Book Cover Reveal The Druid's Door by S.G. Daniels

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We’re happy to celebrate the cover reveal party today for “The Druid’s Doorway”, a YA urban fantasy novel by author SG Daniels.

Without further ado, here is the cover…

About The Druid’s Doorway

Jake Reese thinks he’s just a screwed-up high school kid living in a small town isolated in the Arizona desert. Traumatized at an early age by his mother’s sudden death—and believing he might have had something to do with it—he’s allowed his guilt and lack of self-confidence to rule his life.

Hailey is the fiery little redhead that sees Jake as more than a just a good friend. When she invites him as her date to a school function, it brings down the walls he's built to protect his heart, and sets off a series of events that threaten not only Jake’s life, but that of everyone around him.

The discovery of a portal on the outskirts of town brings Jake face-to-face with death and reveals a closely guarded secret about his mother. No longer is his memory of her the only thing that haunts him. Something evil from her past has escaped through the portal, and nothing will prevent it from trying to steal Jake’s future.

Can Jake overcome his fears to keep Hailey safe? Will the decisions he's forced to make destroy everyone he knows and loves? And ultimately...is he strong enough to live with those choices?

Author Bio

S.G. Daniels lives in rural Central Illinois with her husband of thirty-one years, and two spoiled cats, Payne and Jenks. She works full-time in a local medical facility as a patient accounting refund specialist. Most of her evenings she can be found in front of her computer, working on story ideas, or learning the ins and outs of the writing world. On the weekends, if she’s not spending time outside, she’s usually found nose-deep in a book. When S.G. unleashes her inner daredevil, she usually takes off through winding timber trails or country roads on the ATV. Her weaknesses are iced tea and pretzels, especially when she’s working on a story.

Links

Website: www.sgdaniels.com
Twitter: @SGDanielsAuthor
Facebook: www.facebook.com/s.g.daniels.author
Pinterest: www.pinterest.com/sgdanielsbooks

Book Spotlight: Brand Changing Day by Shawn Mihalik

Brand Changing Day
by Shawn Mihalik
General Fiction/Contemporary Fiction
Amazon Print | Amazon Kindle


About the Book 

In the world of the casual American chain restaurant, brand-changing day signifies the start of something new—new menu items are rolled out, logos are redesigned, service procedures are updated, and old uniforms are traded for hipper, darker, flashier styles.

But for employees at The Grill in Youngstown, Ohio—including twenty- something server Scott Pelletier and forty-something general manager Geoffrey McCree—brand-changing day might be when everything changes. Forever.

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About the Author:

Shawn Mihalik was born in San Diego, California in 1990. He currently lives in Youngstown, Ohio, where he studied journalism at Youngstown State University. He writes novels, poetry, and short stories and explores the characteristics of different varieties of wine. 

His works include The Final Days of Poetry, a poetry collection; The Flute Player, a novella; and Brand-Changing Day, a novel. 

About the Publisher 

Asymmetrical Press is a publishing house based in Missoula, Montana, run by indie authors, for indie authors—publishing for the indie at heart. 

Book Review: The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith

The Cuckoo's Calling
Cormoran Strike #1
by Robert Galbraith
Review copy from Amazon Vine
5 Stars

A brilliant debut mystery in a classic vein: Detective Cormoran Strike investigates a supermodel's suicide.After losing his leg to a land mine in Afghanistan, Cormoran Strike is barely scraping by as a private investigator. Strike is down to one client, and creditors are calling. He has also just broken up with his longtime girlfriend and is living in his office.

Then John Bristow walks through his door with an amazing story: His sister, thelegendary supermodel Lula Landry, known to her friends as the Cuckoo, famously fell to her death a few months earlier. The police ruled it a suicide, but John refuses to believe that. The case plunges Strike into the world of multimillionaire beauties, rock-star boyfriends, and desperate designers, and it introduces him to every variety of pleasure, enticement, seduction, and delusion known to man.

You may think you know detectives, but you've never met one quite like Strike. You may think you know about the wealthy and famous, but you've never seen them under an investigation like this.

Review:

Cormoran Strike, wounded war veteran now trying to make his living as a private detective has lots of problems. His longtime girlfriend has just chucked him out, creditors are baying for his money, or failing that his blood, he's got a new secretary who he can't really afford and clients are very thin on the ground.

A few months previously, Lula Landry, a famous supermodel fell to her death from her Mayfair balcony and it's been ruled as a sucidide. Her bother, John doesn't think so and wants Strike to investigate, paying over the odds to find it who really killed her or if it really was a suicide.

Is there such thing as a literary crime novel? If there is, this one fits the bill. It's a book more about the characters than the plot, with lots of vivid descriptions of various parts of London. London itself becomes a character and you could really see the places in your mind's eye.

I'd ordered this book just before I heard that it was JK Rowling, but the book didn't arrive until the truth was out, so that may have influenced my review somewhat. This is a much more grown-up tale than Harry Potter, and if I hadn't known beforehand, I'm not sure I would have guessed it was written by the same author.

The writing here has more maturity, but that might be because Harry Potter was originally intended for children, wheras this one is definitely a book for adults.

I wanted to keep reading to find everything out but at the same time I wanted to savour each page like a delicious dessert. The mystery element is interwoven well with bits about Strike's life and Robin's, his new secretary who secretly held a hankering for working for a detective for years.

Cormoran Strike was wonderful and I hope we get to see more books with this rich new addition to the ranks of PIs.

