A New Release to Start the New Year!

Happy 2012! Woohoo! We have a new year, a fresh start. A blank slate, if you will.

I’m so excited to start this shiny new year with a new book out at Desert Breeze Publishing! QUEST FOR JUSTICE, the third book in my Keller County Cops series, is an intense, wild ride. I really came to love the hero and heroine in this story, C.J.Bowman  and Abby Ryals, two passionate LEOs caught up in a deadly undercover game with a vicious drug lord.

Blurb:

Abby Ryals goes behind the sheriff’s back to accept an undercover assignment with another agency to avenge fellow detective C.J. Bowman’s death, and is stunned to learn he’s very much alive when he leaves witness protection and follows her undercover to help keep her safe. Together, they must race the clock to defeat a notorious drug lord before he can discover their true identities.

Hope you’ll check it out. It’s available here and at Amazon, and will soon be up at other online outlets.

And next month, look for the first book in my New Orleans detective series, CHERISHED WITNESS, out in print… along with my latest single title romantic suspense from Whiskey Creek Press, BLOOD RITE.

Yep… 2012 is going to be a banner year!!

Happy New Year!

Found this on Youtube. Enjoy!

Merry Christmas!

I don’t do politically correct this time of year. I celebrate Christmas, the birth of the Christ child, so Merry Christmas! I hope all of you have a wonderful day with family and friends. And I also hope many of you got e-readers as gifts. Hint, hint…

Another new cover!

I got my cover for my February release at Whiskey Creek… and I’m so excited. BLOOD RITE is my favorite book of all the ones I have written, and Nick Marconi is my favorite hero.

BLOOD RITE blurb:

Women in New Orleans are dying; women New Orleans Police detective Nick Marconi has dated. To make matters worse, they have all been found with vials of his murdered sister’s blood in their throats. Nick is walking a tightrope between depression and rage. His superiors are worried about his mental health, so they send him to see psychiatrist Gracie Simmons.

Gracie is walking a tightrope of her own. She became a psychiatrist because she wants to help people, and in addition to private practice, she also treats police and parolees. The extra work gives her flashbacks about her father, however, a bad cop arrested when she was just fifteen. Then a former flame harasses her, and her best friend turns up dead. Desperate for a distraction, she makes Nick her special project. Only… he doesn’t want to be saved.

Hope you’ll check it out — along with my January and February books out at Desert Breeze. See the next post for info on QUEST FOR JUSTICE, my January book. Then in February, CHERISHED WITNESS, the first book in my New Orleans Detective series, comes out in print! Woohoo!

CHERISHED WITNESS blurb:

Kelly Watson, aka Theresa Pastral, threw the Fifth Amendment out the window when she testified against her mom boss husband at his murder trial. Now divorced, she has begun a new life in the Witness Security Program.

Only… the mob finds her, thanks to handsome ex-NOPD detective J.T. Romano, who uses her as bait to lure the man who murdered his wife and unborn child to town. To ensure her safety, she is forced to trust J.T., the man who has betrayed her to the mob. But can she trust him with her heart?

New cover!

Just got my cover for my January 1 book at Desert Breeze Publishing. QUEST FOR JUSTICE is the third book in my Keller County Cops series. I’m having so much fun writing these books. I’m working on number four right now!

Blurb for QUEST FOR JUSTICE:

Abby Ryals goes behind the sheriff’s back to accept an undercover assignment with another agency to avenge fellow detective C.J. Bowman’s death and is stunned to find him very much alive when he leaves witness protection and follows her undercover to keep her safe. Together, they race the clock to defeat a notorious drug lord before he discovers their true identities.

Look for this book out on New Year’s Day!

Happy Thanksgiving!

 I’d like to wish everyone a very       happy Thanksgiving celebrating the things you may be thankful for most; whether that be family, friends, love, security, health, food, pets, a job, a good novel, etc. I hope that everyone’s bellies are stuffed to the brim and that you are all safe and warm. Once again, I bid a splendid holiday to all!

Kill Shot by Anne Patrick

I’d like to welcome fellow Desert Breeze Publishing suspense author Anne Patrick back to my blog. Her latest book, KILL SHOT, is out this month. I can’t wait to read it!

Blurb for KILL SHOT:

Former combat medic Kory Wagner has been in four war zones, served three tours in Iraq, survived countless firefights, RPG’s, IED’s and even a helicopter crash.  Now she’s home and out of the Army for good and someone is trying to kill her in her own backyard.  Just as disturbing is the handsome sheriff who’s on the case.

