STOLEN OBSESSION BLOG TOUR - INTERVIEW WITH MARLENE M. BELL + GIVEAWAY

Interview with author Marlene M. Bell

What do you hope readers take with them after they’ve read Stolen Obsession? 

There are many morals in this book. Here are the top three: First, you are stronger than you think you are. Shown by Annalisse’s trials with personal loss and helping those around her. Secondly, keep those around you close to your heart because you never know when they can be taken away. Annalisse experiences a great deal of personal loss. Third, judge people not by what others say about them, but by how they truly are. Give people a chance to redeem any negative qualities that come from hearsay. Annalisse learns this with Alec Zavos, her love interest in Stolen Obsession. The tabloids paint him with a broad womanizer brush, and Annalisse takes her time deciding for herself who Alec is and if he can be trusted.  

How long does it take you to write a book?

Stolen Obsession took 8 years from start to finish due to the learning process. I’m working toward publishing the 2nd book, Spent Identity in 2019. I’m at 70,000 words so far!

Where did the idea for Stolen Obsession come from? What was the inspiration? 

The main character, Annalisse is a lot like me. Through 8 drafts of the story, the focus changed dramatically. The genre moved from Women’s Fiction to Romantic Mystery. I wouldn’t say the story came from one inspiration because of the long learning process. It has naturally morphed into the final version through plot changes and tons of edits.

Describe Stolen Obsession using seven words.

Ancient Curse Collides With Three Jewelry Pieces

What is your work schedule like when you're writing?

I write every day, even if it’s a few hundred words. First thing in the morning after the sheep are fed. By 10 a.m. until 4 p.m. on a good day. On very good days, I can knock out a single chapter in 4-5 hours of work. 1-2 chapters each week with editing along the way. I’m a constant editor, especially since using the Hemmingway App.

What do you like to do when you're not writing?

When I can, I stop and read other authors to keep the creative juices flowing. Spending time with the lambs in their pastures with a camera along is also worthwhile as a pick-me-up when words clog my mind and are disjointed on the page. If my writing stinks, there’s no sense in staying at the keyboard. It’s nice to have options like photography, drawing, painting and of course, sheep.

What do you think makes a good story?

It’s all about the reader turning pages. Whether I write mystery, suspense or the occasional love scene, it’s important to leave a scene to hang with an important question in the reader’s mind. The goal is to create a page-turner by whatever means possible.

Book Details

Book Title: Stolen Obsession by Marlene M. Bell
Category: Adult Fiction; 284 pages
Genre: Romantic Mystery / Thriller
Publisher: Ewephoric Publishing
Release date: March 20, 2018
Tour dates: Sept 10 to 28, 2018
Content Rating: R (Small bit of language and one detailed sex scene)

PERRY PRETE: "DON'T BE SO FULL OF YOURSELF THAT YOU THINK YOUR WRITING IS A GIFT TO MANKIND"

At the reading group - guest post by Perry Prete 

I was asked to speak at a writers’ group last summer held at one of the local nursing homes. I was expecting a group of retired seniors sitting in recliners sipping tea and eating biscuits. Instead, I was greeted by a nice young group of men and women who looked liked cliché writers from a 1970’s hardcover jacket. One of the men wore a tweed jacket with elbow patches and had a bushy beard. If it wasn’t for the no smoking policy, I suspect he would have had been smoking a pipe as well.

I went around the table and found that not one of them had any works published which I found very odd. They asked a lot of valid and poignant questions until one of them asked if I had been paid for my writing.

I replied that I was paid for every piece of published work and expected to be paid for my time.

 The woman who appeared to the leader of the group was taken aback and said writing was an art and it should be a privilege to have my work out there for people to enjoy.

Q/A BOOK REVIEW: THE CURSED WIFE BY PAMELA HARTSHORNE

What genre does the book belong to?

It’s a historical fiction thriller, a genre Pamela Hartshorne is familiar with – and very good at -  since she has already dealt with it in some of her  previous novels, which I have reviewed here at FLY HIGH!

What’s the historical  setting of the novel?

The story takes place in Elizabethan London between 1562 and 1590.

Can you briefly sum up the plot without giving away too much?

Well, this is what you find in the book blurb. I hope it is enough to tickle your curiosity: Mary is content with her life as wife to Gabriel Thorne, a wealthy merchant in Elizabethan London. 

She loves her husband and her family, is a kind mistress to the household and is well-respected in the neighbourhood. She does her best to forget that as a small girl she was cursed for causing the death of a vagrant child, a curse that predicts that she will hang. She tells herself that she is safe.

But Mary's whole life is based on a lie. She is not the woman her husband believes her to be, and when one rainy day she ventures to Cheapside, the past catches up with her and sets her on a path that leads her to the gibbet and the fulfilment of the curse.

MOVIE REVIEW - A CURE FOR WELLNESS

        

A cure for wellness sounds rather contradictory. Nevertheless, it does exist. At least in a movie by Gore Verbinski,  which this article is going to be about.

It is the story of a young and ambitious worker of a New York company who is given an important mission to visit a forsaken health center in Swiss Alps in order to get his boss back out of the prolonged vacation. He warned everyone that he is not going to be back by means of a strange letter. It makes it to where everyone worries in the company and which is why a man was sent there to solve this problem. There are rich and powerful people having a rest, stressed due to hectic life for a treatment with a water with curative powers.

On arriving and spending some time within its walls, he realizes that miracle-working procedures of spa-saloon are not what they seem to be. While the main character begins to unwrap scary secrets of the place, his sound mind undergoes a checkout for stiffness. Despite all the attempts, Lockhart is not allowed to meet his boss due to some reasons.

Failed to accomplish the mission, he is going to go back to New York but it looks like now he suffers from the same weird illness, which is the reason why all the rest guests of the center are there wishing to get their dose of the cure. With each new day, hopes of Lockhart to be cured and returned home are fading away. Instead, he has thrilling hallucinations and borderland between fact and fiction disappears.

RAGE BLOG TOUR - A SPECIAL EXCERPT FROM A GREAT THRILLER

... dark – and darkly humorous – European crime fiction at its best... (Reader Dad Blog)

Rage is a book by Poland’s number one crime writer, Zygmunt Miłoszewski, which has been released just yesterday in English.  It became one of the bestselling books in Polish literary history when it came out last year.

Zygmunt Miłoszewski is the biggest name in Polish crime fiction, his addictive, gritty novels have been compared to the Scandinavian crime masters. The first two novels Prosecutor Szacki series (A Gain of Truth and Entanglement) have been made into films and BBC Radio 4 are currently in the process of dramatizing Grain of Truth for radio. His books have been translated into over 13 different languages. 

Here’s a special excerpt for you,  readers of FLY HIGH! 

Chapter Two

For a while Szacki was lost. He remembered Olsztyn’s Warszawska Avenue as a wide road leading out of town past the university, but it turned out to have an uglier sister—a short extension lined with scruffy little tenements right next to the Old Town. He had to turn left by Jan’s Bridge. The hospital was located opposite something that called itself the “regional beer center.”

He showed the guard his ID and found a parking spot between the buildings. This had once been the German garrison hospital, probably of lesser importance, as the buildings of immortal red brick looked much smaller and more modest than the neo-Gothic blocks of the city hospital. Part of it looked neglected, and part had been renovated, with a modern interior that was nicely integrated with the German architecture. The place had the atmosphere of a building site, arising from the fact that Olsztyn’s university medical faculty had only been up and running for a few years. In a short time a squalid military hospital had been transformed into a clinical marvel. Szacki had been to see Żenia’s mother here last year and had realized that on the whole it had quite a human dimension, compared with the various medical monstrosities he had seen in his career. That had been during a hot spring, when the chestnut trees were flowering among the buildings, and the old brick walls exuded a pleasant chill.

BACK FROM HELL - ROOM & THIRTEEN

I happened to watch the film Room and start watching the BBC 3 drama series Thirteen on the same day and the similarity of the topic they dealt with inevitably struck me. Both stories tell of young women coming back from hell. The hell of being abducted and taken captives  by manipulating, devious bastards. 

