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 C. CHANCY: The Words of the Night (Colors of Another Sky Book 1)

It’s 1618. Do you know where your historian is?

Retirement wasn’t supposed to have dragons….

Historian Jason Finn crossed the planet to escape the Black Dog of depression – and almost got there. Over the mountains of Korea, a monster out of nightmares tore his plane from the sky… and into another world.

Hunting down ravenous shapeshifting pirates, Night Magistrate Lee Cheong found survivors from elsewhere. Survivors who say pirates are not the only threat. Over twenty years ago Hanyang burned in dragon flames… and that monster still lives.

Now the young magistrate must lead demon-hunters on a desperate chase, aided by a bandit sharpshooter, a seafolk medic, a Heavenly cultivator on the run for her life… and a time-lost historian.

Jason’s willing to help, but he’s cursed, fighting to survive, and struggling to understand a land of magic and monsters. All the while doing his best to keep a teenage girl alive.

Upside? Jason’s definitely not depressed….

FROM JAY MAYNARD: Foundational Laminate (The Laminate Therapy Chronicles Book 1)

A radical therapy. A difficult past. One last chance to change.

Alex Sullivan isn’t crazy — just angry. Angry enough to get arrested. Angry enough to be offered an unusual choice: face prison, or undergo an innovative therapy at a private facility in rural Missouri.

At the Laminatrix Mental Hospital, patients wear full-body suits that block distraction and isolate sensation. They enter an immersive, time-dilated environment. There, they relive every memory — guided not by a voice, but by telepathic silence. There’s no room to lie, no place to hide.

Alex thinks he can fake it. He’s wrong.

Foundational Laminate begins the Laminate Therapy Chronicles, a speculative series exploring redemption, transformation, and the slow, difficult work of healing.

“One of the rare novels I hope becomes reality—a hard look at how to turn the antisocial into good neighbors.”
— Karl K. Gallagher, author of The Fall of the Censor and Torchship

BY CHARLES ALDEN SELTZER, REVIVED BY D. JASON FLEMING: 3 Ways of Lead (Annotated): A Pulp Western Omnibus

Charles Alden Seltzer was one of the first crop of western authors, a contemporary of Zane Grey and William MacLeod Raine. But he *really* hit his stride in 1921, and these three post-1921 novels prove it!

Brass Commandments

“He’s man’s size, goin’ an’ comin’. No show, no fuss; likes to play a lone hand. Cool an’ easy an’ dangerous. Two-gun. Throws ’em so fast that you can’t see ’em. Lightnin’s slow when Lannon moves his gun-hand. Dead shot; cold as an iceberg under fire.”

Such was the opinion in Bozzam City of Flash Lannon. Five years of getting an education back East might have tamed him, some, but when rustlers target his cattle, and the local law doesn’t care, Lannon nails a new law to the wall of the local post office: his brass commandments naming the five men who must leave the country — or die.

Five named men… and “one other.”

Last Hope Ranch

When Ned Templin rode out of the desert to the Last Hope Ranch, Lisbeth Stanton was grateful, because he saved her from having to kill a man. But when Templin told her he was staying, and that he was an outlaw, and that a posse was on his trail looking to hang him for murder, her opinion changed a little.

And it kept changing, for Templin was an enigma, with secrets and motivations she never could have guessed. And, it turned out, so was her father, whom she had been with her whole life but never really known. Between Sheriff Norton and his posse, and the criminal gang Blaisdell’s Raiders, secrets would out, and bullets would fly, at the Last Hope Ranch!

The Way of the Buffalo

When Jim Cameron saved a stranger’s life, he hardly expected that stranger to promise to shoot him dead.

Sunset Ballantine wasn’t bothered that a man had tried to shoot him from a distance — no bullet had ever touched him, despite living his long years in the west and getting into many a gunfight. He *was* bothered that this Easterner was going to run a railroad right past his front door in sixty days. And even more bothered that the man didn’t change his mind once the threat was issued. Ballantine’s word was iron law in Ransome, always had been. Yet this Cameron, understanding full well that Ballantine meant it, and would undoubtedly beat him to the draw in any fair fight, was pushing ahead anyway.