Sheriff Sean Harding doesn’t quite know what to think of the decorated veteran that managed to outsmart an entire search party.  What bothers him more is the body of a PI, whom she hired to find her sister’s killer, was found dead in a building Kory owns.  And Kory isn’t being very cooperative with helping him find the answers as to why someone would kill her sister and want her dead.  Will he be able to keep her alive along enough to discover the truth?

Excerpt:

The steel door creaked as she pushed it open, the sound echoing throughout the metal building. “Mr. Urlik?” She waited for her eyes to adjust to the change in lighting before stepping all the way inside. A wide stream of light from the door spread out in front of her. “Mr. Urlik. Are you in here?”

Kory heard a sound a few yards in front of her. She quickly scanned the area. Three rows of huge metal shelves lined the interior. She inched forward, peering around the corner of the second row. Mr. Urlik lay on his side, facing her, clutching his chest. His eyes were opened and his mouth moved, but no sound came out. A heart attack? She ran to him, knelt down on the cement floor, and took his hand. It was wet, slimy. She looked down and saw his hand covered in blood. Her eyes shifted to his chest. A large crimson stain spread across the width of his white shirt from a small hole near the center. He was breathing erratically. Experience told her a bullet had pierced at least one lung and he didn’t have much time. She immediately pressed the heel of her right hand against the wound.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured.

“Where’s your cell phone?” Hers was in her backpack but she didn’t want to waste valuable time digging it out.

“No time. Get out.”

“Who did this, Mr. Urlik?”

He grabbed her right hand and squeezed it tightly. “You were right — no accident.”

His hand went limp.

Kory felt something in the palm of her hand, looked down and saw it was a key. She shoved it into her jeans pocket. A whizzing sound buzzed past her, followed by the unmistakable clink of a bullet ricocheting off metal. She instinctively threw herself over his body as another bullet struck metal. Kory felt for a pulse. There was none. She lowered her hand to his chest and felt under both arms and along his waist. I thought all PIs carried guns. Just my luck this one didn’t.

She scrambled to her feet, as more shots ricocheted around her, and dove through an opening on the first row of shelves. A piercing pain sliced through her upper arm as she took cover behind some boxes. They wouldn’t shield her from the gunfire but they would conceal her presence while she figured out how she was going to get out of there. She paused long enough to grab her cell phone from her backpack, wishing she hadn’t when another bullet tore through a box beside her. She ducked lower to the floor.

Kory ignored the throbbing in her arm and slithered along the floor toward the back of the building. As a child, she and her sister, Callie, had often accompanied her grandfather to the warehouse where he worked on boats as a hobby. She remembered a back exit that led to the side parking lot and nearby woods. If she could reach the door, she had a chance of getting out of this alive. She looked down at the tear in her shirt, drenched with blood.

This isn’t good!

KILL SHOT: BOOK ONE WOUNDED HEROES can be purchased at most online bookstores or from my publisher – Desert Breeze Publishing.

Anne’s Bio: Anne Patrick is the author of more than a dozen novels of Romance, Mayhem & Faith, including the award-winning and best-selling Fire and Ash, Lethal Dreams and Sabotage. When she’s not killing off people or falling in love with dashing heroes, you can find her surfing the web or spending time with family and friends.  Born and raised in Oklahoma, she now makes her home in Kansas.

To learn more about Anne, please visit her website  or blog.

 

This is Domestic Violence Awareness Month

You can help by donating to organizations such as Safe Horizon. Click here for more information.

And if you or someone you know needs help, here are some numbers to call:

Domestic Violence Hotline:
800.621.HOPE (4673)

Crime Victims Hotline:
866.689.HELP (4357)

Rape & Sexual Assault Hotline:
212.227.3000

TDD phone number for all hotlines:
866.604.5350

Guest blogger Liz Lipperman!

Liz Lipperman started writing many years ago, even before she retired from the medical field. Wasting many years thinking she was a romance writer but always having to deal with the pesky villains who kept popping up in all her stories, she finally gave up and decided since she read mysteries and obviously wrote them, why fight it? Two years ago, she signed her first contract with Berkley to write a cozy series called “The Clueless Cook  Mysteries”. Book One, titled LIVER LET DIE, comes out  on October 4th and is about a wannabe sports reporter stuck in a po-dunk town writing personal ads who gets the chance to write the weekly culinary column. The problem is, her expertise in the kitchen is limited to frying bologna and microwaving TV dinners. When a dead body is found under her apartment stairwell with her name and number in the victim’s pocket, she becomes the prime suspect, as well as the main course on the murder menu.

