New Release: Bounty Huntress by Sheri Queen

Today we're celebrating the recent release of Sheri Queen's Bounty Huntress, the first in the Sleepy Hollow Hunter series.

Janda Gray’s a Lykoi—part werecat, part wolf—shunned by both sides of her lineage.

She yearns for the day when she can escape the disdainful glances and leave her home on the outskirts of Sleepy Hollow, NY. When she lands a lucrative bounty hunter contract, she thinks her life is finally turning around. All she has to do is lure her werecat target from the safety of the Hotel Paranormal.

Then she meets a werepanther. Her life will never be the same.

Alexander Holden, second-in-command of a powerful werecat clan, is accused of murdering the woman he was to marry. He must find the real killer to clear his name or spend the rest of his supernaturally long life on the run.

Complications arise after Janda falls for the man she’s supposed to be capturing.

Now she must decide if following her heart is worth risking everything, including the love they’ve found in each other’s embrace.

Love is about making sacrifices. Saving him is all that matters.

Bounty Huntress is the introduction to the Sleepy Hollow Hunter series.

It is also a Hotel Paranormal story.

The Hotel Paranormal is THE place for supernatural beings looking to get away from it all. Beings like werewolves, vampires, elves, sprites, djinn and more check in from all over the world for business and for pleasure—and sometimes for both.
http://www.thehotelparanormal.com

"A beautifully descriptive, fast-paced tale full of paranormal twists and turns with a dash of romantic heat." ~ Traci Douglass, USA Today Bestselling Author

"Thanks to Sheri Queen's smooth, immersive style and her penchant for interesting characters, you'll not only want to follow Janda Gray into the Hotel Paranormal, but will soon be clamoring for your own magical room key." ~Heidi Ruby Miller, award-winning author of the Ambasadora series

Excerpt:

Half a block stood between me and my future happiness, but it might as well have been a mile for all the good it would do me. From the alley to the bar there was no cover, no shadows to absorb my presence. I’d scoured the surrounding area for another entry point to no avail. Barred windows and a padlocked backdoor thwarted me. I had one shot at getting inside before anyone could stop me, and that meant waiting until the barkeep kicked the last of his patrons out at closing time. While they were busy getting on their bikes, I’d make a mad dash to the front door. I was grateful the street was deserted at this hour, but it was almost too quiet. One stupid move on my part could mean disaster.

I calculated the distance from where I stood, hidden in the alley, to the bar’s entrance and figured I’d probably be fast enough to make it as long as the wolves were so drunk they wouldn’t notice me until it was too late. It was a long shot, but the only one I had. Wolves were quick, even inebriated ones. Their metabolism burned off alcohol within minutes of downing it, which meant my window of opportunity was about the size of a mouse hole. In my Lykoi state I was faster than a wolf—I’d honed that particular skill long ago with all the times I’d been chased—but I couldn’t go Lykoi. Paws didn’t lend themselves to turning doorknobs, so I’d have to do this the hard way. Nothing new there.

I leaned against the brick wall and let the cool autumn air soothe my restless body. My calf muscles twitched, and my stomach rumbled. It was tempting to give in to the urge to transform and run through the woods I’d passed on the way into town. Maybe even hunt a bit of rabbit. I let out a slow breath and resisted my primal desires.

I counted four bikes outside the bar. Mutther’s might be a neutral, no-colors establishment, but I still had to get past the owners of those bikes. Four big-ass obstacles between me and the portal to the Hotel Paranormal. I knew portals existed in most major cities—definitely in Manhattan—but, of course, my only way into the hotel would be through a wolf biker bar. My luck ranged from bad to stinking bad. I was long overdue for a bit of good luck, but I didn’t look for that to happen tonight. My usual mode of blending into the background to avoid attracting attention wasn’t going to work here. There were no crowds to lose myself in, and the glaring neon sign covering three quarters of the bar’s facade was a beacon spreading a swath of red across the sidewalk. Anyone wishing to enter the bar would be doused in light. This had to be the hotel’s idea of a joke—or a test.

Get Bounty Huntress on Amazon, Nook, or iBooks!

Sheri Queen received her MFA in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University. She grew up in the Hudson Valley region of New York—an area she loves to depict as a backdrop for her stories—and enjoys traveling to new places where she is constantly discovering inspirations for her writing. In particular, she loves visiting old graveyards.

