Meet Susanne Lakin

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Innocent Little Crimes was inspired by Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None (sometimes called Ten Little Indians). In my psychological suspense novels, I prefer to kill my characters off psychologically rather than literally. To me, words and actions can just as powerfully destroy us completely as physical harm, which is what I intended to show in Innocent Little Crimes.
The key point of the novel, as hinted at in its title, is that we all commit “innocent little crimes” against others each day. Just one hurtful word can destroy a marriage or ruin a person’s reputation and send them into despair. Piled up, small hurtful words and actions can have a cumulative effect. I also wanted to explore the theme of revenge, and how it can eat away in us, and never brings any measure of satisfaction. Only forgiveness and letting go of blame and anger can free us.
If you are intrigued by this topic, I hope you will read my award-winning novel Someone to Blame. I think you can tell, by the title, what the theme of this book is.
I’ve been writing novels for twenty-five years, and when I’m not writing psychological suspense, I write fantasy. I currently have a seven-book fantasy series out (the first four books have been published so far) called The Gates of Heaven, and they are a collection of deep, rich fairy tales for adults, full of metaphor, evocative language, and happy endings. I suppose I alternate writing fantasy and suspense to ease up on the tension! I like to throw in a few talking pigs and feisty rumphogs to liven up the action!
I love to hear from my readers, so come find me on Twitter and Facebook or visit my website! I also write a blog for writers to help them in their writing journey: Live Write Thrive, and I work professionally in the US book publishing industry as a copyeditor and writing coach. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area (Santa Cruz) and have two daughters (grown), a wonderful husband of thirty years, three persnickety cats, and a very BIG Labrador retriever named Coaltrane. 

Meet Jeani Rector

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Words have always conjured up pictures in Jeani Rector’s mind. From the exotic locations of H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, to the social inequalities of S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, to the inner torments of Edgar Allen Poe’s work; all made lasting impressions since she read them as a child.

She knew that a story could transport the reader into realms outside the norm; if a story was especially well-written, it could absorb a person and create a compulsion to finish it. A well-written story holds the promise that the very next page could deliver the mystery the reader seeks, yet instead it continues to tantalize and withhold the prize until the very last page. A well-written story grabs the reader in a relentless grip until the end.

When Stephen King made his debut in the 1970s, Jeani was introduced to the excitement of horror and she devoured books in the genre. The horror she read was not evil or wicked, but instead it felt like riding a roller-coaster: a thrilling ride to be sure, but one could get off safely when the ride was over.

In the early years of the millennium, Jeani Rector began writing stories of her own and submitting them to horror magazines with some success. But when the economic crash of 2008 occurred, many horror magazines went out of business. When even the renowned online magazine The Harrow went on hiatus, Jeani realized that someone had to start a magazine to take the place of all those that were folding.

Who would be that someone? Why, she would.

Jeani Rector is the founder and editor of The Horror Zine and has had her stories featured in magazines such as Aphelion, Midnight Street, Strange Weird and Wonderful, Dark River Press, Macabre Cadaver, Ax Wound, Horrormasters, Morbid Outlook, Horror in Words, Black Petals, 63Channels, Death Head Grin, Hackwriters, Bewildering Stories, Ultraverse, and others.

And now Jeani has taken all the deliciously dark delights from The Horror Zine and placed them into the book titled WHAT FEARS BECOME, available on paperback and Kindle, and published by Imajin Books.

From horror masterminds Bentley Little, Ramsey Campbell, Graham Masterton, Joe R. Lansdale, Elizabeth Massie, Piers Anthony, Melanie Tem, Cheryl Kaye Tardif, Scott Nicholson, Conrad Williams, Simon Clark and a host of other respected authors, poets and artists comes WHAT FEARS BECOME, a terrifying collection of bone-chilling, nail-biting horror that is sure to keep you awake until all hours of the night.

“Each spine-tingling chiller takes the reader into the depths of eerie imaginations.” ― Fangoria

“This anthology is like a fearful breath from an ancient crypt; enter if you dare!” ― Midnight Street Magazine

“There’s nothing like a good scary story, except a lot of them, collected in an anthology from some of our top horror/suspense writers. So read one and be scared, or read a few and be good and scared, or read the whole book and lock all the doors and stay up all night listening to the house creak…They’re terrific.” ― William Martin, New York Times bestselling author of BACK BAY

Don’t miss WHAT FEARS BECOME at http://amzn.to/REGTau/

You can visit The Horror Zine at http://www.thehorrorzine.com

Meet Halli Lilburn

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The Art of Lying
Good story telling is a marvellous fascination.  As readers we enjoy escaping our mundane lives and entering an entertaining world of the imagination.  We want to participate in the mystery, adventure or romance without it affecting our reality.  We like being swept off of our feet, thrown some danger in our face and be wooed by a beautiful hero.  At the same time, we don’t like being cheated, we don’t like our favourite characters to die and we don’t want to realize the story isn’t real.  So we implore authors to fool us.  We ask them to lie to us, but we want to be unaware of the lie.