Raised in a small town in Ohio, number eight of nine children, she graduated from nursing school and worked as a registered nurse for many years. When she could no longer ignore the characters talking in her head (No, she’s not on medication), she went back to school and got a professional arts degree. Then she started her first novel.

She lives north of Dallas with her HS sweetheart hubby. When she’s not writing she spends her time doting on her four wonderful grandchildren. The first book of her Clueless Cook Mystery Series, LIVER LET DIE, debuted last week.

Now… on to Liz’s blog post! Welcome, Liz! I beta read her book MORTAL DECEPTION before she published it online, and let me tell you… I loved it. It made me laugh, cry, and squee. And few things make me squee. So I can’t wait to dig into LIVER LET DIE. I opened the book today at the gym, but only got through the acknowledgements before my time was up on the elliptical machine. So… let’s hear from Liz!

First off, I want to thank Melanie for inviting me to blog with her today. Melanie and I have been cyber friends for a lot of years, finally meeting at RWA several years ago. I love her sense of humor, so when she posted on my blog last week with a funny story about FIND and REPLACE, I thought I would reciprocate with a few equally funny stories about autocorrect.

For a not-so-good typist like me, Autocorrect can be your best friend or the devil. I learned how to use autocorrect a while back when someone sent me a link to a blog where an author talked about it. At the time, I thought it was one of those things that involved macros or some other gadget on Word that only confused the heck out of me. So, I didn’t bother reading it. Fortunately, I was smart enough to put it in a file I called “Writing”. Sometimes, I’m so clever, I scare myself.

And then later, I was cleaning out that file and decided to read what the guy had to say.

Holy cow! The man could have been talking directly to me.

Anyone who knows me knows I write longhand and then type each chapter on the computer. I have to do this right away because on a good day, I’m writing so fast I can’t read my own writing. I’ve already admitted that my typing skills are lacking. No, it’s worse than that. I seriously suck at it, and I transpose a lot of letters in words. Grr… how irritating is that when almost every word I type needs correcting?

It might be a good time to tell you about once in my younger days when the hospitals had a freeze on nursing positions, and I went looking for a job in medical records. (I know. How old am I that nurses had to look for other jobs???) And did I mention I have to be looking at my fingers when I type? Anyway, I was told there was a five minute typing test, so when the lady handed me the page to type, I quickly memorized what I thought was enough for five minutes worth. Turns out the test was 20 minutes. Needless to say, I stayed unemployed.

BREAKING NEWS: Autocorrect saved my life!!
Now every time I type form, it automatically changes it to from, freinds become friends, ot changes to to, fo –to of.

I am in typing heaven. Of course I had to go in and make frm change to form for those times when I actually wanted that stupid word.

Another trick is that my heroine’s last name is McAllister. Now all I type is Mc and Voila! McAllister is typed.

Isn’t that just about the coolest thing you’ve ever heard of? To set it up, open a Word document and go to Tools. Click on AutoCorrect Options and just type in the misspelled word under Replace and the real word under With.

It even acts like a little editor for me. I like the word really …a lot. So I have programmed it to type – No, No, Liz- when I type really. Relly changes to the real word really when I just have to use it. Don’t even get me started on just. That comes out – Take me out- when I try to get away with using it.
Does this just really knock your socks off?

Come on, tell me all about words you frequently use or misspell, or just tell me what a genius I am for discovering this little trick.

A friend of mine just shared this wonderful story on another loop. She was making a trip to Alaska to stay with her brother and sister in law for a few days. My friend makes pottery and her SIL wanted her to bring a certain coffee cup. This is what her text said. “I’ll lay you well when you get here.” Turns out the SIL had company at her house and my friend ended up sleeping with her!!

Here’s a few hysterical funnies about autocorrect on smart phones. http://damnyouautocorrect.com/

Oh, I forgot to plug my debut release. LIVER LET DIE, the first of my Clueless Cook mysteries from Berkley Prime Crime is about Jordan McAllister, a wannabe sports writer who ends up in a small town writing personals. When the culinary reporter has to go to  rehab, Jordan is offered the temporary position, She jumps on it, seeing it as one step closer to her dream job, despite the fact she lives on fried bologna sandwiches and Hostess Ho Hos and can’t cook her way out of a box of macaroni and cheese.  On her first assignment reviewing a steakhouse reopening in town, she inadvertently orders foie gras (fatty duck liver) which ends up uneaten in a borrowed purse. Later when her waiter from the restaurant ends up dead outside her apartment with her name and number in his pocket, Jordan becomes the number one suspect as well as the main course on the murder menu.