You can follow the author at:

www.sheriqueen.com

Twitter: @SWQueenFlemming

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Goodreads

Amazon Author page

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Seven Noble Knights

by Jessica Knauss

Giveaway ends December 14, 2016.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway

Seven Noble Knights Characters: Long-Suffering Justa

Perennially overworked Justa 

Justa is one of the characters I added to the mix from the original epic story I based Seven Noble Knights on. In the old draft of the story that no one will ever see, Justa was conceived as a snarky maid for Doña Lambra, the main narrator, and a commentator on the story.

When I started over, I decided Doña Lambra was negative enough. She didn't need a snarky sidekick. So Justa became a sweet girl who longs for a normal life, but her ties to Lambra won't permit the freedom to pursue it. She took on more of the characteristics associated with her name, which is the same as an early Spanish martyr saint, and whose meaning has to do with fairness or justice, and then it turned out that she needed a snarky foil. That sassy role is filled by Gotina, a minor character.

Using the distaff and watching the kid 

Partly because my critique group really liked her character, and partly because it fit brilliantly into the plot, Justa turned into a major character with a fairly complex arc. When I write the sequel to Seven Noble Knights, it will focus largely on Justa, the decisions she makes before and after Seven Noble Knights comes to a close, and their ramifications.

She was born into a family of the minor nobility the same year as Lambra, and she looks enough like her that they could be sisters. In Part Two of Seven Noble Knights, our hero, Mudarra, is afraid she might be Doña Lambra when he first meets Justa. She comes into Lambra's household as a foster child when her parents are killed in a border raid, and lives as if she were Lambra's sister until Lambra's parents are killed. From that moment on, Lambra treats Justa as her personal servant, and Justa suffers it because she has nowhere else to go. The ties created when Lambra's family took her in are not easily broken, but everyone has their breaking point. When Justa finds hers, the story comes to an end.

It's a pretty important role for someone who started out as a snarky maid.

This is artist Ayal Pinkus's rendition of Doña Lambra.

Justa looks a lot like her, but she never gets to throw a fit. 

The last chapter of Part One is devoted to Justa's point of view. She gets to fall in love and dream of possibilities beyond her bad-luck servile situation. The romance may not be coincidental: this is the novel's only Chapter XIII, which is the lucky number my husband and I adopted. In this chapter, Justa lets slip perhaps her most iconic line:

"She may control everything I do, 

but she doesn't have any secrets from me."

Smart readers who subscribe to my mailing list will get to catch a glimpse of how Justa's and Doña Lambra's characters were formed in a prequel story in December, just in time to celebrate the release of Seven Noble Knights!

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Seven Noble Knights

by Jessica Knauss

Giveaway ends December 14, 2016.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway

Meet the Characters: Baddies Male and Female and a Treat for Newsletter Subscribers

A couple of weeks ago, we were introduced to Mudarra, the hero of Seven Noble Knights. This novel is so epic, there's more than one villain!

The story on which I base Seven Noble Knights contains many historical figures, but the existence of Ruy Blásquez and Doña Lambra has not been fully verified, perhaps because no one, even today, would welcome the possibility of being associated with such vile traitors.

Ruy Blásquez is even a little hard to define as a part
of the statue of his wife in Barbadillo

Ruy Blásquez doesn’t kill a king or even a count. But his heinous crime leaves him with all the power for a generation at the turn of the eleventh century.

The crime is all the worse because it's an assault on the family of Doña Sancha, his sister. There are few stronger blood ties at this time in history. An uncle is expected to take on an almost nurturing role, ensuring that his nephews realize their potential, especially on the battlefield, and for this surrogate father to actively seek their harm smacks of taboo. Additionally, Ruy Blásquez's close association with powerful Muslims taints him in the eyes of his Christian neighbors. His actions betray not only his blood relatives, but also the Christian faith.

Although I tell the story from many different points of view in my novel, Ruy Blásquez’s actions are so hard to understand that I dared not take a seat behind his eyes. The source material writers seem to have felt the same taboo. They make an effort to distance the audience from Ruy Blásquez, referring to him as I do here, always with his first and last names, and usually appending “that traitor” or calling him simply “the traitor.” I took a more subtle route: I made him slippery, hard to get a handle on in general, so that his incomprehensibility in the betrayal is somewhat believable. The reader is left to conjecture that his wife, Doña Lambra, made him do it.

