Tuesday, May 19, 2015

BONE DEEP by Kim O'Brien: Release Day Blitz


Title: Bone Deep
Author: Kim O'Brien
Release Date: May 19, 2015
Publisher: Spencer Hill Contemporary

A note from Kim:

I chose this passage because it’s kind of creepy and I love the idea that people who have passed can come to us in dreams, communicating through our subconscious. When I was about twelve, my best friend’s mother had a brain aneurism and was taken to the hospital. I was very shy, very quiet around adults. So my friend’s mom and I looked at each other more than we talked. A couple of days after she’d gone to the hospital, I woke up and in the middle of the night and saw her face floating in the corner of my bedroom, near the ceiling. It was just her head, nothing else, and it glowed as if it were lit from within. The next morning, I found out she had died the night before. I never saw her image again.

Excerpt

In my bed, I lie with the covers pulled high looking up at the ceiling. Although

I’ve been trying for hours, I can’t sleep. The room feels cold, much colder than usual— as if the thermostat is set to about fifty degrees.

I flip over. It’s just after two o’clock in the morning. I’m so tired my hands tingle, but I can’t sleep, not when Emily’s missing. I wonder if the police have Jeremy in custody. If they’ve found Emily. Another chill goes through me, and I tuck the quilt more tightly around my shoulders.

I’m thinking of getting up and putting on a pair of sweats when my door creaks and Emily walks into the room.

In the moonlight, her hair looks disheveled. Half her face is in shadow, but as she nears, I see it’s not the lack of light, but dust coating her left cheekbone.

“Oh my God! Emily!” I sit up straight. “You’re okay!”

“Paige!” She hurries to the edge of my bed. Her long pale hair falls forward as she leans over me. “I’ve been trying to get in touch with you.”

“Where were you?” I study every inch of her. She’s very pale, and there are small chunks of something plaster-like dangling in the strands of her hair.

“I got lost,” she states, a little sadly. “I’ve been walking for a while.” She looks down at her feet. “I lost my sneakers. Isn’t that funny, Paige? They disappeared when I was sleeping. I just woke up, and they were gone. Have you seen them?”

The question is odd, but I’m so happy to see her I don’t care. “No.”

Her shoulders sag. “Oh.”

“They’re not important,” I assure her. “What matters is that you’re back and you’re okay. What happened to you?”

Her face wrinkles. “I don’t know.” Her eyes move to the top left corner of their sockets, as if she’s thinking really hard. After a moment, she shakes her head. “I can’t remember.”

“Were you in a car accident?”

“I don’t think so.” She feels the back of her head with her hands and then grimaces. “God, my head hurts.”

Throwing my covers off, I swing my legs over the side of the bed. Emily stands very still as I throw my arms around her. “Stop trying to remember. It doesn’t matter what happened. I’m just so happy to see you.”

She smells strongly of roses, as if she has doused herself in perfume. It’s so unlike her that it takes my mind a second to register that her body is stone-cold in my arms and her skin feels hard and smooth as polished marble.

Stunned, I pull back far enough to look into her face. Only instead of Emily, she morphs into my mother, who leans over me, the strap of her silk nightgown slipping from her pale shoulder, her eyes black and angry.

“You didn’t see him, Paige,” she says. “You were dreaming.”

My alarm goes off, and I jolt upright. Heart pounding, I fumble for the off button and switch on the lamp. The room is empty, and it’s 2:13 in the morning. I pick up the clock to reset the alarm and discover it’s already at set for six—my usual time. So why did it go off? The dream was about Emily. So why then did my mother say, you didn’t see him?

Add it on Goodreads

Blurb

When Paige Patterson travels to Arizona to spend the summer with her archeologist father, she expects answers. Why did her parents divorce? Why did her father choose his career over family? She doesn't expect to be reunited with her best friend Emily Linton, a girl she has always admired and secretly wanted to emulate, or to find herself falling for the project manager's son, Jalen Yazzi.

But the summer takes a terrible turn when Emily vanishes. As the police struggle for answers, Paige sets out to find the truth.

The search takes Paige from the Cliffside ruins of prehistoric Native Americans to the Navajo Nation to the horrifying possibility that the answer is much closer to home. Emily, it turns out, was not the ony one good at hiding things.

Her father has no alibi for the night Emily disappeared. An intern with the motive insists he's innocent. And Jalen has some secrets of his own.

Old bones might not be the only things buried in the ruins. As Paige digs deeper into Emily's disappearance, she realizes that uncovering the truth may cost her everything - even her life.

Giveaway is open to US only.