I have one copy of LIVER LET DIE to give away, thanks to Berkley. To enter, leave a comment with a valid email address. This is open to US addresses only (publisher’s request.) Contest ends at midnight October 11^th, so get those comments rolling.

Voodoo Bones is now available!

Just in time for Halloween, my creepy e-novella, VOODOO BONES, is out with Desert Breeze Publishing! I’m so excited to have this book back out. I got the inspiration for it from a true story, and that makes it even more creepy.

In this story, Noel Galliano has always wanted her own business, and despite critics who believe she won’t succeed, opens a tiny French Quarter Voodoo shop. What she doesn’t count on is finding a dismembered corpse upstairs. Detective Matthieu Bergeron is considered a screw up around the district station until he puts away the Bayou Ripper. Then another body is found mutilated, and both his arrest and competence are thrown into question. Matt and Noel must work together to solve this terrifying crime in the Big Easy… and along the way, they fall in love.

Excerpt:

The night’s inky blackness reminded Detective Matthieu Bergeron of hot chicory coffee: thick, rich, and filled with mystery. A muted jazz tune echoed off the French Quarter’s worn bricks, and heavy fog rolled in off the river, masking the scrollwork on the balconies and dampening the air. October in New Orleans was fickle. Warm one night, and cold as hell the next. Tonight’s humidity chilled Matt to the bone and told him it was the perfect night for murder. Not many people were out, and those who were, hurried to wherever they were going.

He halted just outside the narrow alley where Crawford Delacort, one of the chief techs from the Orleans Parish Medical Examiner’s office, knelt beside a sprawled female corpse. The air reeked of stale cigarettes, river mud, and old beer. He scowled.

Fog snaked eerily around the body, and the bright yellow crime scene tape stretched across the entrance to the cave-like space fluttered in the damp breeze. Matt ducked beneath it and approached Delacort, a tall red-haired man with a runner’s lanky build.

“Hey, Crawford. Please tell me this woman has all her parts.”

“You’re in luck tonight, Detective.” Crawford rose and brushed off his hands. “She’s all here.”

“Cause of death?”

“Strangulation with some sort of ligature.” The ME looked down at the body lying face down on the cold concrete. “Maybe a necklace. Can’t be sure.”

“Was she raped?”

“No fluids, but I’ll know more once I do the autopsy.” He cocked his head. “I’m thinking she might be a hooker, though. Just look at her clothes and shoes, and she has needle marks on the inside of both arms. Killer left her empty purse. He cleaned her out.”

“Could’ve been a dissatisfied customer.”

“Or a drug deal gone bad. Even a simple robbery.” Crawford shrugged. “Who knows?”

Matt squatted beside the dead girl and examined her twisted, pale neck. Sure enough, a dark red line was gouged into her skin. He sighed. “Okay. Where’s CSU?”

“On the way.”

“Make sure they get plenty of pictures of her neck.”

“I’ve got it covered.”

Something in Crawford’s tone made Matt look up. The ME’s dark eyes gleamed with derision. Anger boiled inside Matt, but he held it in check. No way would he let the bastard know his air of superiority bothered Matt in the least. Damn it. Gage Simms had soured everyone against him.

He gritted his teeth and came to his feet. “Any witnesses?”

“No idea.” Crawford peered down his sharp nose at Matt and jerked his head toward the other end of the alley, where two uniformed officers lurked in semi-darkness. “Ask the first guys on scene.”

“All right.” Matt’s heart raced. He dug out his pad and pen and made a few notes. Even his big collar two days ago, when he’d single-handedly brought in the Bayou Ripper, hadn’t silenced his critics. His former partner’s constant barbs had alienated everyone in the district station, and now that the jerk had been elevated to commander, Matt was seriously considering asking for a transfer. He started down the alley, and his cell phone rang.

With a sharp curse, he jerked it off his belt. “Bergeron.”

“Matt.” Speak of the devil. It was Gage Simms. “Got another one for you.”

“You can’t be serious.” Matt halted. “I just got here.”

“I’ll send someone else. Get your ass over here. To Vous Deux, on Esplanade.”

“That new voodoo shop?”

“Yeah. And Matt — I told you so.”

“What are you talking about?” A sick feeling swirled in the pit of Matt’s stomach.

Simms laughed. “You’ll see when you get here.”

Hope you’ll check out this book at Desert Breeze, Amazon, Barnes & Nobles, the iPad Store, or any other online outlet.

Other upcoming releases:

KELLER COUNTY COPS BOOK 3: QUEST FOR JUSTICE — January — Desert Breeze Publishing

BLOOD RITE — January — Whiskey Creek Press