Would Cameron back down? Would Ballantine go back on his word? Could an old western hand face down the forces of Progress, or must he go the way of the buffalo?

• This iktaPOP Media omnibus includes introductions giving the novels historical and genre context.

FROM VICTOR TANGO KILO: Hell Yeah! We’re the Baddies!

Midnight Morrigan was once the Scorpion Horde’s top intelligence operative—master of deception, seduction, assassination, and alcohol appreciation.

Then the invasion of Carpathia faceplanted into a crater of blood, blame, and bureaucratic finger-pointing.

Now the Scorpion Overlords have demoted her to a lowly tactical post on a Horde battle cruiser—stripped of her power, her prestige, and worst of all… her minibar.

Morrigan has only one shot at redemption (and revenge!)—naturally, it involves murder and mayhem.

The Rebel Pact calls itself “the last best hope for freedom in the galaxy,” or at least their PR department does. If she can crush this ragtag band of insurgents, she might just get her rank back. Maybe even her minibar.

On her side: a war-weary Horde captain; a mad scientist named Madd (not a nickname—it’s branding); a sexy operative who gathers intel horizontally; a suspiciously helpful bartender with rebel sympathies; and the galaxy’s hardest-working liver.

Against her: the Rebel Pact, the incompetent Horde military bureaucracy, and the odds.

She couldn’t have asked for a better set of enemies.

Hell Yeah! We’re the Baddies! and its companion novel,The Baddies, explore the light side of the dark side—where one hapless food tech and one disgraced intelligence officer try to outmaneuver an empire built on cruelty, incompetence, and performance reviews. Together, they tell two distinct stories wrapped around the same set of events: a Rashomon-style exploration of different perspectives inside the evil Scorpion Imperium.

FROM CAROLINE FURLONG: The Guardian Cycle, Vol.1: In Dreams and Other Stories

A man whose debts must be paid by vengeance. A woman desperate to save her husband. A grieving father finding a young enemy soldier on his veritable doorstep…

These fantasy and soft sci-fi stories wonder whether or not heroes need families. Are we not told that families slow the hero down? Is it not typically implied that they get in the way of the adventure? Are they a burden, or truly the greatest strength from which the hero and those he loves can draw?

Six tales in this collection center on family, faith, and self-sacrificing love as men and women fight for the ones whom they hold most dear. Whether the enemy is inner turmoil, a nightmare, or a demon really does not matter. If the threat seeks to harm a member of the family, it is going to pay dearly.

FROM HOLLY LEROY: Hostile Earth (Hostile Earth Series Book 1)

Terra Vonn is fighting to survive in a destroyed world, surrounded by unspeakable horror . . . and things are about to get much worse. After witnessing the vicious murder of her mother, Terra has a singular focus—exacting revenge on the killers. But before she can complete her plans, savagery intervenes and she is cast alone into a brutal post-apocalyptic world. As she trails the men south through a land filled with cannibalistic criminals, slave traders, and lunatics, the hunter becomes the hunted. Terra quickly learns that she is neither as tough nor as brave as she thinks she is. Worse, she may be the only one who stands between what little remains of civilization and destruction

FROM MACKEY CHANDLER: A Reluctant Sovereign (Family Law Book 7)

When North America attacked the space habitats beyond the Moon they had no plan B if they failed. The Earth Claims Commission was already suffering a credibility crisis and North America’s disastrous failure and defeat left them with no muscle. Far flung worlds and stations were abandoned with no banking, no supply, and no news. The explorers who were owed royalties were cut off too. Lee and her father Gordon weren’t about to sit still for that. If you can repossess a ground car, why not a planet? Lee had standing to be sovereign of Providence but wasn’t all that fond of planets. She didn’t want to be bogged down with the day to day drudgery of sovereignty like her friend Heather on the Moon. Was there any reason she couldn’t have her cake and eat it too? None that she could see.

