Book Promo
If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months (unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE.*Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying. I reserve the right not to run any submission, if cover, blurb or anything else made me decide not to, at my sole discretion.– SAH
FROM PAM UPHOFF: Wild West Bar and Grill
Horst Aslanov is a seventeen-year-old criminal. Or at least he aspires to be one. But his mentor is missing, the number two boss is a dictatorial idiot, and it’s hard to say if the possibility of a police raid is better or worse than the violent criminal gang moving into their area.
The Wild West Bar and Grill is a restaurant in a cross-dimensional future Moscow. Serving authentic barbeque, and tiny shows of wild west shootouts. It’s also a cover for an unlicensed brothel . . . which is an extra layer of cover for an ID hacking and brainchip forging operation. But the old forger is missing, and now Horst has to decide if he’s going to try to keep the business running . . . or go straight.
FROM ALMA T. C. BOYKIN: Hunter of Secrets: Familiar Generations
Secrets lurk below the surface, waiting, watching, restless …
Jude Tainuit, once alone and outcast, plans for his wedding. And wonders if is sister-in-law elect will survive his fiancée’s growing irritation. Aunt Martha has filled a freezer and a half with baked treats in anticipation of the pending nuptials.
Darkness rises in the north …
Jude and his Familiar, Shoim, go on alert as strange creatures fall into Devon County. Power calls them, rips holes between the planes of existence, something corrupt and blood-laced. The twisted magic beneath the Beck Farm stirs, summoning the Graff Rider. The pale horseman and the Becks share a tie, one Jude and Shoim must unravel before twisted evil reaches the surface and tears the land apart.
Secrets swirl around the living and the dead, secrets that a Hunter must unravel or all he has hoped for will be lost!
FROM NATHAN SHUMATE: The Shadow Over Vinland: and Other Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos
From the imagination of Nathan Shumate, the man behind the Space Eldritch and Redneck Eldritch anthologies and The Last Christmas Gift: A Heartwarming Holiday Tale of the Living Dead, comes this collection of ten stories of cosmic Lovecraftian horror: from the deepest prehistory to the darkest future, to that innocuous neighborhood just down the road…
FROM DAVID COLLINS: The Wrong Button
Jerry Anderson was an astronaut faced with an impossible choice: die of asphyxiation in a few hours or see if the alien pod he was transporting really was an escape pod and find out if it could actually save him.
When he enters it, he finds that the controls are unreadable, lacking anything to go on, and rapidly running out of air. He presses the blinking green button.
The next thing he knows, he isn’t human anymore, and he finds himself on a seashore, next to some birds feasting on a body that looks very similar to his new body.
He is alive, but staying alive will be a challenge, and he will be able to communicate with the locals, assuming the next ones he finds don’t kill him on sight.
FROM J. W. KERWIN: Only In Clerksburg (Brendan O’Brian Legal Thrillers Book 4)
During prep sessions in the office, Wally Pratt appeared to be the perfect expert witness. But as soon as he took the witness stand, instead of telling the jury about a shipment of gold coins that had gone missing during the Civil War, he began talking about space aliens and mind control.
Brendan O’Brian travels to the little town of Clerksburg to assist a fellow attorney who is representing professional treasure hunters suing the federal government. When the attorney mysteriously disappears, O’Brian’s one-day court appearance turns into an extended stay.
O’Brian quickly discovers that Clerksburg is anything but an ordinary town. The bank manager attempts to rob his own bank. The minister’s wife does a public striptease. The local judge has a penchant for handing out ten dollar fines. And the mysterious Merchants Association seems to have more power than elected officials.
But perhaps the strangest thing about Clerksburg is its relationship with the military base in the national forest north of town. And that turns out to be a key factor in the treasure hunters’ case against the government.
FROM TERRY M. RUWE: Space Ranger: Down the Event Horizon
Leaving the Rangers was Eddie’s way of dealing with tragedy, but the Rangers weren’t going to leave him alone even as a regular in Space Force.
When a high tech weapons theft involves Eddie’s new ship, he has to get involved. Can he stop the transfer of the stolen goods to the Alliance’s adversaries before the whole situation devolves into war? Can he save his shipmates from becoming cannon fodder?
FROM HOLLY CHISM: The Last Pendragon (Legends Book 1
“The last thing I expected when I went to grieve in the mountains was to get chased by werewolves, kidnapped by a dragon, or meet a legend. But that was exactly what happened.”–Sara Hawke
Sara Hawke, a highly-educated former PhD candidate in Linguistics, is plunged into a situation that strains her skepticism: first she meets a pack of werewolves while camping on the night of the full moon, then she’s rescued by a man the werewolves seemed to fear. Her rescuer then decides that she’ll be good company until he decides to let her go. Then he tells her that she has the potential to be a sorceress, and offers to teach her.
Along the way, she learns that legends aren’t always what they’re cracked up to be, and are occasionally more than they seem…
FROM KAREN MYERS: The Chained Adept: A Lost Wizard’s Tale
MEET A POWERFUL WIZARD WITH UNANSWERED QUESTIONS–AND AN UNBREAKABLE CHAIN AROUND HER NECK.
Have you ever wondered how you might rise to a dangerous situation and become the hero that was needed?
The wizard Penrys has barely gained her footing in the country where she was found three years ago, chained around the neck and wiped of all knowledge. And now, an ill-planned experiment has sent her a quarter of the way around her world.
One magic working has called to another and landed Penrys in the middle of an ugly war between neighboring countries, half a world away.
No one has any reason to trust her amid rumors of wizards where they don’t belong. And she fears to let them know just what she can do — especially since she can’t explain herself to them and she doesn’t know everything about herself either.
Penrys has her own problems, and she doesn’t have any place in this conflict. But they need her, whether they realize it or not. And so she’s determined to try and lend a hand, if she can. Whatever it takes.
And once she discovers there’s another chained adept, even stronger than she is, she’s hooked. Friend or foe, she has questions for him — oh, yes, she does.
All she wants is a firm foundation for the rest of her life, with a side helping of retribution, and if she has to fix things along the way, well, so be it.
The Chained Adept is the first book of the series.
FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: Phoenix in the Machine
Dreams come true in cyberspace — but so do nightmares.
Roger remembers dying in a fire on the launchpad. He’s reconciled it with being alive again. However, being an infomorph in a simulated environment has been a difficult adjustment. Toni tells him he went mad the first time he awoke, and she had to crash the computer.
Now he helps her playtest the games her employer designs. But cyberspace outside Toni’s local area network is a dangerous place. A disastrous experiment in Bangladesh left the world in a moral panic about AI and machine consciousness.
When a careless connection betrays him to those who cannot distinguish between an AI and a post-biological human being, he and Toni must flee. Their cross-country journey will either destroy him or deliver him the spaceflight he’s awaited for a century.
Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.
So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.
We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.
If you have questions, feel free to ask.
Your writing prompt this week is: desert