Captain Chase Eversea and Rosalind March employ a street urchin, Liam Plum, to help with their search for Lucy, Rosalind’s missing sister—but when the boy’s sister and only surviving relative disappears, too, the mystery thickens, sizzling attraction deepens, and they’re forced to admit how much the boy matters to them. Chase is recruited to give the filthy boy a bath (with lavender soap, no less), and this scene starts after Chase carries a sleeping Liam to bed and Chase and Rosalind are tantalizingly alone again… “He weighs nothing at all.” He said it nearly tonelessly. They sat in silence. Knowing they’d both just irretrievably given up the safety of ambivalence toward the boy. They’d allowed him to mean something. Neither of them were pleased about it, but neither would they give him up for the world now. The fire popped loudly. Rosalind jumped. For more in Julie Anne Long’s exciting excerpt click here Visit FreshFiction.com to learn more about books and authors.

Books Included: This week I seemed to spend half my time buying books, getting a ticket for a book signing and then standing in line and waiting for a signing. It probably was only a couple of hours but I’m sure you know what it’s like to try to mesh your schedule with a family’s schedule especially when there is car pooling involved! So, here’s how it worked out — I got up before dawn and showered and dressed to leave at 6:30am to go to downtown Dallas on Tuesday, August 4th, the day BAD MOON RISING was officially released. Now in the old days with a “real job” that was my usual routine but it’s been a couple of years and I only get up that early to work in my “work clothes” aka pajamas, so to be actually showered and dressed is a shocker, but I managed. Then I drove downtown barely missing the rush hour traffic and just avoiding a few of the angry drivers. Oh, yes, and the sun rose. It may have been beautiful but I was too busy trying to keep my eyes open and avoiding other motorists without the help of coffee. Sigh….

Whenever people find out that Allyson Roy translates into a husband and wife team named Alice and Roy we get reactions from other couples as varied as: “We just luuv doing things together.” — to — “We’d be divorced if we tried that!” Well, we not only made it through our second book — BABYDOLL comes out today! — but the first in our Saylor Oz series won a Daphne du Maurier Award for Excellence in Mystery/Suspense. To celebrate, we thought it would be fun to have a little quiz aimed at assisting those of you who choose to test the waters of writing together as a couple. Want to take the quiz? Then click here Visit FreshFiction.com to learn more about books and authors.

This week one of my Yahoo groups was discussing the newest Suzanne Brockmann book, Hot Pursuit. One of the ladies in the group was planning on buying a copy, but the store she went to wasn’t offering a discount, so she did some calling, and found a store with a discount and placed the book on hold. In her doing this she found that the store wasn’t getting as many copies of a book as they might have before the economic downturn, and it led several people to say they either didn’t read Brockmann any longer or they would be getting her book from the library. This takes me to the next lady, who said she checked her library and they did not have any of Hot Pursuit on order. I found this interesting as I believed her to have been a very popular author, and even with funding dwindling I would have thought they would have ordered at least one copy. Read the rest of the story click here Visit FreshFiction.com to learn more about books and authors.

Daniel Silva signing THE DEFECTOROriginally uploaded by freshfiction Photo collection from the Daniel Silva signing in Dallas. Check them out and watch for a special contest in August to win the copy of THE DEFECTOR Daniel signed to a “Fresh Fiction Fan!” Visit FreshFiction.com to learn more about books and authors.

This week while I was driving and trying to entertain myself I decided that if I were to be a writer I’d want to have a wonderful place to write in. What would it look like? I know it certainly wouldn’t be an old-fashioned typewriter setting atop a doghouse ala Snoopy in the Peanuts cartoons. It would probably have a nice state of the art computer that I could never learn to fully use, and lots of shelves to hold all the research books, whose soul purpose would be to sit there and make me look scholarly and to collect dust. Of course I’d have to have a nice polished desk, and plenty of office supplies; reams of paper, highlighters in all colors, pens, pencils, and a rainbow of sticky notes in all shapes and sizes! Now, I’d be officially a writer wouldn’t I? What, you mean in order to be a writer I have to have a story idea and the talent to extend it into several hundred pages that are written coherently and would attract the attention of some great literary agent or publisher and actually get my story to you my overeager fans. So now you know…

I’ve been a reader for half a century. There you go, guys, you get to do the numbers and calculate my age, but it’s true, I’ve been reading FOREVER since dirt was new! And it never ever gets old. What? Well meeting my favorite authors. I’m very fortunate that I’m able to meet some of the goddesses (and gods) who channel muses and create wonderful and imaginative worlds for me to enjoy. And this week is like reaching a stage of nirvana or whatever is really a special place. It’s the annual conference of Romance Writers of America. So many authors in one space. Wow! So, if you’ve been following on our Twitter or on Facebook you know a wee bit about what we’ve been doing, who we’re meeting, and books we’re getting. But I wanted to talk about what it means to me as a reader, an addict to books if you will. It’s like being surrounded by friends I’ve known for years, creators of worlds with characters who have aided my education, stories that gave me a few hours away from stress and sadness to keep going, examples to follow that inspired me to success and sometimes just…

This week I read a new to me author, Marie Bostwick. I read her book A Thread of Truth. When I started it I was warned that there might be numerous typos. With that thought it mind I set out to not enjoy the book, because last year I attempted to read a different book by a different author that was so riddled with typos, both spelling and grammatical that after four days of reading I hadn’t even made it to page one hundred. I’m very happy to report that even though A Thread of Truth was the second book in the series I had no trouble following along, and that the typos didn’t pull me out of the story, and I truly feel that there were only two times that I would have even noticed them had I not been warned. I’m also thrilled to say that I had been told for some time that Bostwick would be an author I would like, but I had been putting her off, and I was not misled…Bostwick is now on my must read list. So while we want a book to be perfect, and for the storyline to flow in a…

I recently asked this question on Twitter: “As a romance reader, what makes a book a keeper for you?”  Out of the replies that came my way, the two most common responses were one, a compelling hero/heroine and two, a story that generates an emotional reaction in the reader, whether that means laughter, crying, et cetera. I think we all read romance novels to escape, at least temporarily, the conflicts of our normal lives.  Even the people with the happiest of marriages, the best of health, and the most wonderful of jobs have some kind of problems.  Everyone needs to play a little hooky once in a while, and romance novels are a great way to do that. When you read a romance, you get caught up in someone else’s problems.  And even if you’re biting your nails on page 300 wondering if these two will ever get together, you know in the back of your mind that everything is going to turn out happily ever after, which leaves you with a feeling of satisfaction and hope at the end of the book.  (But you still nibble on those nails.) A book that gets a reader so emotionally involved is…

This has been an interesting week coming off a beautiful relaxing away-from-it-all vacation to business catch-up, a little family drama, death of a favorite author to a full-blown panic attack. I seldom have panic attacks in fact probably wouldn’t know what they were unless someone I trust told me about them. I just called them anxious moments. Anyway, this one went full blown crazy and was all based, believe it or not, on books. Or more specifically the chance of not being able to get new books. First it was just a weird dream sorta a nightmare but it kept echoing in my mind. I was wandering in a book store — the old Waldenbooks on Midway, now a beverage center (sigh) — where I had spent many memorable minutes and hours every week for about fifteen years. It was the first stand-alone chain bookstore I’d ever been in. Some of the staff members are still my friends. They made me feel at home in Texas, this new place I’d moved to from the East. They learned my name, my taste in books and even introduced me to new authors and books I’d never tried before. Judy and Jackie put…