The author couldn't help grinning with
the statue of her villainess in Barbadillo 

Doña Lambra, on the other hand, was too much fun not to try to understand. She’s frustrated because she has to marry Ruy Blásquez and covets the nephews’ superior power. She also feels an inconvenient level of sexual tension around her handsome new nephews-in-law, and when they get into an argument and kill her cousin, she snaps. She has to be a little insane to take such a disproportionate revenge, but she also has to be manipulative or influential in order to get Ruy Blásquez to agree, even if he is wishy-washy. It was delightful creating this dangerous beauty the reader loves to hate. I would imagine how I would handle the situation, and then have Lambra do the greatly exaggerated opposite. Readers get to live many lives; authors even more so!

Curious about Lambra?

Check her out in these other nutty posts: 

          When Does a Blood-Soaked Cucumber Solve Your Problems?

          Vengeful Ladies and Bloody Cucumbers with free excerpt!

And preorder Seven Noble Knights.

SEVEN NOBLE KNIGHTS Cover Reveal!

As my newsletter subscribers know, Seven Noble Knights now has its own medieval, blood-red cover! 

The first draft had only the knight on the hill crest, but I requested a group of seven in the valley below. Just one knight was not enough for me, oh no.

It's nothing like what I was imagining, but I think it suits the novel. My fondest hope is that it will attract readers instead of putting them off. Let me know what you think in the comments or on Facebook or Twitter.

Remember to enter for your chance at a short-run advance reader copy of Seven Noble Knights—ends soon—November 13. These copies won't have the blood-red cover, but they will have the map and all the goodness words can convey. They won't be printed this way ever again!

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Seven Noble Knights

by Jessica Knauss

Giveaway ends November 13, 2016.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway

Meet the Character: The Hero, Mudarra

Who will everyone be dressing up as for Halloween next year? 

Mudarra, the hero of my epic novel of medieval Spain, has been gracious enough to sit down with me for an interview, and it appeared at History Imagined way back in 2016. 

A review by the Historical Novel Society calls Mudarra "intriguing," and "a strangely believable mixture of Christian and Muslim, boy and man, intellectual savant and formidable warrior. He impresses all he meets, is made a leader of warriors by the Count of Castile, and systematically goes about hunting down the sources of all the misery." 

Today, get a few of the details about this fascinating individual. 

1) Is this hero a fictional or a historic person?

Mudarra González ibn Zaida is a fictional character with a lot of history. He’s the talented but reluctant hero who rises up in the second part of Seven Noble Knights, which is based on the lost medieval epic poem Los siete infantes de Lara. The first part of the story includes some verifiable historic characters, such as the Count of Castile, García Fernández, and the members of his court, Gonzalo Gustioz and his wife Sancha (Prollina in the history books). The inciting incident also has a whiff of truth to it. It leads to such widespread destruction that in the second part of the story, no historical person remains to carry on the cause and complete the revenge. Because a sense of eye-for-an-eye justice was so important to medieval storytellers, they resorted to making up a character from (semi-)plausible circumstances in order to deliver the ending their audience craved. Mudarra is that semi-plausible hero.

In the medieval epic, Mudarra is one-dimensional, so it has been my pleasurable task to make him complex and sympathetic. In the end, his doubts and decisions cast new light on all the events of the first part and make it, I hope, worthwhile and enjoyable.

2) When and where is the story set?

It might have been interesting to try and transfer the characters and worldview to another time period, but because I love medieval Spain so much, I researched what the most likely year for the inciting incident was in real life, and settled on 974. I’ve since done more research, and that date could be a tad too early, but in planning the sequel, it actually works better for the story than a more accurate historical date would have.

In 974, Castile was not yet the dominant kingdom on the Iberian Peninsula. In fact, it wasn’t a kingdom at all. The most powerful earthly authority was the count, and technically he owed allegiance to the Kingdom of León. Other kingdoms battled for dominance in the north at the same time that they maintained complex, on-again, off-again diplomatic/warring relationships with al-Andalus, the unified Muslim caliphate that occupied more than half the peninsula in the south.

3) What should we know about him?

Mudarra grows up in the Andalusian capital, far from the Christian lands he’ll have to take a vested interest in during the course of the second part of Seven Noble Knights. Although intensely trained in the arts of war from both the theoretical and the practical standpoint, his life of sensuality, peace and privilege has not prepared him for the trials that await in the barbaric north.

The crest of Salas de los Infantes shows Mudarra 
holding the ring that brings him back to his father. 

4) What is the main conflict? What messes up his life?

The overarching conflict in the second part is the feud that started in the first, which insinuates itself into Mudarra’s idyllic life. He must reconcile whether or not to answer the call to revenge with his own sense of right and wrong, and puzzle over exactly how these decade-old events have affected his life.

The conflict becomes intolerably complicated when Mudarra meets the daughter of his supposed enemy and falls head over heels in love with her.

