Mary's Musings

It was a beautiful weekend in our neck of the woods. So, did I spend it outside working on my flower beds? No. I spent it inside attacking the mess that was my bedroom.

It all started so innocently. Saturday I decided my dresser had become an eyesore and I clean it off. (You know- flat surface...everything in the world gets set on it :-) ) So, I cleaned it all off and dusted it. Then it was a trip to the store for something to hang my necklaces from as I was out of room in my jewelry box. By Saturday night, my dresser was clean, my winter clothes changed out for summer, and my bed newly made.

Seems I'd have Sunday to work on those flower beds, right? Wrong. As my husband and I lay in bed watching the NHL playoffs, I happened to look up at my curtains and see that they were covered with dust.

A full cleaning of the room had to be done.

Sunday, I pulled everything out from under the bed, vacuumed, and returned the winter clothes bins underneath the bed (I LOVE under-the-bed storage.) Then I vacuumed the curtains, and the entertainment center. I took all the ball caps outside where my hubby and I took turns cleaning the layers of dust off with the air hose. (It was more fun than it sounds.) Once everything was dusted, then I organized (leaving myself a huge project for next weekend as my office is filled so full of things you can barely walk in it!)

All in all, it was a successful weekend. And, I did manage to get some sunshine while eating on the back deck, taking a reading break, and going for a walk.

So, how did you spend your weekend?

#TBR Thursday-CARTER REED

Here it is. My first TBR recommendation. And boy was this hard! With all the books one my shelves (both physical and electronic) choosing what to feature first was quite a difficult task. But one book kept popping up in my mind over and over. WARNING: This book is for 18+ only.  

So, what book is it?

If you like dark, gritty stories where a girl on the run for her life turns to a guy who may be more dangerous than the one chasing her, then this is a book for you.

I don't remember how I stumbled upon this book, but when I went to Amazon and clicked on the "Look Inside" feature, I knew I had to read more. I was caught from the first sentence:

"Douchebag's here."

What an opening line! Add in a murder, the mob, and and a smexy hero. This book kept me turning pages to see how things would work out between our hero and heroine.

Need more information? Here's the book blurb:

Emma decided to skip the gym and went home early. It was the last easy decision she made because she found her roommate being raped by the boyfriend. She had two choices. Call the cops and be killed by his family’s mafia connections or kill him first and hope to survive. There was no choice to her. She killed the bastard first and went to the one person who could protect her. Carter Reed. He’s a weapon for the rivaling mafia family, but he’s also Emma’s secret. Not only was he best friends with her brother, but she’s the reason he became that weapon in the first place. 

If you're looking for a dark read, I highly recommend this one! 

Have a book you've read you want to recommend? Share in the comments below.

Same blog, New Format

Since the end of last year and into this year, I've been trying to come up with a better way to theme my post days. Something that will encourage me to want to post more (yeah, I know I've been hit and miss!) and be interesting for you to read.

After months of thinking and looking at other blog themes, I've finally found my themes!!

Mondays will be Mary's Musings. On these days, I'll post whatever I feel like talking about. Hockey. Baseball. Lacrosse. Life. Writing. Share writing tips. Share excerpts from WIPs. Things like that. I may also host another author or do books promos. It all depends on what I feel like talking about!

Thursdays will be #TBR Thursday. In these post I'll recommend specific books/authors. Any book mentioned here will be one that I've read. Any author featured I will have read at least one book by. I'll give you my opinion of the book/author and tell you why I think you should add it to your #TBR pile.

So, I hope you'll come back this Thursday to see what book/author is my featured post for the day!!

THE EXTRACTION LIST by Renee N. Meland

I'm super excited to be a part of the blog tour for Renee N. Meland's YA Dystopian The Extraction List. 

BLURB:

When fifteen-year-old Riley Crane finds out her best friend Olivia is being abused at home, she knows just who to turn to: her mother Claire, writer and spokesperson for President Gray's Parental Morality Law. Under this law, Task Force Officers remove children from their homes if their parents do not meet certain guidelines, taking them to government-run boarding schools. Once they arrive, supervisors rehabilitate them, turning them into productive members of society. Or at least that was how it was supposed to work...

