Book Brief: The Descendant

The Descendant
by Kelley Grealis
Genre: Paranormal Fantasy
Word count: 85,600

Allison Carmichael wakes from a car wreck with no memory of the past three years. She doesn’t recall her husband’s death or how she alienated her friends, and she definitely doesn’t remember anything about her new boyfriend Vincent Drake – a charismatic man with a penchant for rare and unique possessions. In fact, the only things familiar to Allison are her seemingly common ailments – insomnia, lack of appetite, erratic body temperature – which have gone undiagnosed and are worsening.

But Vincent knows exactly who, and what, Allison is – a mortal descendant of the first vampire. He is a vampire who has watched over Allison and her ancestors since the biblical times of Cain and Abel ensuring their secret is kept. Once he realizes Allison’s symptoms are accelerating and transforming her, he’ll stop at nothing to have her.

Allison discovers that she is a descendant and the first of her kind to exhibit signs of vampirism. She must decide between risking her mortal death if she cannot control her symptoms or fully transforming into a vampire and damning her soul for eternity. A decision made even more difficult when Allison discovers that Vincent has manipulated her life, and everyone in it, so that he can have the one thing no one else in the world has – the first descendant-turned-vampire.

THE DESCENDANT – A Vampire Tale of Biblical Proportions

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Book Brief: Don’t Tell Anyone

Don’t Tell Anyone
by Laurie Boris
Genre: Contemporary fiction
Word count: Approx. 65,000

Landing in the emergency room nearly unconscious from pneumonia, sixty-five-year-old Estelle Trager is forced to admit that she’s been living with potentially malignant tumors in both breasts…for five years. Now her son Adam and his wife, Liza, know about her deadly secret. Adam is hurt and outraged to learn that his mother had intended to take this to her grave. But Estelle, who watched her mother and grandmother suffer from breast cancer in the days when no one dared speak its name, has no intention of putting her family or herself through the horrors of cancer treatment. Estelle decides there is only one solution: ask Liza, the thirty-three-year-old daughter-in-law she once called a godless hippie raised by wolves, to kill her.

A horrified Liza refuses and keeps the request—among other things—a secret from her furious husband. But she tells his charismatic younger brother, Charlie, a close friend from college with whom she shares her own confidences, despite Adam’s serious case of sibling rivalry. Armed with nutrition textbooks and her neighbor, a savvy nurse, can Liza win over her mother-in-law and convince her to consider other options before the cancer, the secrets, and Estelle’s determination to end her life win out?

This book is available from Amazon, Smashwords, and Barnes & Noble.

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Book Brief: Beauty Rising

Beauty Rising
by Mark W Sasse
Genre: General/Literary Fiction
Word count: 61,000

“My heart sank. I dumped my father’s ashes in the heart of communist Vietnam – over a thousand miles from the death of his comrades – over a thousand miles from the smile of that girl. How could I have been so stupid?”

Only the bumbling, overweight, thirtyish, stay-at-home Martin Kinney could have mistakenly flubbed his dying father’s request with such gusto. This thousand mile mistake awakens the ghosts of long-held family secrets and puts Martin on a fateful course with an unlikely romantic interest – a young, beautiful, yet troubled Vietnamese woman named My Phuong.

With its cross-cultural setting and unlikely romance, the 61,000 word novel Beauty Rising creates a powerful, unique voice in today’s literature. In a swift-moving, dialogue-driven prose which is funny, honest, tragic and unpredictable, Beauty Rising explores the depths of culture, family, and love as the Vietnam War, a generation removed, continues to hang on the periphery of society, cursing families and causing destruction.

This book is available from Amazon.

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Book Brief: Dead Blow Hammer

Dead Blow Hammer
by Steve George
Genre: Mystery, suspense
Word Count: 52,000

Jim Mann is a homebody. While he trades grain commodities out of his house in a western suburb of Minneapolis, he spends most of his time helping his neighbors. If they ask, he helps. If they don’t ask, he offers. Everyone on Barbosa Street calls him Handy.

It would have been a peaceful life if he hadn’t trusted his neighbors. If he hadn’t traded home repair work for Bo Stinson’s accounting expertise. If he hadn’t fallen for Gustav Olson’s long-lost daughter. If he hadn’t, with true DIY stubbornness, tried to do it all himself.

Dead Blow Hammer tells the story of how one misstep—in this case, the first step on the stairway to Angie Stinson’s bedroom—drew Handy Mann into a life-or-death struggle with evil he never imagined could be so close at hand, a struggle he will need every tool in his tool box to survive.

This book is available from Amazon US and Amazon UK.

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