Reviewed by Annette Gisby

Book Trailer: The Riddler's Gift by Greg Hamerton

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The Riddler's Gift
by Greg Hamerton
Epic Fantasy


This is the first tale of the Lifesong fantasy series, a full length epic fantasy set in a time when magic was a raw force, free from the confining code that so tightly binds it today...

Like it? Try a sample on the Amazon page: http://smarturl.it/TRG

Or visit the author on http://greghamerton.com

Book Review: Promise of Blood by Brian McClellan

Promise of Blood
The Powder Mage #1
by Brian McClellan
Fantasy
Review Copy from Amazon Vine
4 Stars

Blurb:

The Age of Kings is dead . . . and I have killed it. 

It's a bloody business overthrowing a king...

Field Marshal Tamas' coup against his king sent corrupt aristocrats to the guillotine and brought bread to the starving. But it also provoked war with the Nine Nations, internal attacks by royalist fanatics, and the greedy to scramble for money and power by Tamas's supposed allies: the Church, workers unions, and mercenary forces.

It's up to a few...

Stretched to his limit, Tamas is relying heavily on his few remaining powder mages, including the embittered Taniel, a brilliant marksman who also happens to be his estranged son, and Adamat, a retired police inspector whose loyalty is being tested by blackmail.

But when gods are involved...

Now, as attacks batter them from within and without, the credulous are whispering about omens of death and destruction. Just old peasant legends about the gods waking to walk the earth. No modern educated man believes that sort of thing. But they should...

In a rich, distinctive world that mixes magic with technology, who could stand against mages that control gunpowder and bullets? PROMISE OF BLOOD is the start of a new epic fantasy series from Brian McClellan.(less)

Review:

In my time, I have read a lot of fantasy and I have to say this is one of the most original, most unique form of magic in a fantasy setting that I've ever seen! There are a few different types of magic users in this world: the Privileged - who are what you would expect of a sorcerer in a fantasy book, then you have the Knacked - who have one particular skill only, such as knowing when someone is lying or the ability to read minds. Then there are the Powder Mages who wield magic through gunpowder - they can make the gunpowder in an enemy's gun explode from a distance, for example, or they can ingest gun powder to induce a trance like state where they can see further etc.

The book has three main POV characters, Field Marshal Tamas, his estranged son Taniel and the ex-police inspector Adamat. After the king and nobles are overthrown and executed, Tamas sends Adamat to investigate the mysterious dying words spoken by every one of the royal cabal of Privileged: "Kresimir's Promise must not be broken".

The author uniquely blends elements of magic, mystery and political intrigue to give a very interesting plot. Some parts were a little bit bloody for my taste, but you couldn't really have the story without them - the book opens on a bloodbath in the royal palace as part of the military coup to take over the country.

It was an interesting read and I think I will be picking up the rest of the series once it's out.

Reviewed by Annette Gisby

Book Review: Altar of Bones by Philip Carter

Altar of Bones
by Philip Carter
Thriller/Conspiracy
Simon and Schuster
Reviewer's Purchased copy

4 stars

Blurb:

"They didn't have to kill him . . . he never drank from the altar of bones."

In San Francisco, a homeless woman is fatally stabbed by an assailant she's been expecting for years—and her cryptic last words unlock a decades-buried secret that changed history.

In Galveston, an old man makes a chilling death-bed confession—"I am not who you think I am"—that serves as a warning to his sons of danger and deception.

In Massachusetts, a cold-blooded female assassin makes an insidious pact with a corporate billionaire over a highly incriminating film.

Each of these people has ties with a woman who, decades ago, fled a Soviet prison camp with an ancient knowledge people would sell their souls to possess

Drawn in to this web of danger are Ry O'Malley, a man desperate to outrun his own deadly fate; and Zoe Dmitroff, a San Francisco attorney who recognizes the slain homeless woman—a woman she was told had died nearly half a century ago. No one can be trusted in the corrosive game of cat-and-mouse that ensues—one that spans a century, from the frozen Siberian terrain to the serpentine streets of Paris, from the shocking revelations of a doomed Hollywood legend to the deadly machinations of the KGB and the highest office of the United States . . . and ultimately to the guardians of an ancient religious icon ...

A priceless artifact worth killing for. The dark and unimaginable promise of a power that could change the world as we know it.

Review:

This was on roller-coaster of a book. The term page-turner hardly does it justice. I was hooked from the first page and just had to keep reading to find out what was going to happen next. Some if it I had guessed, which disappointed me a bit, I would have preferred it if the 'big kill' referred to in the book had been a not so famous kill already.

Nevertheless, the writing flows so well you just want to keep reading. It's a different sort of conspiracy, in that the reader knows quite early on what the altar of bones is and what it can do. Maybe more mystery as to what it was would have been better because I, as a reader, prefer to discover things at the same time as the characters, rather than earlier than them.

Parts of it read like an action movie, but there is more depth in these 600 odd pages than a lot of films.

The characters were spot on, I adored Zoe and Ry, although I did feel the romance between them felt a bit forced. Just because we have a man and a woman forced together by circumstances as they evade the bad guys and find out the secrets of the altar of bones, doesn't mean they have to become romantically involved. It's not a rule or anything. Women will still read books even if there is no romance in it. Really.

Reviewed by Annette Gisby

Book Trailer: Drowning Rapunzel

I never know whether book trailers help or not with book sales, but I do like having them and looking at them :)