In both stories the focus is on the psychological aspect of being back to an ordinary life, the stress and the distress of being unable to fit or cope any longer. In both cases viewers delve into the protagonists' traumatic homecoming learning how difficult it is to victims to go back to normality. Very little or nothing is actually revealed of the horrors of their respective periods of captivity as victims of sexual abuse so, don't expect a claustrophobic, haunting experience while watching, if you decide to. It could be much more an occasion to see our ordinary lives in a boundless world and in total control with different eyes. 

BOOK BLAST & GIVEAWAY - NIGHT CHILL BY JEFF GUNHUS

Killer Within by Jeff Gunhus

Arnie Milhouse is a murderer. A millionaire with dozens of kills in his past and no one the wiser. But when his name surfaces in connection with the death of a D.C. call girl, Arnie knows it’s only a matter of time before the FBI puts the pieces together. As he makes plans to disappear and leave his life in Annapolis behind forever, he meets a beautiful, mysterious woman who takes an interest in him. The perfect final victim. He can’t believe his luck. Only luck has nothing to do with it. Allison McNeil has returned to Annapolis, a city that she promised herself she would never come back to, not while the cruel memories of her time at the United States Naval Academy still haunt her. But she’s willing to do just about anything to get close to Arnie, even if it means having to face down the demons of her past. Her plans work and soon she and Arnie find themselves locked in a dangerous dance of seduction and betrayal. But Arnie isn’t the only one who carries a secret and the dark truth about Allison McNeil makes a final confrontation between them inevitable. Neither of them know it, but they're on a collision course that only one of them will survive.

Amazon

MEET SIMON LEWIS, WRITER.

I’m very pleased to introduce my guest today: British novelist and screenwriter, Simon Lewis. I’m reading his novel GO these days and it is such a gripping thriller! My review of the book is coming soon, meanwhile, meet its brilliant author, please.

Simon Lewis was born in Wales in 1971 and GO is his first novel (1999), a travel thriller about backpackers, which he wrote  in a village in the Himalayas. It has been translated into German, Italian, Turkish and Swedish so far.

His second novel, BAD TRAFFIC (2008), is a crime thriller about people smugglers, featuring jaded Chinese cop, Inspector Jian. The book has been published in the UK and the US and translated into German, French, Swedish, Italian, Japanese and Turkish. In 2009 it was nominated for the LA Times Book of the Year Award and for the French SNCF prize for crime fiction.

His third travel thriller, BORDER RUN, was published in April 2012 in the US and the UK.

 As a screenwriter, Simon has worked for Potboiler Films, Cloud 8 and Channel 4 and has 3 movies with incredible International casts  in post-  or in production in 2014!  Read the interview, welcome Simon Lewis  at FLY HIGH and discover more about him and his work.

Are you ready for Halloween? The Rise of Zombie "Semi-Historical" Literature: A Growing Popularity with Students and Spook Thrillers

(by guest blogger Caroline Ross)

Traditionally the "living dead" doesn’t move with great speed or finesse, but in the book publishing industry Zombies have taken off like the speed of light. Over the past few years, book stores have displayed an increasing number of zombie-related historical fiction that has seemed to do quite well with the youth—so much in fact that some titles are even appearing on required reading lists at select universities. But of course you don't need to be a student to enjoy them. If you're looking for a few good historical reads with a satirical, dark twist then check out some of these titles just in time for Halloween.

Pride, Prejudice and Zombies

Just like the title sounds, this parody piece is a smashup of the classic 1813 Jane Austen novel Pride and Prejudice with sprinkles of brain-eating zombies, courtesy of author Seth Grahame-Smith. It might seem a little bizarre to picture a zombie infested 19^th century England and a zombie-slayer Mr. Darcy, but the story line actually works. Not only does Grahame-Smith do a stellar job at creating an alternative universe within a classic story such as Pride and Prejudice, but he's also successful at bringing out the laughs—this book is funny with a capital F. (2009)