As I mentioned briefly on my home page two weeks ago, I have a big event coming up that I hope all my friends and fans will participate in. It’s called “The Gala International Blog Tour,” taking in some fifty blogs from Nov. 1-Nov 30. My publicist does all the work setting it up, but I am plenty busy, because I plan to have all four of the books we are featuring updated and with gorgeous new Orson Whitney Press covers. You have probably seen the new Cankered Roots cover, but I will show it again. For the Gala, we are featuring Cankered Roots(first in my mystery series), Arthurian Omen (stand-alone Suspense taking place in Oxford and Wales), The Last Waltz: A Novel of Love and War (my 2009 Whitney Award winner about Austria from 1913-1938–an Historical Romance), and of course The Only Way to Paradise (my new women’s fiction about four women traveling in Italy).
To get the ball rolling, here is the new cover and a writing sample from Cankered Roots:
Design And Art Credit David P. Vandagriff
The Chicago Skyway had to be the weirdest place on earth. Breathing as little of the yellowish air as possible, Alex gripped the steering wheel and glanced through her car window at the factory-scarred landscape below. A sudden nostalgia for Scotland pierced her, as it did all too often.
High summer in Inverary was the very best time. Against the sapphire waters of Loch Fyne, the little white-walled town sparkled on the occasional sunny day. Sweetpeas, snapdragons, and pansies danced indiscriminately through the tiny flower garden on each side of the solid black door. Fresh from its daily shower, the earth smelled sharply of peat as Alex weeded the lettuces and collected the writing brown worms for night fishing. In the long summer twilight, she and Stewart donned mackintoshes, stashed a thermos of hot chocolate with their fishing poles, and ventured out in their tiny boat. The stillness, the whispering, ghostly magic of the loch at midnight . . .
. . . was a million miles away. Reality: She was stranded in time between Stewart’s death and her own, suspended at this moment above a brutalized landscape, on her way to the last place on earth she wanted to go. Squaring her shoulders, she told herself, “I am going home.”
Next Saturday, we will be introduced to Briggie (everyone’s favorite grandmother) and her deer rifle.
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