out on the real-life bookshop experience. Wasn’t it much better when you could step into a dimly lit space, and eke your way around searching for the right novel? You could run a fingertip along the spines, smell that glorious old book scent, flick them open, and unbend a dog-eared page. Read someone else’s notes in the margin, or a highlighted passage, and see why that sentence or metaphor had dazzled the previous owner.
Secondhand books had so much life in them. They’d lived, sometimes in many homes, or maybe just one. They’d been on airplanes, traveled to sunny beaches, or crowded into a back¬pack and taken high up a mountain where the air thinned.
Some had been held aloft tepid rose-scented baths, and thickened and warped with moisture. Others had childlike scrawls on the acknowledgment page, little fingers looking for a blank space to leave their mark. Then there were the pristine novels, ones that had been read carefully, bookmarks used, almost like their owner barely pried the pages open so loath were they to damage their treasure.
I loved them all.

Excerpted from The Little Bookshop on the Seine by Rebecca Raisin. Copyright © 2015 by Rebecca Raisin. Published by HQN Books.

 

 

Q&A with Rebecca Raisin

Q: Have you ever been to Paris?  If so, what are some of your favorite Parisian things?

A: I’ve been lucky enough to go Paris four times and do a bit of exploring for the books. It’s my favourite city in the world and if I could up and move I’d do it! I love the bookshops of Paris, particularly the secondhand shops that are dusty and musty and disorderly. You never know what you’ll find and that makes it magical. If you’re in Paris find the Abbey Bookshop, it’s full to bursting with English books and it’s a treasure trove if you have time to hunt! I also love French food – who doesn’t?! My favourite place to eat is the Christian Constant bistros. He has one for every budget and they’re all glorious. If you splurge once, I highly recommend it’s there.

The Ritz is also a must-see, from Bar Hemingway to Salon Proust, it’s an experience like no other walking in the footsteps of those literary greats. Buly 1803 is the most beautiful perfume shop in all the world, it’s like stepping back in time. My favourite is the rose oil… ooh la la. And holding a special place in my heart is Point Zero Paris, the exact centre of the city and a place where magic happens – you’ll have to read the book to find out more…

 

Q: What authors were/are a huge influence on you as you began writing?  Or Now?

A: I have always loved Maeve Binchy and Joanne Harris and the style in which they write. I love Maeve’s ability to write everyday relatable characters, and I love Joanne’s sense of whimsy. I love writing foodie books set in exotic locations and I think I probably fell in love with France through Joanne’s books, they managed to transport me fully and I must’ve reread them a hundred times by now.

Q: What’s some of your favorite novels? What are you currently reading and what’s on your TBR (to be read) list?

A: I loved Me Before You. I cried ugly, ugly tears at that. I must be a sucker for punishment because my all time favourite is The Fault in Our Stars. And also Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance. Three books that you need to read in the privacy of your own home with some cucumber slices to apply after for puffy eyes! I’m currently reading the Seven Sisters series by Lucinda Riley, so a nice change of pace from sobbing my heart out. I love how different each sister is and how you still find common ground with them.

Q: What inspired you to write your The Little Bookshop on the Siene?

A: My love of Paris and its bookshops! And truthfully, I wangled the family there so I could do some ‘research’ which included eating my body weight in macarons and walking until I couldn’t feel my feet anymore and feeling that I was a little bit French on the inside if only the locals could see that!

Q: What theme or message do you hope readers will take away from your book?

A: I hope you do something reckless, something that scares you, jump out of that comfort zone and do that thing you’ve always dreamed of! What’s stopping you – fear, money, work, life? You can make it happen if only you take the plunge! Open yourself to new experiences and people and don’t take the taxi, walk until your feet are numb and find those lost laneways and hidden alleys and see what you find!

Q: What drew you into this particular genre?

A: I love love, but Little Bookshop is also about another kind of love, the love of a place, or a feeling…writing this genre leaves it open to interpretation and anything goes as long you tie it all up at the end in a satisfying way!

Q: If you could sit down with any character in your book, what would you ask them and why?

A: I’d sit down with bookworm Sarah and ask her what she really thought of Luiz… I am still conflicted about that thread and what I could have done but didn’t!

Q: What social media site has been the most helpful in developing your readership?

A: They’ve all been good in different ways but I’d say Facebook is my favourite. I have a great group of people who follow me there and really interact. It’s a nice place to stop and chat and they’re all really lovely. Instagram is good too. I love how creative book bloggers are with their photos, they’re very inspiring to me.

Q: What advice would you give to aspiring or just starting authors out there?

A: I’ve said this before and it’s really this simple. Write every day. I think it was Stephen King who said writing is like a muscle, the more you use it, the stronger it gets and it’s true! Carve out a time and stick to it.

Q: What does the future hold in store for you? Any new books/projects on the horizon?

A: I’m currently editing Aria’s Travelling Bookshop, which is about a Van Lifer who sells her wares as she explores France! (Are you detecting a pattern here!?) It’s the follow up to Rosie’s Travelling Tea Shop, which was released last March. Both books are about a different way of living, about having less but gaining more as you go. I’ve loved writing Rosie and Aria!

 

Rebecca Raisin is the author of several novels, including the beloved Little Paris series and the Gingerbread Café trilogy, and her short stories have been published in various anthologies and fiction magazines. You can follow Rebecca on Facebook, and at www.rebeccaraisin.com

 

 

Social Links:
Author Website
Twitter: @JaxandWillsMum
Facebook: @RebeccaRaisinAuthor
Instagram: @RebeccaRaisinWrites
Goodreads

 

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Happy New Year 2020

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Happy New Year 2020

 

The Reading Cafe and its’ contributors would like to take this opportunity to wish everyone a Happy and Safe New Year.

As we say goodbye to 2019 many of us have struggled with the death of family members and friends,  illness and issues of health, loss of jobs, and the uncertainty of allegiances, alliances and the people in charge.

Entering into a new year, and a new decade let us hope for peace and prosperity, good health, love and friendship, and the daily escape into the world of fantasy and fiction, if only a few chapters at a time !

Barb, Sandy and The Reading Cafe team

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