Cover Reveal: Reasons Why Not to Date Your Nemesis
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Reasons Why Not to Date Your Nemesis
Melanie Munton
(Shell Grove, #2)
Publication date: October 4th 2022
Genres: Adult, Comedy, Contemporary, Romance
There’s a new sheriff in town…
And he’s her worst nightmare.
Reason #1: Ben Crawford is Olivia Knight’s long-time arch rival. They’ve been sworn enemies ever since she wore overalls to school one day, and he asked her in homeroom where she parked her cow. Now that he’s back, it doesn’t appear much has changed. He’s still arrogant. He’s still trouble. And this time, he’s got a badge and handcuffs. Which will make murdering him and disposing of his body much more challenging for her.
Reason #2: Sheriff Ben has done a lot of growing up during his time away from Shell Grove. He went and got himself some muscles and tattoos, and has the nerve to wear that sheriff’s uniform absurdly well. For some reason, that’s all she can seem to focus on whenever they cross paths. All the nice changes he’s made, instead of how vehemently she’s vowed to hate his guts for all eternity.
Reason #3: The complicated connection that has forever entwined their lives doesn’t have a pleasant backstory. As adults, they should be able to forget what happened when they were teenagers and move on. But in a small town where everyone has long memories, there are reminders everywhere of the nasty events that destroyed both of their families years ago. And she’s not sure their growing feelings for each other are enough to forgive the sins of the past and carve out a future…together.
Ben has a secret. A big one. The longer he’s in Shell Grove and surrounded by people who know his sordid history, the more likely that secret is going to come out. But if it does, Olivia will never speak to him again. Which will not do. Because he’s finally realized that Olivia is the reason why he came back to town in the first place. And if he doesn’t want to lose her forever, he needs to correct the mistakes he made a long time ago and prove he’s not the NEMESIS she’s always thought him to be.
Author Bio:
Melanie grew up in the Midwest, but she loves living in the Southeast (where the beaches are!) now with her husband and daughter.
Melanie’s other passion is traveling and seeing the world. With anthropology degrees under their belts, she and her husband have made it their goal in life to see as many archaeological sites around the world as possible.
She has a horrible food addiction to pasta and candy (not together…ew). And she gets sad when her wine rack is empty.
At the end of the day, she is a true romantic at heart. She loves writing the cheesy and corny of romantic comedies, and the sassy and sexy of suspense. She aims to make her readers swoon, laugh out loud, maybe sweat a little, and above all, fall in love.
Go visit Melanie’s website and sign up for her newsletter to stay updated on release dates, teasers, and other details for all of her projects!
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Cover Reveal: Trace by Ali Lucia Sky
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Trace
Ali Lucia Sky
(Somnolence, #2)
Publication date: September 6th 2022
Genres: New Adult, Paranormal, Romance
From the moment Vivi Vanderloven set eyes on Trace Linton, she knew she wanted him. Getting him is another thing altogether.
Touring with Somnolence really is sex, drugs and rock and roll. But the two lovers are baring more than their bodies when they are together. Secrets are coming out and the two are telling truths they’ve never shared with anyone else.
But when Vivi’s past starts leaving her threatening texts and emails, can she keep the one secret she doesn’t want to share from ruining her future?
Disclaimer & Trigger Warning:
This title is in the mature New Adult genre and meant for an audience of 18+ due to triggering situations such as PTSD, reference to sexual assault/rape, sexual situations including MF, MFM, light MM & light FF, profanity and substance abuse.
Author Bio:
Ali Lucia Sky is the author of The Powers That Be series. She lives in Southern California with her husband and a house full of kitty cats and a yard full of crows.
She loves laughing, drinking good coffee, vegan food, and supporting animal rescues.
When she isn’t writing or dreaming of new stories, she can be found planning her next vacation because traveling is life.
If you encounter her in the wild, don’t be offended if she should run away. She’s timid with strangers, but can be plied with shiny things and pictures of your cat or dog.
She’s a weirdo like that.
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Cover Reveal: CHRIS by Nancy Brown
CHRIS
Nancy Brown
(Cross Security, #3)
Publication date: September 9th 2022
Genres: Adult, Romance, Suspense
This will be a job from hell…
I knew that from the moment I laid eyes on her.
Ex- MI6 agent Chris Winters lives by the rules. The most important rule of all: no messing around with a client. It works for him. Until it doesn’t. His newest job for Cross Security should be simple. Poppy Jones, the hottest swimwear and lingerie model on the planet, has a stalker… a ghost from her past who is coming to collect what he believes is his. Chris is to protect her and find out who is issuing the threats.
Simple. Cut and Dry.
Until it’s not.
Their chemistry is off the charts. But even as Chris fights his attraction to Poppy and discovers there is more to her than meets the eye, the real threat comes not from her stalker, but from the growing connection between them.
If he puts everything on the line, including his heart, will Chris still be able to keep her safe? Or will the ghost from Poppy’s past succeed in taking what he believes is his?
It’s a dangerous game to play. Who will succeed and who will fail?
Author Bio:
Nancy Carolyn Brown is an author of contemporary romance, fond of writing love stories about hunky badass men endowed with massive hearts, and strong heroines with just the right mix of sweet and sass… flaming hot chemistry and thrilling nail biting suspense is always guaranteed!
She loves cosmos and chocolate and a swoony good book with a strong storyline.
She lives in sunny southern Alberta, Canada with her high school sweetheart husband and naughty Bengal cat. When she isn’t writing, she enjoys the simple things in life like spending time with family and friends, reading and running with her favorite playlist blasting in her ears.
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The Last of Seven by Steven Hartov Blog Tour
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Title: The Last of Seven
Author: Steven Hartov
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Publication Date: August 9, 2022
Page Count: 305
About the book:
A spellbinding novel of World War II based on the little-known history of the “X Troop” – a team of European Jews who escaped the Continent only to join the British Army and return home to exact their revenge on Hitler’s military.
A lone soldier wearing a German uniform stumbles into a British military camp in the North African desert with an incredible story to tell. He is the only survivor of an undercover operation meant to infiltrate a Nazi base, trading on the soldiers’ perfect fluency in German. For this man is not British born but instead a German Jew seeking revenge for the deaths of his family back home in Berlin.
As the Allies advance into Europe, the young lieutenant is brought to Sicily to recover, where he’s recruited by a British major to join to newly formed “X Troop,” a commando unit composed of German and Austrian Jews, training for a top-secret mission at a nearby camp in the Sicilian hills. They are all “lost boys,” driven not by patriotism but by vengeance.
Drawing on meticulous research into this unique group of soldiers, The Seventh Commando is a lyrical, propulsive historical novel perfect for readers of Mark Sullivan, Robert Harris, and Alan Furst.
Find this book online:
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Excerpt:
CHAPTER ONE
North Africa, Spring 1943
In the Sahara, the sun could make a man bleed.
It was hard to believe at first, especially if you’d ever trekked a frigid winter landscape somewhere, boots slogging through alpine snow, limbs shivering and aching bone deep. It was a challenge to imagine it, such a murderous sun, when December memory recalled teeth chattering like a Morse code key, toes and fingers numbed and raw, eyebrows stiff with frost, till all at once that blessed star emerged from charcoal clouds to save the day.
The sun was a holy thing then. The breath of God on your frozen face.
Ah, but in the vastness of that empty desert, when spring fell prey to cruel summer, when the cloudless sky was nothing but a silver mirror, the sand an iron griddle, and there was not a tree or cave or cactus to throw a shadow’s sliver. Nowhere to run from the sun. It was then that heaven’s jewel became a hunting thing, its furnace eye unblinking, merciless, and pounding.
You could shade your skull with a cap, drape your blistered neck with burlap, but still you had to see your path as your squinting eyes filled with flies who’d found the only liquid in the land. The lancing light bounced off the dunes to slowly broil your face, lips turned plaster white and split, and the oils of your nose and cheeks fried patches there like poultry on a spit. And then, the crow’s-feet wrinkles at the corners of your bleary vision turned to brittle parchment, until at last they cracked, and the most unnatural happened…
The man across the dunes was weeping tears of brine and blood. But they were not of sorrow or self-pity, for all of his emotions had hollowed out so many weeks ago. They were simply the last vestiges of all the fluid he had left, squeezed from the ducts by that relentless sun.
He was small there in the distance, and nearly weightless now, though from the way he moved it seemed he wore a yoke of iron. He was no more than an upthrust child’s thumb against the umber sands, shimmering in the steaming light of the fata morgana, an illusion where horizon met the sky.