5) What is Mudarra's personal goal?

Once he meets Blanca Flor, Mudarra’s only goal is to be with her. His life has been turned upside down, and he’d like to start over again with his true love by his side. He needs constant reminders of his obligation, what should be his goal, to take revenge against her family. It’s all tremendously confusing for him. In the end, only one of these goals is accomplished, and I’m working out how he’ll overcome obstacles to meet the other one in the sequel.

6) Where can we read more about Seven Noble Knights?

You can read much more about it and how I came to write it and complete it at its web page and at this retired blog.

7) When is Seven Noble Knights available?

Seven Noble Knights is available for preorder from Encircle Publications. 

Or snag it at NetGalley! 

Character Interview with Sorcha Faye from Cara McKinnon's Fay of Skye Series

Q: Tell us a little about where you live.

A: I have spent nearly my entire life on the Fay House grounds on the isle of Skye in Scotland. The house sits up on the cliffs above Loch Fay, near the village of Kinlochfay on the River Fay.

Q: That’s a lot of Fays!

A: My family has lived there for over a thousand years, although the name “Fay” is a recent addition, brought in by a French ancestor. But that was long enough ago that everything in the area bears our name.

Q: What is your family like?

A: Large, and loud! When we get together for clan gatherings, births, weddings, and wakes, everyone talks at once and we sound like a barnyard. We squabble sometimes, but we love each other very much. I don’t spend much time with them, though, as they live all throughout the Highlands and I am almost always on Skye. Recently one of our far-flung members, a distant cousin, returned to us from America. Her name is Etta.

Q: If you could have anything in the world, what would it be?

A: At the moment, I would like to have money to help improve Fay House. While there was no Duchess of Fay, the funds for the house were tied up by solicitors and trustees. While they’d release money for major repairs, the house has very few modern amenities, and I would like to refurbish some of the ancient furniture and repaint and paper several of the rooms.

Q: Do you have any special magical talents?

A: I have very strong magical intuition. I can often tell what other people are thinking and feeling, and I get hunches that warn me not to do some things, or help me decide to do others. I also have frequent visions of the future.

Q: Last question—You can see the future. Is there anything you can tell us about what is coming?

A: Magic visions don’t need to come true. There is no such thing as fate, or destiny. My visions are based on possibilities—things that might happen, or are likely to happen. But I can say that what worries me are the choices we make for dark reasons, for jealousy or envy, for hate or anger. Those lead to dark futures. Love, acceptance, understanding, and empathy are the ways to the light, and peace.

Q: That’s good advice. Thanks for answering!

A: You’re welcome. Thanks for having me!

ABOUT CARA

Cara McKinnon wrote her first fantasy romance at the age of six, about a unicorn couple that falls in love and has adventures (there is also pie). Now she writes about humans falling in love and having adventures, but she can't quite stop including magic.

She loves history and historical romance, so she decided to set her books in an alternate Victorian era where magic is not only real, but a part of everyday life.

Cara attended the best writing school in the world, Seton Hill University, where she received an MFA in Writing Popular Fiction and found her writing tribe. She lives on the East Coast of the United States with her husband, two kids, and an oversized lapdog named Jake.

Visit her on her website caramckinnon.com, where you can find more information about the Fay of Skye series, writing and romance, and ways to get in touch!

Get Ready for Seven Noble Knights: A Giveaway!

Seven Noble Knights is still faceless,
but not the in same way a lot of
historical novel covers are.  

Although it looks, to my dismay, as though Seven Noble Knights is still faceless to the world because the cover is not yet finished (it's being perfected as of this moment), today us still the start of something wonderful. The first Goodreads giveaway of Seven Noble Knights is open today!

Because the cover is not yet finalized, these ten prepublication copies have a cover that will not see print beyond this contest. That's right, it's an edition of ten, count 'em, ten copies only. That's what you call a bibliographic rarity. Go ahead, put your name in the hat for the book that's been 1000 years in the making—and still doesn't have a cover! Just click on "Enter Giveaway!" below.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Seven Noble Knights

by Jessica Knauss

Giveaway ends November 13, 2016.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway

Enter for your preview copy now! If you subscribe to my newsletter, you got a nice little present today with much more instant gratification. More such goodies to come in November, so it's not too late to sign up here or type in your email address at the top of the page!

UPDATE 10/13/16: The cover has been finalized. All will be revealed near the beginning of November.

My newsletter subscribers will be the first to see it! Become a part of this exclusive group here.