To celebrate this week’s release of the third book in my paranormal romance series, REVENGE OF THE WRONGED, I’m excited to share with Fresh Fiction readers a very popular paleo recipe from the first book in the series, SLIP OF FATE. I received so many emails from my readers who tried this recipe at home after reading the chapter in which our big, scary, bad-boy supernatural Alpha dons a tall white chef hat and apron and pan sears rib-eyes for our very confused and reluctant vegetarian heroine, Milena. In the book, Alex prepares the steaks following a slight variation on the recipe provided below, which has been taken from PaleoFoodieKitchen.com. I hope you enjoy it as much as Milena ends up loving it in SLIP OF FATE! Recipe: Pan Seared Rib-eye Steaks (Recipe credit: PaleoFoodieKitchen.com) INGREDIENTS 2 grass fed ribeye steaks (about 1″ thick and 10 oz each) 1 tsp sea salt (preferably Himalayan or Celtic) 1 tsp black pepper ½ tsp paprika ¼ tsp onion powder ¼ tsp garlic powder 2 tbsp grass fed butter 2 sprigs of fresh rosemary cloves from 1 head of garlic, peeled coconut oil INSTRUCTIONS To make the dry rub, combine salt, pepper, paprika,…

I woke to the familiar shadows of gray and black blanketing our room, but for some inexplicable reason I felt afraid. Almost like I’d just had a nightmare. I faced the edge of the bed, my husband spooning me, his arm around my waist, his head behind mine on the pillow. There was something off about his breathing. It wasn’t the calm, slow breathing of someone asleep. No. It was the kind of breathing that came from great exertion. Or fear. When my husband spoke it was more breath than sound and meant only for me to hear. “Someone’s in here.” My heart exploded. My body tensed. His arm tightened around me, telling me with his action that we should lie there unmoving, pretending to be asleep, and hope the intruder wouldn’t bother with us. My gaze ping ponged around the room, searching for the man. At first I didn’t see anyone. Then I spotted him. He crawled on his hands and knees along the side of the bed toward me. I thought I had known fear. I hadn’t known fear until I knew he was going to kill me. Kill us. Then I woke up. Yep. That was one…

Organization makes life easier. Four words I’ve been told again and again as a writer. Four words I simply can’t live by. I’m always jealous of the people I meet who are able to write lists and structure their days in a way that allows them to move seamlessly from task to task. When I first started joining writing groups, many of the people I met fit this picture. They created detailed plots and planned out every aspect of the epic growth and transformation of their characters. They could pull out journals and bits of paper from their purse where they jotted down every idea to flit through their incredible brains and created a road map of exactly where they wanted to go. I, on the other hand, live in a constant state of chaos. Seriously, you should see my home. I’m of the opinion that if I put something away I’ll forget it forever. Out of sight, out of mind. So when I tried to learn from my peers about their writing styles, I quickly learned what worked for them didn’t work for me. When I write, I don’t do so in order. I write the big, important scenes…

Luke’s leg brushed against hers, triggering an immediate response from her overactive hormones. Just being near him turned her on. He held himself differently now than at the club. Tension coiled in his muscles like he was prepared for an imminent attack. “You seem very familiar with military terminology,” Astrid said, keeping her tone casual. He shrugged. “I served for a while.” She’d bet it was for more than “a while,” judging by how quickly his mind had snapped into strategic planning. It would have been a career. “What branch?” “The Marines, of course. There is no other worth joining.” Holden fired one of his grins at her. She wasn’t overly familiar with the different branches of the U.S. military, but she did know that the marines were elite soldiers. She and her battle brothers and sisters were einherjar, Odin’s and Freya’s elite soldiers. She wondered if Holden’s training had been similar to theirs but doubted his had included how to kill supernatural creatures like Loki’s wolverines. “What about you?” Holden asked. Startled from her thoughts, she didn’t know what he meant. “What about me?” “You obviously know something about the military. Did you serve?” Talk about a loaded question….

Seven years ago, I was just starting out on my writer’s journey. I’d written a couple of historical novels which I was enthusiastically peddling to agents and was keen to keep writing. Part of that was due to the fact that my job situation wasn’t the greatest, and I’d just survived a tussle with US Immigration. I was living in a small town in south-central Arizona, and wanted to escape the stress. So, when a fellow writer challenged me to take part in NaNoWriMo—the annual writing fest where you hammer out 50,000 words in the month of November—I couldn’t resist. But, what to write? I stared out of my office window at the railway tracks, the desert and the Pinal Mountains, and came up with an idea. The story fell together fairly quickly. I’d set it in a small town in south-central Arizona, in the near future, when the tanking economy had left the place half-deserted and dying. It didn’t seem too unfeasible. The town I worked in was surrounded by big, new housing developments, partly-finished and forlornly dotted with ‘for sale’ signs. Banks had been repossessing deserted homes and I hadn’t signed off on any new housing permits for…

