Book Title: DARLING BEASTS Character Name: Gabby Gunn How would you describe your family or your childhood? That is a loaded question! I grew up on NYC’s Upper East Side, with homes in the Hamptons, Vail, and a few other places. When I was eight, my mother moved to our family compound outside San Diego (Rancho Santa Fe, specifically) to recover from thyroid cancer and just never… came home. Because my dad was busy running his media empire, my little brother Ozzie and I were raised by our beloved nanny, Diane. Our sister Talia is much older so was mostly out of the house by the time Diane took charge. A lot of people express sadness for me—especially after my mom eventually passed away—but we weren’t close, and Diane was the only mother figure I needed. I was totally fine! Talia was very close with our mom, so her death hit her a lot harder. What was your greatest talent? I famously don’t have any talents, but I run an experimental theater to give my friends a place to showcase theirs. Significant other? If only. I’m not even sure whether I’m attracted to boys or girls. Biggest challenge in relationships?…

Exclusive Excerpt: HUNTED by Maggie Shayne Nighttime was different up here, she thought, gazing outside. Star-spangled and natural. Alive and real. Nothing like night had been downstate. The night up here spoke in whispers, but at least it spoke.  The house tended to creak in response to the wind outside. It was as if the night moaned a question and then the house creaked an answer. She paced away from the window, bending to stroke Jax’s head when he twisted around her calves. There was nothing out there. Just forests and lakes and the speck-on-the-map town of Pine Lake a few miles down the mountain, where old men still sat around a checkerboard in the general store. She ought to go back to bed, try to sleep, she supposed. She turned toward the curving staircase and started up it. Then she stopped dead in her tracks and listened to what sounded absurdly like an upstairs window scraping open. A heartbeat later, the doorbell chimed, and she almost jumped out of her skin. No one visited her up here. Especially not in the middle of the night. Her stomach turned queasy as she tried to decide which to investigate first. She…

Instead of trying to find your perfect match in a dating app, we bring you the “Author-Reader Match” where we introduce you to authors you may fall in love with. It’s our great pleasure to present Kelley Armstrong Writes: Just about anything. I love reading all the genres, so I write in a lot of them. One of my favorites is thrillers, and while series are a great way to dive deep into character and worldbuilding, sometimes I’m in the mood to pen a standalone tale. EVERY STEP SHE TAKES is one of those. As a teenager, Genevieve was at the center of a celebrity scandal. Fifteen years later, she’s happily living in Rome under a new name. A letter from her old life disrupts that and sends her back to New York…running from a murder charge. There’s also a romance snuck in there. About: As much as I actually do like long romantic walks, I’m even happier curled up with my dog and a book, in front of a roaring fire. I divide my time between southern Ontario and the Yukon, which means dividing it between holing up to write and getting out in nature, being a little more…

1–What is the title of your latest release?  THE VIEW FROM LAKE COMO 2–What’s the “elevator pitch” for your new book? A woman is forced to rebuild her life and the house that goes with it. In Italy! 3–How did you decide where your book was going to take place?  My husband and I were driving down the shore and came upon Lake Como, New Jersey. I was off to the races! I’m half Lombardian- Italians in the Alps- near Lake Como. It was fate. 4–Would you hang out with your protagonist in real life? Absolutely. 5–What are three words that describe your protagonist?  Decent. Kind. Put upon. 6–What’s something you learned while writing this book? I learned about gilding stone- and cutting stone. I learned that sculptors, including the great Jago, go to Carrara to choose marble from the same mountain that Michelangelo visited to choose his marble to sculpt David. 7–Do you edit as you draft or wait until you are totally done? Both. 8–What’s your favorite foodie indulgence? Spaghetti. 9–Describe your writing space/office! A room with a door that closes. A room of one’s own! Thank you, Virginia Woolf! 10–Who is an author you admire? Too many!…

1–What is the title of your latest release? RELATIONSHIP GOALS 2–What’s the “elevator pitch” for your new book? An infamous star soccer player who is forced to fake date a Hollywood starlet, only to develop real feelings for her—just as she learns he was pretending and vows to get even. 3–How did you decide where your book was going to take place? I knew I wanted the fame aspect of this fake dating, and I couldn’t think of a better place to set a high stakes public romance than in L.A. and Hollywood. 4–Would you hang out with your protagonist in real life? Oh my gosh, ABSOLUTELY. Abigail and I would be chaos queens together. 5–What are three words that describe your protagonist? Bubbly, chaotic, and kind. 6–What’s something you learned while writing this book? I did a lot of research for this one, but the thing that I got most intense about was the real-life FIFA scandal— which I ended up not using much of at all, other than a sort of background flavor. There’s a great documentary on Netflix about it— but if you want a soccer documentary Beckham is a lot more fun! 7–Do you edit as you draft…

Music has always been important to me, but it took on a whole new meaning when I became a romance author. I can’t write a single chapter without music playing in the background. Seriously—no character playlist, no words. Music sets the tone, helps me dig into what my characters are feeling and sometimes, can drag and entire scene out of nowhere that has me rushing to my notes app to get the dialogue down. SCOTCH ON THE ROCKS is a pretty messy love story, that, at its core, is about meeting the right person at the wrong time and being willing to wait until the stars align. So, I thought I’d share a few songs with you that helped me learn my characters and dig into those emotions. Black Magic Woman by Fleetwood Mac This is the first song I added to the SCOTCH ON THE ROCKS playlist, so it has to be the first song I talk about. Callum has been yearning for Juniper for several years and mentions this song on the page when he thinks of her. Just like Callum, it’s a song about a man so enraptured with his love he feels he must me under…

            July 4th reminds me that we’re in the middle of summer. It doesn’t matter that I’m a glass-half-full type personality, bells and whistles are going off in my head and telling me to get every last minute of enjoyment I possibly can out of the remaining days of summer. Fall is knocking on my door with the daily grind of school, work, and responsibilities.             With that in mind, I have some must reads for you to sneak into your library before the summer gets away from you. ETIQUETTE FOR LOVERS AND KILLERS by Anna Fitzgerald Healy What are the chances of receiving a love letter and an engagement ring for a perfect stranger, only to see that same woman murdered the very next day? It’s 1964 in the tiny town of Eastport, Maine, and Billie McCadie is bored to death. She’s surrounded by dull people with more manners than sense, and no sign of the intrigue or romance that fill her beloved novels. That is, until an engagement ring and cryptic love letter turn up, addressed to “Gertrude.” Until she meets yacht-club handsome Avery Webster. Until the unsettling phone calls and visits from a man in a fedora begin. Until…

Romance books are described as being hot or steamy. A subtle warning that the content may be too much for some readers. There used to be a simple rule: would you recommend the book to your mother? Since my mother handed me THE OTHER SIDE OF MIDNIGHT by Sidney Sheldon, that criteria didn’t work for me. Also people are described as being hot. Those who are above and beyond attractive and alluring. Again, hotness is in the eye of the beholder. What’s hot and what’s not is subjective. Except in the case of Tom Hardy, it’s a universal truth. When I say hot, I mean the weather. To say it’s been hot this summer is an understatement. For those forced to work outside, shade is the most sought-after spot. The poor dogs in my neighborhood are only outdoors before 7am and after 7pm. Since ice melts so fast, cold drinks must be consumed immediately. My hair does a special dance with humidity and refuses to lay flat. Even if I hold still, sweating is a constant. I’m a winter person. I like snow and not polar vortex cold, but normal cold. It’s quieter, no nightly fireworks, store bought or thunder….

1–What is the title of your latest release? THE BLACK HIGHWAY 2–What’s the “elevator pitch” for your new book? A headless, handless body washes up on the banks of the river Thames in the heart of London. The only clue as to the identity of the body is something the killer wrote on the victim’s arm – P.Brannigan. At first they think it might be the man’s name until one of the detectives assigned to the case, Dr Laughton Rees, realizes it refers to the Penthouse of the Brannigan Building, close to where the body washed up, an address she knows well because it’s where she lives, and also where their teenage daughter Gracie is currently home alone. 3–How did you decide where your book was going to take place? When I lived in London I found out about Dead Man’s Hole, an open-air morgue built into the foundations of Tower Bridge where they used to display all the people who drowned in the Thames so people could help identify them. They built it there because the curve of the river and the currents combined to gather all the bodies there, and I always wanted to include this fact and…

My series, Ghost Ops, is coming out soon. The first book, HEART OF DANGER, is coming out on July 8. The second book, I DREAM OF DANGER, is coming out on August 5, and the third and final book. BREAKING DANGER, is coming out on September 9.                 These books are books of the heart. I loved writing them. The books are set in the near future where things are unravelling fast but Haven doesn’t unravel. Everyone in Haven is strong and steadfast.                 The Ghost Ops series features three elite warriors, Thomas ‘Mac’ McEnroe, Nick Ross and Jon Ryan. Ghost Ops was a classified Special Operations unit so secret that there was no trace of the men who belonged to it. They had to be men without connections – no family, no girlfriends, no wives, no children. All of their records were expunged. All photographs destroyed. No trace of their previous life was left. They were completely dedicated to the task of fighting bad guys, and winning. But their work was secret and in the shadows.                 They were Ghosts.                 Each had his own reason for renouncing the world. The outside world had nothing for them. Their unit…