FROM ANNA FERREIRA: The Root of All Evil

When murder comes to Stockton, it brings long-buried secrets in its wake…

Kate Bereton leads a busy but unexciting life as the clergyman’s only daughter in a small Dorsetshire village. She’s grateful for the break in routine heralded by the arrival of her stepmother’s latest guests, but when Kate discovers a dead body in the parsonage one morning, she finds herself in much more danger than she could have ever anticipated. Terrified and desperate, she turns to the local magistrate for help. Mr. Reddington is eager to aid his dear friend Miss Bereton, but can they discover the murderer before it’s too late, and the secrets of the past are forgotten forever?

With a dash of romance and a generous helping of mystery, The Root of All Evil is a charming whodunit that will delight fans of Jane Austen and Agatha Christie alike.

FROM CELIA HAYES: West Toward the Sunset

It’s the year 1846, and Sally Kettering is just twelve years old. Her parents have decided to sell their farm in rural Ohio and go west … west to California. Sally and her six-year old brother Jon must leave everything they knew – friends, kinfolk and the little town where they had lived all their lives so far. Pa and Ma Kettering packed what they could take into a single covered wagon, and they set out to follow a trail through the wilderness west, along with a party of other families and adventurers. Unknown dangers lay around every bend of the trail … wild animals, wilder Indians … Indians who might be hostile or friendly, and no way to know for certain … treacherous river crossings, trackless deserts, and jagged, dangerous mountain passes.
And still, the Kettering family and their friends boldly set out … following the trail that led west toward the sunset!

FROM KAREN MYERS: Second Sight: A Science Fiction Short Story

A Science Fiction Short Story

BORROWING SOMEONE ELSE’S PERCEPTIONS FOR A POPULAR DEVICE CAN ONLY MEAN COMMERCIAL SUCCESS. RIGHT?

Samar Dix, the inventor of the popular DixOcular replacement eyes with their numerous enhancements, has run out of ideas and needs another hit. Engaging a visionary painter to create the first in a series of Artist models promises to yield an entirely new way of looking at his world.

But looking through another’s eyes isn’t quite as simple as he thinks, and no amount of tweaking will yield entirely predictable, or safe, results.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: The Baying of the Hounds

In the world we know, Nikola Tesla’s Wardencliffe experiment proved a costly failure and was ultimately torn down for scrap. But what if things had gone differently and he pressed his work to completion? In a world similar to but unlike our own, Tesla completes his transmission tower. But when he turns it on, he discovers his calculations were incomplete. Some unknown factor has created a connection with another world with physical laws unlike our own. The commingling of curved and angular space has led to catastrophe. Now his greatest rival, Thomas Alva Edison, compels him to repair the damage. To do so, Tesla must make his way through a ruined city to the locus of the damage. And through his mind echoes the baying of unseen hounds. A short story originally published in the anthology Steampunk Cthulhu.

FROM SARAH A. HOYT: Noah’s Boy.

Transform into a shape-shifting dragon? Complicated. Run a successful diner? Even harder. Fall in love? Now that’s really testing Tom Ormson’s self-control.

Between managing a temperamental new fryer and his budding romance with fellow shifter Kyrie Smith, Tom’s plate is already full. But when a vengeful sabre-tooth tiger stalks into town and an ancient dragon starts playing matchmaker, his carefully balanced life threatens to spiral out of control. Add in a string of mysterious murders at the local amusement park, and a lovestruck ex-triad dragon with country music aspirations, and Tom’s having the week from hell—literally.

Now Kyrie’s been kidnapped, and Tom must race against time to save her while keeping his inner dragon in check. Because eating the bad guys? Definitely bad for business.

Welcome to Noah, Colorado, where the supernatural meets the everyday, and young love comes with teeth, claws, and the occasional bout of spontaneous combustion.

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: ROMANTIC.