About Heather Blake Heather Blake grew up in a suburb of Boston, and enjoys going “home” in her novels. As a young mother, she tried her hand at writing novels and hasn’t looked back. Currently, Heather lives in the Cincinnati area with her family, and is currently hard at work on her next novel. Magic Potion | A Wishcraft Mystery WEBSITE | FACEBOOK | TWITTER | PINTEREST THE WITCH AND THE DEAD by Heather Blake Wishcraft #7 The national bestselling author of Gone with the Witch returns as wish-granting witch Darcy Merriweather uncovers dangerous skeletons in the closet—and the garage…. When Darcy moved to Salem, Massachusetts, she never expected her life to change as drastically as it did. But within a short time, the Enchanted Village has become her home, its mystical residents have become her family, and As You Wish, the personal concierge business formerly run by her Aunt Ve, has become her calling. Still, the time has come for change—and for Darcy to move out of Aunt Ve’s house. Darcy’s belongings are stashed in Aunt Ve’s garage, alongside a mess of memories, forgotten possessions, and, to both Ve and Darcy’s horror, a pile of old bones. It turns…

Cozy mysteries are almost always set in a small town. Many of our heroines return to the town where they grew up, or where they spent summers, or where they thought they might like to live someday. Often they’re fleeing from a shattered relationship, a job loss, or some other traumatic event. Or they’re coming back to save a family business that’s in trouble, or to help out an ailing or aging relative. American readers love small towns. I think they have a visions of a place called “home” where people know you and usually welcome you, where you have a place to call your own. These settings have healing powers of their own if you’re recovering from some personal disaster. But there is one problem: these small towns in cozy mysteries usually come with a corpse, or worse, a whole series of corpses—people who have been murdered in this idyllic place. And for any of a variety of reasons it falls on our heroine to solve the murder(s). SEEDS OF DECEPTION is the tenth book in the Orchard Mysteries series. My heroine Meg Corey moved to Granford almost two years ago (in book time), with no friends, no real…

About Joyce and Jim Lavene Joyce and Jim Lavene wrote award-winning, bestselling mystery fiction as themselves, J.J. Cook, and Ellie Grant. They had written and published more than 70 novels for Harlequin, Berkley, Amazon, and Gallery Books along with hundreds of non-fiction articles for national and regional publications. Joyce passed away October 20, 2015 and Jim passed on May 5, 2016. They are missed by family, friends and their many fans. Renaissance Faire | Missing Pieces Mystery | Retired Witches Mysteries WEBSITE | TWITTER | FACEBOOK PUTTING ON THE WITCH by Joyce and Jim Lavene Retired Witches #3 In the latest mystery from the bestselling authors of Looking for Mr. Good Witch, the retired witches of Wilmington, North Carolina, are ready to kick up their heels… With their coven’s spell book still missing, Molly and Elsie—along with their ghostly friend Olivia, her daughter Dorothy, and her boyfriend Brian—are all on edge, especially now that Dorothy’s infamously wicked father is back in the picture. So when they receive an invitation to an exclusive Witches Ball, the ladies jump at the chance to dress up and have some fun. The castle locale is spectacular and the party is hopping, but the festivities…

The first time I visited New Orleans, I fell head over heels in love with the city. And because this fanciful city was introduced to me by friends who lived there, friends who actually belonged to the famed Rex and Comus krewes, I had the rare privilege of being invited into the giant float dens, meeting the float builders, marching in one of the Fat Tuesday parades, and attending the white tie (not just black tie) Rex Ball. New Orleans truly is The Big Easy and The City That Care Forgot. It’s also a city that been mythologized and derided, and is filled with contradictions. It’s eccentric, overindulgent, and just naturally possesses a dark side. And I just knew that New Orleans would provide the perfect setting and backdrop for my Scrapbooking Mysteries. The tricky thing, of course, is how to capture the essence of New Orleans. How to bottle the magic and then spill it out onto the pages of my mysteries. Well, I’ve tried very hard to do just that. Because at its heart, New Orleans is a spooky, highly atmospheric place that lends itself to a mystery novel setting. Think about it – you have the crumbling…

Enemies to lovers. I have such a weak spot for these stories – reading them, writing them, watching them on the big screen…I love it all! My latest novel, ALL LACED UP, features two ice arena enemies: figure skater Lia Bailey and hockey player Pierce Miller. On the surface, the idea of Lia and Pierce (or any enemies!) becoming lovers seems ridiculous. How can two people go from wanting to stab each other with an ice skate to wanting to melt the skating rink’s ice with their kisses, all within the span of one novel? The key is passion. Just like it takes passion to love someone, it also takes passion to hate them. You know how the line between laughing and crying is so thin? I think the line between hate and love can also be thin, especially if said hate was caused by some kind of misunderstanding or easily resolvable conflict, which is definitely the case for Lia and Pierce. My favorite moment in one of these stories is when that misunderstanding disappears or the conflict is resolved. That moment when a character goes from thinking “he gets on my very last nerve” to thinking “he gets on…