Authors have to be many things besides literary scholar.  They have to be a promoter, editor, researcher, fairy godmother and evil stepmother.  They have to get you to love their characters, then do something really mean to them before redeeming them from the black pit.  They have to get you to love them, hate them, fear them, and then love them again.  They have to hook you in, pull you through treacherous waters and place you safely on the shore.

My newest YA novel “Shifters” released through Imajin Publishing has some farfetched ideas like reality shifting and transformation along with some very real threats to our existence such as human cloning and the misuse of natural selection.  Of course, it is all speculative, but I wanted to convey these possibilities in a believable way.  The characters are just regular people who find themselves in a terrible situation.  In this way they find hidden strengths they did not know they had.

It was challenging to portray a science fiction world within a very real one.  There isn’t anything to research on such a subject and I’ve always been told to write what I know.  So I invented a way to lie to myself by adding an element that eliminated the need for research.  I wanted to create four different worlds within the same book so I shift realities.  As long as I explained myself, I was off the hook.

Readers take a great risk every time they crack open a book because it might change their life.  Like committing to a long term relationship, the last thing we want or expect is betrayal.  We give our hearts to another and hope they take good care of it.  We give our time and emotional stability to an author when we read their works.  Literally we are saying, “Here is my mind, teach me about your world.  Here is my heart, break it and make me believe it.”

Meet Robin Winter

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I wrote the book to entertain, but that’s never enough, I also wanted to provoke, to inspire and incite. I lived in Nigeria, grew up there, saw the violence of coups and demonstrations, the strength of its incredibly varied peoples. Evacuated by the civil war, I saw Nigeria torn apart while I lived a safe cold exile in New Hampshire.

Time passed, I went to college and met amazing women, and had and have still their friendship. So in this novel I spin together a theme of expatriate women in friendship plunged into war, and how the things they bring from the heart of their pasts twist everything that follows in the light of day. My point is not that women are as good as men, it’s that we are as good as ourselves, and gender is incidental. So in this story, we have women with and without men. However, a man is never the meaning of any of my womens' lives.

Then there is the political aspect of a white expatriate writing about the most powerful black African nation. I hope I do this humanly. I’ve read obsessively on Nigeria, lived there, smelled and tasted it, and I have loved it. But there's no going back and Nigeria doesn't belong to me. This is one of the other themes pervading every page, the push-me pull-you adoration of a superb and vibrant land, and the inevitable parting from it. There are the conflicts of feeling a presumed superiority to native peoples, struggling with the eventual realization that those feelings are contextual and all the strength of one kind of society cannot be transposed or infused into another. There's no simple way to help, there are only human individual ways that must be rooted in humility.

I remember the Nigerian Civil War. The Biafran War. Not many Americans do. It was short, it was messy. I was an evacuee watching TV in New Hampshire, glued to those images of starving babies the newscasters warned ‘might be disturbing’, but my parents felt that they could not edit what I knew even if I was ten years old. I believe they were right, and this novel is my answer.

A Purse to Die For by Melodie Campbell & Cynthia St-Pierre FREE August 18-20

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A Purse to Die For by Melodie Campbell & Cynthia St-Pierre

What’s more treacherous than navigating a pack of society matrons at a designer sale? 
Stalking a killer…
When fashionista and television celeb Gina Monroe goes home to attend the funeral of her late grandmother, the last thing she expects to encounter is murder. And the reading of the will is anything but fashionable as unanswered questions arise. Who is the dead woman in the woods behind the family house? And why is she dressed in Milano designer clothes?
With help from her cousin Tony and Detective Rob Dumont, Gina investigates the not-so-model citizens around her. When another murder occurs, a pattern slowly emerges and Gina wonders if her grandmother's death wasn't so natural after all.
Book Details:
FREE Kindle edition - August 18-20
Editorial Reviews:
"Page-turning pace, fascinating characters, sly wit, and a plot that will keep you guessing." —Janet Bolin, Agatha-nominated author of Dire Threads
"Fast-paced suspense, charismatic characters, and dialogue to die for. Brisk plotting with a deadly twist at the end." —Lou Allin, author of She Felt No Pain
"Campbell and St-Pierre have style in the way they present, develop and portray their characters. This novel grabs hold of you from the get go with its cast of wacky and malicious relations. A delightful novel with complex relationships and a series of shocking secrets. The authors have a knack for wonderful turns of phrase, which are one reason why this novel is a delight to read. Then there is one mystery after another and suspense building to an unforgettable conclusion. Campbell and St-Pierre create a delectable concoction of savoury and unsavoury characters, sex, delicious humour and suspense. This winning combination can't help but delight readers." —Garry Ryan, Lambda-nominated author of Malabarista
"An old fashioned murder with modern sensibility; stylish characterization, and delicious plot; artistically woven." —Rebekkah Adams, author of Front Porch Mannequins
Available at:

Meet Melodie Campbell

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Why a Mystery Writer?  It’s the Maze.
 A horrible crime occurs.  Murder most foul.  The police are stumped, and it looks like the criminal will get away with it.  Then along comes an amateur detective who follows a set of clues, and with supreme logic, solves the mystery.  Justice is served.

I want to say I write mysteries and suspense because of a deep-seated need to see justice done in the world.  I really want to say that.  But it’s not true.

I love to read and write mysteries because they are clever.  They force me to use my brain.  Who is the killer?  Can I come to the same conclusion as the detective, at the same time, following the same trail of clues?

Traditional mystery novels are like a chess game.  In writing the novel A Purse to Die For, I discovered that mysteries must be plotted carefully, strategically.  It is a convention of mystery writing that the reader receives the information at the same time as the detective.  Anything else is considered cheating. Clues must lead to the solving of the crime.  The reader must be able to go back and see the trail, once he/she has finished reading the ending.  But the ending can’t be too obvious – that’s no fun.  So it’s the clever mix of laying several trails like those of a maze that intrigues me as both a writer and reader.  The trick: only one leads to the fateful conclusion.

A good mystery with a bang-up ending – logical, but original – gives me a kick like no other book.  I marvel at the cleverness of the author.  In short mystery fiction, I devour that twist at the end.  In my own short fiction, you can count on a twist ending.  

I love the wonderful delight that comes from stumping the reader…in making them say “Ah! Didn’t see that coming.”  I’ve given them a challenge, and hopefully at the end, a smile.  There is no greater high.


Melodie Campbell is the author of 40 short stories and three novels, including A Purse to Die For, co-authored with Cynthia St-Pierre.  She has won 6 awards for short fiction, and was a finalist for both the 2012 Derringer Awards and the Arthur Ellis Awards.
www.melodiecampbell.com

Meet E. Van Logh

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Humor Me

When I was a boy growing up in the Bronx I never thought of myself as a funny person.  Oh sure, I liked making my older brother laugh with a well-timed arm fart, but my early writing was dramatic, almost melodramatic.  As an undergrad I’d read Hubert Selby Jr.’s Last Exit To Brooklyn, an epithet-filled tale about the horrors of living in 1950s Brooklyn.   I decided these were the kind of stories I wanted to tell.  The difference was I wanted to tell my stories about growing up in the hard-scrabble streets of the South Bronx. 

I set out writing humorless tales about the underbelly of society.  I gave one of my gut-wrenching tales to my brother, and as he read it he started to laugh.  ”Hey, what’s so funny?”  I demanded.  “This,” he said pointing to the pages in his hand.  I loved making my brother laugh. However, I did not like making him laugh when I wasn’t trying.  I was insulted.  “Why is it funny?” I asked.  “Because this doesn’t sound like you.  This isn’t your life.”  I admit I had taken a few liberties, like my father holding up a liquor store at gunpoint and getting thrown in jail for trying to support his family.  My father was a cook.  And let’s face it, a cook isn’t nearly as exciting as a gun toting papa.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was on the road to writing humor.
Humor has served me well.  I’ve written for award winning sitcoms The Cosby Show and Even Stevens. With the first novel in my Hollyweird series: The Zombie Always Knocks Twice, there’s a good dose of humor, but is blended with exciting action scenes and drama.   This time I am not trying to prove anything to myself.  I am just trying to tell a good story.  I hope you enjoy it.

To learn more about me and my novels find me at http://evanlowe.com/
You can follow me on Twitter @evanlowe
Or like my Facebook fan page at http://www.facebook.com/author.e.vanlowe

Twitter Party celebrates Summer Sizzles with Imajin Books

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Today from 10 AM to 10 PM EST, join us on Twitter at www.twitter.com/imajinbooks for a 3-day Twitter Party. We're hoping to give away lots of prizes--ebooks, paperbacks, gift cards, maybe even a Kindle, if we get lots of participants.