He wore a Bedouin burnoose, tight about his oily blond curls and rough against his bristled jaw. His German staff sergeant’s tunic was girded with white salt lines of evaporated sweat, a single bandolier of ammunition, and the lanyard of a camel skin water bladder, now shriveled like an ancient’s scrotum, nothing left. One Feldwebel rank was on his collar, his Afrika Korps palm-tree shoulder patch was bleached into a ghost, and in one pocket were two lizard tails he’d chewed from time to time, though all the meat was spent. The right waist of his tunic was punched through with a bullet hole, its fringes black with dried blood, and in the left thigh of his trousers was another one just like it, the reason for his crooked limp.
In his dangling right hand, below a ragged sleeve, he clutched a German MP40 Schmeisser machine pistol, barrel down, its leather strap dragging through the sand. His left hand held nothing, the nut-brown fingers capped with broken nails with which he’d tried and failed to dig some water from the heart of a dying oasis. His breaths rattled like an asthmatic’s, yet he came on, another half an hour, another mile.
A pair of British soldiers from Montgomery’s Eighth Army watched him. They knelt behind a berm of sandbags, Tommy helmets buckled tight, sleeves rolled up and neat, shorts revealing sun-browned thighs above knee socks and tanker’s boots. They were alone, the western guards of a garrison south of Medenine, Tunisia, and they raised their bayoneted Enfield rifles to bear down on the stranger, like twins who often read each other’s minds.
At twenty feet the German sergeant stopped, unmoving, only breathing. The Cockney Tommy on the left aimed the rifle at his chest.
“Drop the bloody Schmeisser.”
The German jolted, as if surprised to hear a voice aside from his own mutterings to himself, unsure if these two Brits were real or cruel mirage. Yet he obeyed, as after all he knew it didn’t matter. The machine pistol was choked with grit and only the first shell would have fired. He opened his fingers and let the gun slip, like the hand of a dying lover, and it fell to the sand and was still.
The Tommy on the right said, “Hände hoch.” Hands up. He was a Scot and it came out as “Handerr hook.”
The German tried, but he couldn’t raise his arms higher than his waist, and his leather palms fluttered there above the sand like a maestro urging his musicians to play the passage pianissimo. His cracked lips formed a trembling “O,” though no sound emerged, and he mouthed Water, and then again—a goldfish with its face pressed to the glass of an aquarium. The Scot, keeping his Enfield trained, pulled a tin canteen from his battle harness.
“Don’t go near him, Robbie,” warned the Tommy on the left.
The Scot pitched the water bottle, cricket-style, where it pinged against a rock before the German’s boots. But the man could hardly bend his wounded leg and leaned in half a fencer’s lunge, snatching the canteen two-handed. He unscrewed the cap and brought it, shaking, to his mouth, and raised his face to heaven as the water gushed into his swollen gullet and dribbled from his filthy beard. His body trembled, and he looked at the two men and said, in nearly perfect British English, “I am not a German.”
The Tommies glanced at one another, then back at their intruder.
“You don’t say, Klaus?” the Cockney said to him.
“Looks like a bleedin’ Jerry to me, Harry,” the Scot growled to his partner.
“He’s bleedin’ all right, mate,” said Harry sideways. “Got a couple of nicks.”
“Nicks?” Robbie snorted. “Coupla hefty caliber holes. Can hardly see `em for the flies.”
Cockney Harry craned his neck to peer beyond the German’s head.
“You all alone, mate?”
“Six others,” the German managed in a brittle whisper.
“Don’t see ’em.”
“All dead.”
“Right,” said Robbie. “And where’d ye come from then?”
The German dropped the canteen. His fingers wouldn’t hold it.
“Borj el-Khadra, by way of Tobruk.”
“Bollocks,” Harry spat. “That’s three hundred miles.” He thrust his buckled chin above the sea of endless dunes. “Across that.”
For a long moment, the trio regarded one another like drunkards sizing up opponents for a brawl. The Tommies watched the German’s hands, for they hadn’t searched him yet, while for his part he struggled to stay upright. Cockney Harry gestured at Robbie the Scot, but only with his head.
“Fire the Very pistol, Robbie. Green flare, not red. Let’s have the captain up here for a chat.”
Aside from Robbie’s flare, which arced into the silver sky and fell to earth somewhere, the trio stayed immobile until at last a throaty engine loomed. A four-wheeled open command car appeared from the north, its peeling fuselage bristling with petrol jerrycans, pickaxes, and Bren light machine guns snouted at the sky. It spewed a cloud of dust as it hove to and an officer dismounted, his captain’s cap stained with sweat, Webley pistol lanyarded to a holster. His left hand tapped a swagger stick against his muscled calf while his right fingers smoothed a short mustache. His large driver followed close, hefting a Thompson submachine gun.
The captain ambled up and stopped, his bloodshot eyes squinting at the strange tableau. Robbie the Scot turned and dipped his helmet brim, but Harry kept his rifle trained, and there were no salutes.
“What’s all this then, lads?” the captain said.
“Captured us an Afrika Korps infiltrator, sir,” said Harry.
“Sneaky desert serpent,” Robbie sneered.
“Good show then.” The captain nodded and scanned the prisoner head to foot. “Right. Summon a firing party.”
Harry turned and looked at his commander.
“Execution, sir?”
“Affirmative, Corporal.” The captain flicked his stick toward a distant rise. “And let’s stake his corpse on that hill. Perhaps it shall keep the other vultures at bay.”
“Yessir,” said the captain’s driver, and he turned back for the car to muster up a firing squad.
The captain wasn’t barbarous, but more than worn and weary, and his men were not quite sure if he was serious or bluffing. In the past few weeks, despite the routing of the Germans in the westward push for Tunisia, spies of every kind had probed his lines, including one Bedouin woman. They were often followed by marauding Stuka fighter-bombers. He’d lost four men, most painfully his major whom he’d buried and replaced, and had a fifth now dying in a tent, legless and weeping for his mother. So much, he thought, for Erwin Rommel’s “Krieg ohne Hass,” war without hate.
“I am not a German.” The intruder spoke again, and his voice spasmed with the effort.
The captain raised his chin. His driver stopped and turned. The prisoner’s accent was British, yet with a certain Berlin curl.
“That’s quite a claim,” the captain said, “given your costume.”
“He told us that shite too, sir,” said Robbie.
“Says he hoofed it from Borj el-Khadra,” Harry said. “By way of Tobruk, no less.”
The captain raised a palm to hush his men and squinted at the prisoner.
“What are you, then?”
The prisoner tried to swallow. The water hadn’t been enough. It would never be enough. His body quaked in feverish ripples now, his ragged clothing fluttering like gosling feathers. It was the proximity of rescue, now turned to sudden death, coupled with his famish, thirst, and wounds.
“SIG,” he said, tunneling in his delirium for the words. “Combined Operations.”
The captain raised an eyebrow. Harry asked him, “What’s ess-eye-gee, sir?”
“Special Interrogation Group.” The captain stroked his mustache corners. “Top secret commando unit, attached to LRDG and SAS. Mostly German Jews, but they were all killed at Tobruk, and that was many months ago.”
“Not I,” the prisoner croaked. His right hand reached into his tunic. The captain fumbled for his Webley and the Tommies’ Enfields stiffened, as the prisoner fetched a pair of British identification disks, one green, one amber, like autumn leaves on a threadbare lanyard, and they fell against his chest.
The captain glanced at them, and at the hollow bearded face again.
“Tobruk, you say. And where’ve you been since then…allegedly?”
“Captured. Escaped a month ago, or two, perhaps, I think.”
“You think.” The captain closed his fists and put them to his garrison belt. “And why, pray tell, if you were in this uniform, were you not executed as a spy? Those are Hitler’s orders, after all.”
“Because I had tea with Erwin Rommel,” the prisoner said, yet without a hint of irony that the German field marshal would have thusly intervened.
“Had a pint meself with Churchill just last week,” the captain’s driver quipped. The Tommies laughed, but the captain didn’t. There was something in the prisoner’s eyes—a sincerity of madness, or truth.
“What’s your name and rank?” he asked.
“Froelich, Bernard, second lieutenant.” He pronounced his given name as “Bern-udd” and his rank as “left-tenant.” Then he added, “Six seven two, four five seven.”
The captain produced a small pad and pencil from his tunic pocket—ink was useless in the desert. He wrote the details down, tore the page off and flicked it over his shoulder for the driver, his eyes never leaving the desperate gleaming blue ones there before him. They were bleeding from the ducts, but he’d seen that once or twice before.
“Sergeant Stafford,” he ordered, “take this to the wireless tent and have Binks get onto Cairo. Tell them we’ll need our answer double quick.”
The driver sped off amidst a cloud of dust, but his return was far from quick. A grueling fifteen minutes passed, while the prisoner teetered on his feet. He could no longer keep his head erect, and he fought to stay awake and straight. He told himself he’d stood this way before, for hours in formations, and he dredged up images of bucolic pleasures, the Danube and the Rhine, and even Galilee. He longed for rain and felt its kisses on his face, while rivulets of something else crawled down his beard and touched the corners of his mouth. But he tasted only brine, and then the armored car returned.
He raised his chin as the driver handed back the paper to the captain, who perused it, then spoke again.
“Lieutenant Froelich, if that’s you,” he said, “do you remember your last passwords?”
“I shall try,” the prisoner whispered as he stumbled through his memory, unsure if he could find the thing to save him from a bullet.
“If I said Rothmans cigarettes,” the captain posed, “what would you say?”
The prisoner’s sunburned brow creased deeply like a cutlass scar.
“I’d tell you I don’t like them, sir…that I fancy Players Navy Cut instead.”
The captain nodded, and offered his first thin smile of the week.
“That is correct.”
And Froelich slumped to his knees in the sand, a collapsed marionette, strings cut. And then he slipped from consciousness and toppled forward, knuckles in the desert, his palms turned up to the sun he hated.
“Fetch a stretcher, lads,” the captain said. “It’s him. He’s the last of them. He’s the seventh.”
Excerpted from My Last of the Seven @ 2022 by Steven Hartov, used with permission by Hanover Square Press.
About the author:
Steven Hartov is the coauthor of the New York Times bestseller In the Company of Heroes, as well as The Night Stalkers and Afghanistan on the Bounce. For six years he served as Editor-in-Chief of Special Operations Report. He has appeared on CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, FOX, and most recently the History Channel’s Secret Armies. A former Merchant Marine sailor, Israeli Defense Forces paratrooper and special operator, he is currently a Task Force Commander in the New York Guard. He lives in New Jersey.
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Cover Reveal: Lessons in Love and Death by W.H. Lockwood
**This post contains Amazon affiliate links which will allow me as an associate to earn a small commission on any purchase made through the link of the products I share. This commission in no way changes the pricing of any items for the buyer.**
I am beyond excited to share this gorgeous cover with you all today! Lessons in Love and Death by W.H. Lockwood will be available September 26th, but you can pre-order your copy today!
A Lesson in Love and Death (Endymion College #1)
Expected Publication Date: September 26th, 2022
Genre: Cozy Horror Romance/ Dark Academia
Anna James dreamed of only two things in life: to read books and to not die.
The day she is offered a scholarship to study literature at the beautiful, exclusive and gothic Endymion College, is the happiest day of her life, but soon after arrival, Anna finds it is nothing like the brochure.
Instantly thrust into a dangerous conspiracy, sent to live in a haunted dormitory with a captivating rival, Anna struggles to keep control of her only chance at a better life and to maintain her already tenuous grip on reality.
Things soon go from bad to worse when a séance goes awry, and finding herself pursued by a terrifying spectre, Anna finds comfort and a kindred spirit in her professor of literature: young, devastatingly handsome and completely off-limits.
Anna must find a way to fight both her desire and a relentless supernatural force out for blood, all while completing her work on time to hold on to her precious scholarship.
Darkly humorous, crushingly awkward, deeply romantic, Endymion College: A Lesson in Love and Death is a celebration of the books we love and an action-packed, supernatural, feminist, horror story all rolled into one.
About the Author
W.H. Lockwood writes feminist gothic and historical fiction, dark academia and cosy horror, all with a romantic twist.
Raised on a diet of Point books and Pepsi, only willing to leave her den to attend chess club at public school, W.H. Lockwood started writing at a young age and has kept this passion throughout her life.
Always a voracious reader, she obtained an undergraduate degree in literary studies from a gorgeous sandstone university, following that with a master’s degree in publishing and editing, then another master’s degree in astronomy, thus uniting her two great loves of the arts and science, leaving her utterly unqualified to cope with the real world.
These days, W.H. Lockwood works as a professional editor and can often be found aimlessly wandering through the coffee shops and bookstores of the beautiful city she calls home.
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