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Buy Bone Deep

Amazon Barnes and Noble The Book Depository

IndieBound Kobo

About the Author

Kim O'Brien grew up in an old Victorian house in Bronxville, NY. Her mother loved telling her bedtime stories, especially onees about the ghost in their attic. Kim not only believed the house was haunted but also fell in love with books and the art of storytelling.

At Emory University in Atlanta, Kim earned a B.A. in psychology. She then attained a M.F.A. in writing from Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY. She worked for many years as a writer, editor, and speechwriter for IBM before becoming a full time fiction writer. She lives in Texas with ehr husband, daughters, and four-legged friend Daisy.

Kim is the author of eight inspirational romances and seven non-fiction children's books. She loves to hear from her readers and can be found at www.kimobrienbooks.com, Facebook, and Twitter (kimobri).
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Monday, May 18, 2015

Blog Tour: BONE DEEP by Kim O'Brien

Title: Bone Deep
Author: Kim O'Brien
Release Date: May 19, 2015
Publisher: Spencer Hill Contemporary

A note from Kim:

Aren’t the relationships between best friends fascinating? In Bone Deep, Paige and Emily grew up together following their fathers around the Southwest. Paige’s father was an archeologist and Emily’s was an anthropologist. Emily was always considered the smarter and prettier of the two girls, but it was Paige’s imagination that proved to be the most powerful bond between them. Both girls got dragged around to the various work sites and had very little supervision. So they made up a game, essentially of dares, which turned out to be a very dangerous one.

Excerpt

We found the cave by accident, one morning when we were exploring the rock formations rising in Chalupa Canyon in New Mexico. It was well-hidden, the opening so disguised it looked like a shadow between two rocks. I stuck my face into the darkness. I couldn’t see much, but I knew it was a perfect place to play our game.

Emily grinned. “The best-told stories are the stories told just before dark.”

I hesitated. The last time I had played the game, I’d almost fallen off a very tall rock. For a long time now, I had wished we could stop playing these games. I actually thought what our fathers were doing was a lot more interesting, but I’d always done what Emily wanted me to do. The bottom line: I didn’t want to lose her friendship.

I promised myself this would be the last time. “Okay, but I’ll have to get inside before I’ll know the story.”

To prove I wasn’t afraid, although I was, I went first. What little light there was vanished almost immediately, but I moved slowly, waving my arms around like a blind person, making noise, and taking tiny baby steps. The air grew cooler, smelled musty.

“We’re in a si’papu,” I said, pausing as Emily shuffled up behind me. “And we’re going backward in time, to the world that existed before ours.”

Emily’s hand dropped on my bare shoulder, connecting us, but startling the hell out of me. “Shit,” I said, and she giggled. The noise echoed in a terrible way.

With Emily’s hand on my shoulder, I led us deeper into the cave. It was very dark, but we were used to it. The deeper we went, the more the walls became increasingly narrow. Each bend became harder to squeeze through.

The sounds became magnified, or maybe we were just breathing harder and harder. My heart thumped loud and fast, and my sides scraped against the rock that was pressing now on me from both sides even though I was mainly turned sideways. I told Emily that the cave had a heart and lungs and if we listened closely enough we could hear them. I stopped. We listened.

“Oh, shit,” Emily whispered. “I hear it. I’m totally freaking out.”

“Let’s go back.” I thought about lying, saying that the cave ended. It was too tight for her to pass me. She’d never know. But I didn’t. Instead, I led us deeper, embellishing the story, releasing my fear in the story I told as we inched our way through the darkness.

The bat came out of nowhere. I didn’t even hear it until it was flapping by my head. I ducked to the side, and then it happened. One minute there were walls and floor, and the next they were gone. I had long enough to realize I was in serious trouble, and then the ground flew up at me. I heard something crack, and then Emily’s weight smashed into me.

My leg exploded into a thousand knife-points of pain. It blazed up my body, took my breath, and lit my brain on fire. I had to clamp my teeth together to keep from screaming.

“Emily… Emily…” I croaked out. “Are you okay?”

“I think so,” she said. In the darkness, it seemed like her voice was everywhere—around me, on me, even inside me. She shifted off me. “Are you okay?”
The pain was terrible. I couldn’t keep myself from making a horrible groaning noise.

“I…I think my leg is broken. And I’m bleeding.”

Emily sucked in her breath. “Oh, shit,” she said, and for once there was no excitement in her voice, only fear.

Add it on Goodreads

Blurb

When Paige Patterson travels to Arizona to spend the summer with her archeologist father, she expects answers. Why did her parents divorce? Why did her father choose his career over family? She doesn't expect to be reunited with her best friend Emily Linton, a girl she has always admired and secretly wanted to emulate, or to find herself falling for the project manager's son, Jalen Yazzi.

But the summer takes a terrible turn when Emily vanishes. As the police struggle for answers, Paige sets out to find the truth.

The search takes Paige from the Cliffside ruins of prehistoric Native Americans to the Navajo Nation to the horrifying possibility that the answer is much closer to home. Emily, it turns out, was not the ony one good at hiding things.

Her father has no alibi for the night Emily disappeared. An intern with the motive insists he's innocent. And Jalen has some secrets of his own.

Old bones might not be the only things buried in the ruins. As Paige digs deeper into Emily's disappearance, she realizes that uncovering the truth may cost her everything - even her life.

Giveaway is open to US only.

a Rafflecopter giveaway
Buy Bone Deep

Amazon Barnes and Noble The Book Depository

IndieBound Kobo

About the Author

Kim O'Brien grew up in an old Victorian house in Bronxville, NY. Her mother loved telling her bedtime stories, especially onees about the ghost in their attic. Kim not only believed the house was haunted but also fell in love with books and the art of storytelling.

At Emory University in Atlanta, Kim earned a B.A. in psychology. She then attained a M.F.A. in writing from Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY. She worked for many years as a writer, editor, and speechwriter for IBM before becoming a full time fiction writer. She lives in Texas with ehr husband, daughters, and four-legged friend Daisy.

Kim is the author of eight inspirational romances and seven non-fiction children's books. She loves to hear from her readers and can be found at www.kimobrienbooks.com, Facebook, and Twitter (kimobri).
Website Twitter Facebook

Tuesday, May 5, 2015

About the book

Title: Freaks of Nature
Author: Wendy Brotherlin
Series: The Psion Chronicles, #1
Publisher: Spencer Hill Press
Release Date: May 5, 2015
Isbn: 9781633920064
Get a Copy: BN | Amazon | Book Depository

"Stand back because a new generation of superheroes is here.  “Freaks of Nature” is that rare action-adventure novel that simultaneously tugs at your heart and punches you in the gut.  With equal parts mystery, mayhem and romance, this is a story that will leave you begging for the next vividly imagined installment."
D.J. MacHale
#1 New York Times Bestselling Author
The global Ebola-X pandemic of 2022 lasted five months, two weeks and six days before a cure could be found. In its wake, it left a generation of psionic freaks who can turn a single thought into a weapon… or worse.
Fifteen-year-old Devon McWilliams is one of those freaks, but instead of some awesome ability like telepathy or telekinesis, he talks to plants. Yes, plants. In other words, Devon rates a big fat zero on the scale of kick-ass psychic abilities. But when Devon escapes from his psionic detainment facility, the United States Military intercepts him before he can rendezvous with the Psionic Underground Network. Regaining consciousness, Devon finds himself securely fastened to his seat aboard a military airship headed to Washington DC, where he will either be incarcerated for life or killed. 
However, there are six other psions aboard this one-way flight to doom… and one of them, a telepath named Bai Lee, claims to have the means to escape, but they have to convince her, one by one, that they’re worthy of freedom. This is not good news for Plant Boy. The last thing he wants is to relive his nightmare escape from the psi-facility that left his best friend dead, especially since he’s made the acquaintance of the lovely, blonde healer, Alya du Roumanie, sitting beside him. Worse than that, he wouldn’t be able to bear the look in her eyes if she ever found out how truly pathetic a psion he really is. 

They say there are no keeping secrets from a hell-bent telepath, but Devon McWilliams is determined to do just that, risking everything not to be left behind.
About Wendy Brotherlin
Wendy Brotherlin is a screenwriter, music enthusiast and all around geek-goddess. She earned a Masters in Screenwriting at the University of Southern California and went on to write for children’s television including Nickelodeon’s Are You Afraid of the Dark?. Today, she lives in Manchester, Maine with her husband and two little super-heroes-in-training. Freaks of Nature is her first novel.
Tour Schedule
April 27- Wendy Brotherlin
April 28- Mindy @ Books Complete Me 
April 29- Brooke @ The Cover Contessa
April 30- Stephanie @ Chasm of Books
May 1- Raychelle @ Steele Reviews
May 4- Nicole @ Nicole Payne
May 5- Release Day!!
May 6- Raychelle @ Steele Reviews
May 8- Deitre @ A Leisure Moment
The Giveaway
*Open to US entrants *Must be 13 years of age or older *No giveaway account may be used for tweeting/following, must be an active account
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