Now, after a government official threatens to make Riley the law's latest victim, Riley and Claire must rely on Cain Foley, a gifted killer with a tongue as sharp as the knives he carries, to get them out of America alive. Though he slices through men's necks as if they are warm butter, Riley can't seem to keep her cheeks from flushing every time he speaks. But when they stumble upon a deserted boarding school, Riley sees that escaping the country is only part of their problem. Together, Riley and Cain figure out that a killer can save a life, and a mother can damn a nation.

RELEASE DATE: April 7th, 2015 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: 

Renee N. Meland lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and two dogs. Her favorite obsessions are Rome, learning new recipes, and exploring the world around her. She is an avid reader of speculative fiction, and believes that telling stories is the best job in the world.

FIND RENEE ONLINE:

Twitter: @reneenmeland

Blog: https://reneenmeland.wordpress.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Renee-N-Melands-Books/311899338826241 

Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/8194285.Renee_N_Meland

EXCERPT:

Sometimes a killer can save a life. In this case that life happened to be mine. I wish I had met him before the whole mess started. Maybe he could have saved more of us.

Maybe he could have saved us all.

I met the man who saved my life exactly one month after he killed his twentieth person. Of course he didn’t call it “murder,” he called it surviving, though sometimes I thought he should try to explain the difference to the people buried in the ground. To me, one label didn’t necessarily cancel out the other.

***

One of my teachers used to say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Trust me, I knew all about it; I called that road “mother.” That teacher never mentioned what the road back was made with. I figured it was because nobody’d ever found one. Hell sort of struck me as a one-way-ticket kind of thing.

The night the Taskforce showed up on our doorstep, my mom screamed. After my brother Aidan’s death, then Dad leaving, hearing her carrying on like a crazy person wasn’t exactly new and different. I didn’t even flinch at first. I figured maybe she was missing my dad all the way to the bottom of a tequila bottle—again.

After a couple minutes though I slammed my copy of Crime and Punishment shut and left my room. I took my sweet time going downstairs to see her, hoping to hold on to the little bit of normal I’d had just seconds earlier. I stopped by the bathroom and grabbed a giant bottle of aspirin. Just in case.

Then I decided I was kidding myself. I knew better. There was no way she wouldn’t need aspirin.

“Riley! Get your stuff! We have to leave right now!” I ducked as Mom greeted me with a scene full of flying paper, jackets, and a few photo albums. They seemed to spin like a paper and plastic tornado, twirling through the air and landing unevenly in a giant duffel bag spread open at her feet. Even in the chaos I paused for a second to wonder how Mom’s hair managed to stay fastened perfectly in place. The image in front of me looked almost ordinary, a beautiful blonde woman in a fitted black skirt, white blouse, and hair pinned back in a bun, with a briefcase resting just inside the door.

Except this woman had thrown half our living room into orbit.

“Mom, what’s going on? What happened?”

Mom grabbed me by the shoulders and stared right into my eyes. “We need to leave right now, okay? I need you to not ask questions and just go pack a bag. You need to just trust me and do what I tell you, okay? And do NOT come downstairs until I say so.” Mom didn’t blink. I remembered the last time she didn’t blink during a whole conversation: When she told me that she and Dad needed to “work on their communication.” I found out later that was Mom-speak for “Dad’s about to abandon us and slam the door for the last time.”

I suddenly wished for the empty tequila bottle.

“You are my life.” Mom kissed my forehead, and I ran up the stairs. I didn’t come down again until I heard the gunshots. At fifteen, I was all too familiar with the sound. A person was never too young to know the snap of a gun anymore. But it was different coming from our house, like a firecracker going off inside my brain.

When I got to the entryway, a pool of blood belonging to a man in a gray suit tried to hold my shoes to the floor. The sticky mess grabbed the soles of my sneakers and smelled like raw steak fresh out of the plastic wrap. I winced as I stepped through it toward my mom. A pink piece of paper rested on top of the pool, slowly flooding with the dark red liquid. Bo, my mom’s best friend, had appeared too. Pistol smoke swirled gently from the tip of his weapon.

It wasn’t the blood, but the paper that made me scream. I felt the color drain from my cheeks, and I wondered if I looked as white as the dead man lying on our floor. “What the hell is going on? Is that pink paper what I think it is?”

Mom ignored my question. I hated being ignored more than anything, especially by her. But since there was a dead body involved, I figured I’d make an exception.

“Oh my GOD—you KILLED him!” Mom screamed, and in all her stick-thin glory started flailing her arms, hitting Bo with the strength of a flightless bird. Her bony fists bounced off his body as if his chest were made of rubber. If it hadn’t been a murder scene, it would have been kind of funny.

“Are you SURE? I saw him push you and I panicked. Maybe he’s just wounded.”

Thank God Bo didn’t panic more often.

Mom took a deep breath and stepped through the blood. She gently picked up the man’s hand and placed two fingers on his wrist. When she released it, her fingertips were stained red. “Yes. He’s dead.” She made a grand gesture, starting at his head and finishing toward his feet. “That’s what dead people look like. What are we going to do?”

My hands shook, partially from fright and partially because no one would tell me why there was a dead guy in the entryway.

Or why he had the pink slip of paper.

Bo grabbed Mom by the shoulders and held her still. “Claire, we’re going to grab Riley and we’re going to get out of here before more people come looking for this guy. I’ll tell you the plan on the way.”

Mom scoffed at him with wide eyes. “Plan? I don’t need your plan. I’m going to go straight to President Gray about this and he’s going to fix it. He has to.”

A twinge of hope rose inside me, working its way up from the tips of my toes to the top of my head. Maybe we wouldn’t have to leave our home after all. Maybe our little visit was just a really complicated, really messy misunderstanding. “Yeah, Mom’s right. I’m sure he’ll fix this. I can’t actually be on the Extraction List, right, Mom?”

“Of course not. There’s no way.”

Mom started toward the door, but Bo stepped in front of her.

“Claire, you saw the paperwork with your own eyes. Gray knows all about this. His signature is there.” He pointed to the guy on the floor. “This guy was going to grab your daughter. We need to go right now.” Bo took Mom by the hand and dragged her out the door.

I hesitated, frozen in the growing pool of red. Sweat broke out on my forehead, and it wasn’t because of the crippling D.C. heat. If I was on the Extraction List, I was supposed to end up like all those other people from my class, the ones who the Taskforce grabbed right from their desks. Those were the ones who disappeared. Since Mom had written the law that the Taskforce was responsible for enforcing, I never thought that I would ever be a target. Politics was all about protecting its stars, and there was no bigger star than my mother.

But that little pink piece of paper could only mean one thing. I forced myself to look down at it. I searched the document, eyes falling on the bottom right corner. It was faded, stretched by the blood into an unnatural shape, but it was there—the President of the United States’ signature.

I grabbed the bag Mom had been trying to pack and zipped it shut. I swung my own bag over my shoulder and followed Mom and Bo out of our house, hoping that I would someday be able to come back. But deep down, I knew we were about to drive away forever.

***

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Cover Reveal: EMPATH by S. Usher Evans

Today I'm super excited to be sharing the cover reveal for S.Usher Evans newest book, EMPATH. First things first, though.

About the Book

Lauren Dailey is in break-up hell.

Stuck between moving on and letting go, she puts on a brave face while crying herself to sleep at night. But when a mysterious voice promises escape from her sadness, she is suddenly transported to a new world. And in this place, the slightest touch pulls her out of her tortured emotions into the mind of another - an empath.

The villagers - sweet Aerona and her mischievous twins, wise Siors, and hunky Cefin - welcome her and the blessings her empath powers bring. But this world is not without its dangers. The Anghenfil, a fire-breathing monster, has haunted the village for decades, and has a taste for empaths. And that mysterious voice promising escape from sadness? It's sounding more like a whisper tinged with smoke and embers.

Preorder:

• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble
• iBooks

Sneak Peek 

"There," Cefin said, pointing to a pile of rocks that leaned against the side of the mountain. "That is where I found you."

"I was under there?" Lauren breathed. It was obviously a cave-in, and the boulders were thick and heavy. If any of them had fallen in the wrong place, she would have been crushed.

It was a miracle she wasn't crushed.

She approached the pile and saw where Cefin must have dug her out. Seeing the size of the rocks, knowing how close she had come to not getting out, she felt a little sorry for being so angry with him. Although he was being an jerk right now, she wasn't sure she ever thanked him for saving her life.

"Hey," Lauren said, tossing him a sideways glance. "Thanks for saving me."

"Just hurry up," he huffed, pulling his spear off of his back. "The Anghenfil could be in any one of these caves."

"The right response is 'you're welcome'…" She walked up to the pile and began pushing aside any of the rocks she could, looking for anything strange. She tossed a fist-sized stone behind her and gasped.

"There's a cave here!" she called to Cefin, who was standing with his spear in his hand and not helping her whatsoever.

She sniffed and began tugging at a big rock, hoping that if she could move it a little bit, it would dislodge other ones, creating a larger hole, one that she could slip through. With a heave, she pushed with all of her might and it broke free, tumbling down into the blackness and taking Lauren with it.

She landed in a heap in the dark, cool cave, coughing up dust and other particles. A small halo of light formed a circle on the ground, but didn't offer any other illumination in the cave. Pushing herself to her feet, she walked over to the hole and peered out, spying Cefin standing at attention.

"I'm fine, thanks for asking."

"Hurry up," Cefin snapped, his eyes glued to the skies.

"Yeah, yeah," Lauren rolled her eyes, disappearing into the darkness.

She stumbled around for a moment, feeling at the floor with her feet for anything that would give her a clue as to how she got here. Maybe she just needed to walk to the end of the cave and she'd wake up back in her own bed. She kicked the ground until she found the wall of the cave, placing her hands on the chilly stone to guide her. She kept to the wall, planting her feet firmly with every step to keep her balance.

Her foot caught on something and she fell, but not onto the hard ground, onto something firm…

And scaly.

In the darkness, a gigantic red eye opened.

She gasped, fear gripping her as she scrambled for the small pinhole in the distance that was the edge of the cave. "CEFIN!" she screamed, her voice echoing in the cave.

The monster was moving, and Lauren saw a flash of bright fire, illuminating the black body the size of an elephant.

She screamed and ran faster, hating herself for ever coming up here. She flung herself at the small hole, wriggling out as fast as she could. Cefin's spear was out, concern on his face.

"Lauren, quiet down, you'll wake the—"

"TOO LATE!" she screamed, pulling herself out of the cave and running past him as fast as her feet could carry her. "RUN!"


And now, for the cover...

Don't forget to preorder!!

Amazon

Barnes and Noble

iBooks

About the Author

S. Usher Evans is an author, blogger, and witty banter aficionado. Born in a small, suburban town in northwest Florida, she was seventeen before she realized that not all beach sand is white. From a young age, she has always been a long-winded individual, first verbally (to the chagrin of her ever-loving parents) and then eventually channeled into the many novels that dotted her Windows 98 computer in the early 2000s. After high school, she got the hell outta dodge and went to school near the nation's capital, where she somehow landed jobs at National Geographic, Discovery Channel, and the British Broadcasting Corporation, capping off her educational career with delivering the commencement address to 20,000 of her closest friends. She determined she'd goofed off long enough with that television nonsense and got a "real job" as an IT consultant. Yet she continued to write, developing 20 page standard operating procedures and then coming home to write novels about bounty hunters, teenage magic users, and other nonsense. After a severe quarter life crisis at age twenty-seven, she decided to finally get a move on and share those novels with the world in hopes that she will never have to write another SOP again.

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