All you need to do is send out a tweet using either @imajinbooks AND #ImajinAuthors in your tweet.

Ever wanted to ask a publisher or published authors a question? Here's your chance. Your tweets can include questions about writing, publishing, life as a writer etc.

And if you can't think of a question, simply tweet about our Twitter Party.

Tweet Examples:

Check out the Twitter Party going on @ImajinBooks! #IMajinAuthors are giving away ebooks, paperbacks etc! Instructions at www.imajinbooks.blogspot.com

Follow @ImajinBooks for chances to win free ebooks, paperbacks etc from #ImajinAuthors. Twitter Party Aug 15-17, 10-10 EST www.imajinbooks.blogspot.com 

Want free ebooks & paperbacks? Check out the #ImajinAuthors Twitter Party going on @ImajinBooks! Instructions at www.imajinbooks.blogspot.com

The more you tweet using @ImajinBooks AND #ImajinAuthors, the more chances you have to win!

Meet Luke Murphy

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Why did I write DEAD MAN’S HAND?

I’ve always had a passion for books, which stems from a family of avid readers.

My father and sisters read everything from novels to biographies and, although my mother died when I was young (cancer), my memories of her include a stack of Danielle Steele novels on her bedside table.
           
There is not a single moment when the idea for DEAD MAN’S HAND came to life, but circumstances over the years that led to this story: trips to Vegas, hockey injuries, love of football and gambling. Everything I’ve done in my life, every job I’ve held, every book I’ve read somehow contributed to my novel.

I’ve been fortunate to have obtained a number of jobs in different fields: professional hockey player, sports columnist, radio journalist—all have played a part in the conception of DEAD MAN’S HAND.

I’ve been a fan of thrillers since I was a kid…back to the Hardy Boys. I’ve been reading this genre for decades, so it only made sense that I write what I love.

I love Las Vegas! But for the glitz and glamour that is Vegas, I wanted to explore the underworld, of that with which people aren’t aware. My frequent visits proved that Vegas has a mystique with unlimited potential—the perfect backdrop for my story.

My protagonist, Calvin Watters, is not a ‘stereotypical’ good guy—a sadistically violent African-American debt-collector who was once a rising football star.
With the sports connection similar to my own, I could relate to Calvin’s attitude on overcoming setbacks after serious injury.

DEAD MAN’S HAND became real from mixing the events of my life, taking advantage of experts in their field and adding my wild imagination.

DEAD MAN’S HAND, although it has an autobiographical element, suggests how far (to Las Vegas’ underworld) the imagination can take readers and a novelist. My goal was to please anyone who loves thrillers, sports, or a walk on the wilder side of Vegas.

Luke Murphy
DEAD MAN'S HAND - Fall 2012
www.authorlukemurphy.com
www.authorlukemurphy.com/blog
www.facebook.com/pages/Author-Luke-Murphy/268343729930467
www.twitter.com/#!/AuthorLMurphy

Chasing Clovers by Kat Flannery FREE August 15-17

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Mail order bride, Livy Green, is desperate to escape the memories of her past. John Taylor will never love another woman again, but his children need a mother. Will they learn to trust each other, or will their pasts interfere?
Longing to escape the awful memories and the saloon she once sang in, Livy Green lies about her past so she can be a wife to John Taylor and mother to his two young children. Overwhelmed by the task, she struggles to put her resentment aside and love them as her own.
John loved his first wife and is still heartbroken over the loss, but he needs a mother for his children. When his distant and unfriendly mail order bride arrives, he begins to doubt his decision, though one glance into Livy's terrified green eyes tells him he can’t turn his back on her.
As Livy's past catches up with her and suspicious accidents begin to happen on the ranch, she is tempted to come clean and tell John the truth. But will he send her back if she does? Or will they forever be CHASING CLOVERS?

FREE Kindle edition - August 15-17


Editorial Reviews:
"This book takes your breath away in its depth of raw emotion and binding love. Chasing Clover is a page turner from the first page to its last page...I couldn't stop reading it. High fives all around!" —Lillian Cauldwell, Passionate World Radio, Inc.
"A compelling story line. A combination of suspense, tension and romance will keep you turning the page until the end." —Michelle Ferguson, author of From Away
"Everything I wanted in a Historical Romance was in this story…Any romance aficionado will love this book and this author." —Tammy Gaines, NovelOpinion
Available at: