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, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. By clicking through and buying (anything book-related, 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. Remember though all of these submissions are from people willing to be associated with this blog. So if you’re trying to buy from people who don’t hate you, this is a good place to start.– SAH
FROM BECKY JONES: Station on the Edge: Rebellion’s Edge Book 1
Zeke Udinesi just wanted to spend his career as a station chief on a nice space station with a good pub. Unfortunately for Zeke, the best pub is on Glasvyr Station which sits on the line dividing the Core, the civilized galaxy, from the Edge, the very much less-than-civilized bit of galaxy. When the Republic of United Planets takes a sudden interest in Glasvyr Station, Zeke gets a very bad feeling. A surprise visit by a high-ranking VIP, a newly minted, bullying political commissar assigned to the station, trader captains fleeing the new regulations and restrictions, and a notorious military unit stationed on Glasvyr all point to increasing power moves by the Burokratika Senaat of the Republic.
Fueled by caffeine and spite, Zeke takes on the leviathan Republic vowing to stop it no matter the cost. Can he survive or will he be pushed into the Edge?
FROM JOHN BAILEY: The Empty Dispatch Case (The Aurigan Conflict)
There are men who operate in the shadows because they are criminals. There are men who operate in the shadows because they are spies. And then there are men who make certain that nobody can tell the difference.
Nicholas Harrow has spent decades cultivating that distinction. To the criminal underworld, he is Lucky Nick — the impossible thief who can steal anything, escape anything, and stay one step ahead of every police force in known space. To law enforcement, he is Saint Nick — the mysterious fixer who appears whenever a case grows too complicated for ordinary methods, and who somehow solves crimes without ever making an arrest.
Neither reputation is entirely false. Neither is entirely true.
In the tense, decades-long Cold War between New Albion and the Aurigan Dominion, information has become more valuable than weapons — and someone has discovered that peace is bad for business.
When trade attaché Susan Hollis answers a knock at her hotel room door on neutral Meridian Station, she finds a dying stranger, a small encrypted device that appears to hold nothing at all, and three final words that will send half the galaxy searching for one particular man: Find Nicholas Harrow.
What Susan uncovers — one careful step at a time, across three suspicious intelligence services, a criminal underworld that adores him, and a conspiracy six years in the making — is a war being manufactured for profit, and a man who may be the only person capable of stopping it, if he can survive being hunted by everyone at once.
A science-fiction espionage thriller in the tradition of classic Cold War intrigue, The Empty Dispatch Case is a story of elegant deception, competing loyalties, and a hero who relies on intelligence rather than force — for readers who love a mystery built on trust, reputation, and the secrets worth dying to protect.
FROM KAREN MYERS: The Ways of Winter – A Virginian in Elfland (The Hounds of Annwn Book 2)
Book 2 of The Hounds of Annwn
TRAPPED BEHIND ENEMY LINES, CAN HE FIND THE STRENGTH TO DEFEND ALL THAT HE VALUES MOST, OR EVEN JUST TO SURVIVE?
It’s the dead of winter and George Talbot Traherne, the new human huntsman for the Wild Hunt, is in trouble. The damage in Gwyn ap Nudd’s domain reveals the deadly powers of a dangerous foe who has mastered an unstoppable weapon and threatens the fae dominions in both the new and the old worlds.
Secure in his unbreachable stronghold, the enemy holds hostages and has no compunction about using them in deadly experiments with newly discovered way-technology. Only George has a chance to reach him in time to prevent the loss of thousands of lives, even if it costs him everything.
Welcome to the portrait of a paladin in-the-making, Can he carry out a rescue without the deaths of all involved? Will his patron, the antlered god Cernunnos, help him, or just write him off as a dead loss? He has a family to protect and a world to save, and little time to do it in.
FROM LEE ECKHARDT: ROGUE STARSHIP!: A Science Fiction Novel
The entire Universe is in danger! This is the telepathic message broadcast by the Sentinel, an entity created by an alien race to guard our dimension from the ferocious denizens of another, dying universe. For millions of years the Sentinel has carried out its mission alone, but now it has been damaged and needs help urgently. But, in all the Galaxy, only Jonny Bluesky can hear the Sentinel’s call for help, and he is an inmate in the Deimos Orbital Redemption Training Center, aka ‘the Dread’, a place no prisoner has ever escaped from. Johnny believes there is no way he can help the Sentinel. Until he discovers that there is a way off the Dread – and a way to hijack the Johner, the most sophisticated starship ever built. With the Johner Jonny can locate the Sentinel and give it the aid it so desperately needs. If he can evade capture by the authorities. If one of the other escapees doesn’t kill him and take over the ship. If he can retrieve a vital piece of equipment from a lost city filled with hostile mutants. And if he can survive a final, possibly lethal, surprise at the end of the journey…
FROM MARY CATELLI: Writing and Reflections Volume 3: Essays on the Writing Process from World-Building to Words
Reflections on the many and far-flung fields that writing can touch upon, from original inspiration to the final work.
Magic and science. Talking birds and cats. Ideas and their origins. Magic, in schools, on the battlefield, and whether it is evil. Fairy tales. Exposition. Utopias. Wandering heroes in series. Wicked stepmothers and their motives. And more.
FROM NATHAN C. BRINDLE: An American in Iya (Timelines Universe Book 8)
Over 200 years ago, a Plague overran the world, and 9 out of 10 human beings died.
In a small Japanese village on Shikoku, a group of American tourists found themselves stranded — and in grave danger of being murdered, merely for the sin of being 外人 ( gaijin ).
Luckily for them, their Japanese hosts took pity on their plight, and took them in as their own.
This is the story of their descendants — who still, more than anything, wish only someday to go home. That is . . .
. . . if they still have a home to return to.
FROM ROSS HATHAWAY: Grimm’s Anatomy : Stay, Don’t Stare
Welcome to Mercy General. Please state your name, your symptoms, and whether your condition is currently metaphorical.
Dr. Tessa Ward thought she was leaving trauma surgery for something quieter.
She was wrong.
Mercy General’s East Annex is home to Supernatural Pathology, the department where medicine meets the things ordinary hospitals prefer not to put on the billing form. Its waiting room may contain a werewolf with sinusitis, a vampire arguing with Insurance, a haunted umbrella, or someone whose curse has become visible on an X-ray.
Under the watchful eye of veteran nurse Hattie Boone, Tessa learns quickly that supernatural medicine has rules of its own.
A diagnosis can change a patient.
Observation can become pressure.
A story recognized too confidently can turn into a cage.
And sometimes the most dangerous thing a doctor can do is decide she already knows what role the patient is supposed to play.
When a series of narrative injuries begins overwhelming the East Annex, Tessa and her increasingly improbable team must invent a new kind of medicine on the fly. Their patients include people being rewritten by fairy tales, transformed by other people’s expectations, trapped inside identities they never chose, and treated as symbols when what they desperately need is to be treated as people.
The solution may begin with something deceptively simple:
Stay.
Witness.
Don’t stare.
And never confuse continuity with captivity.
But in a hospital where stories can bleed, corporations can package identity, insurers can deny the medically impossible for being insufficiently documented, and even a happy ending may qualify as an adverse event, nothing stays simple for long.
Grimm’s Anatomy: Stay, Don’t Stare is the first novel in the Grimm’s Anatomy series, blending dark urban fantasy, supernatural medicine, institutional satire, black humor, and the stubbornly radical idea that patients are not plots, morals, archetypes, or content.
They are patients.
And somebody still has to keep them alive.
FROM HOLLY CHISM: A Sunny Day on Ganymede
Imagine growing up in a colony. No, not one on Earth–one in space. On one of Jupiter’s moons, or maybe on a station…or an asteroid! What would it be like to be a kid in a research station on Io, or Ganymede? What would it be like to grow up inside tunnels dug into an asteroid? Or on a station floating in fixed orbit somewhere? Join Jack, Sean, Raffie, Jake, and Chris in this collection of stories…where one of the biggest differences a kid can make is by asking the right questions.
FROM BLAKE SMITH: By the Light of the Moon
Aatu is eighteen years old, a respectable landowner, and about to marry the girl he loves. The south coast of Finland provides everything his little village requires.
It’s a peaceful life, until a band of ex-Crusaders land on the shore. With the harsh winter and lean times approaching, they cannot be allowed to stay for long. When their priests disturb things best left alone, Aatu fears a minor annoyance will become a disaster.
Aatu’s people turn to the old ways to fight the enemy, to teeth and claws instead of swords and spears. Though they are outnumbered and unused to fighting, Aatu is about to discover that wild wolves are not the most fearsome predators in this land, and even the most peaceful people can become ferocious in defense of the ones they love.
FROM CEDAR SANDERSON: Fen Dead (The Groundskeeper Book 6)
In the misty fen on the edge of town, a murdered man refuses to stay buried.
Chloe Brandt, groundskeeper of Belleview cemetery and reluctant apprentice mediator to the dead, has been called in to help. The deeper she digs into the strange killing, the more she realizes some bindings run deeper than any grave.
Armed with a glowing jar of restless oil, a crew of sectretive gnomes, and more confidence than caution, Chloe must navigate deceptions and dangerous liminal spaces before the fen claims another soul. In a world where even the dead keep secrets, the only way forward is to get your hands dirty.
FROM MACKEY CHANDLER: A Stranger at the Door (Family Law Book 9)
Life never seems to get less complicated for Lee. The Earth Claims Commission collapsed when North America, was driven from the heavens by Central. What else to do but repossess it if they weren’t going to pay the royalties due? That meant seeing to it’s governance. She never aspired to being a sovereign. With a little luck she could govern with a really light hand by appointing a pair of Voices. She had good examples in doing that in her ally Heather, Queen of the Moon.
Her quiet home was much less quiet after she gave shelter to her Badger friend Tish and her brother. At least the Badger Voice and Ambassador owed her a big favor for taking the teenagers in. Any year now she’d start collecting on those favors instead of paying them out.
What was to be a quiet day trip found her in the middle of a civil war, and if that wasn’t enough there were mysterious aliens quietly spying on her and her allies. Of course they had to DO something about that.
FROM SARAH A. HOYT: Done With Mirrors: A Collection of Short Stories (Sarah A. Hoyt’s Short Story Collections)
DONE WITH MIRRORS
From Prometheus Award winner Sarah A. Hoyt comes a dazzling collection that showcases why her work has appeared in Analog, Asimov’s, and Weird Tales—and why readers can’t get enough.
Magic-soaked noir in 1920s Denver. Mirror-hopping time lords fleeing across infinite universes. Survival in John Ringo’s zombie apocalypse. Murder and mystery in the world of Darkships and Rhodes. Each story in this collection pulls you into a different world—and refuses to let go.
Previously published in acclaimed anthologies from Baen and Chris Kennedy Publishing, these nine tales span Hoyt’s most beloved universes alongside standalone adventures. Whether she’s writing in Ringo’s Black Tide Rising series, exploring her own Darkships and Rhodes worlds, or crafting speculative noir that defies categorization, Hoyt delivers the vivid storytelling and emotional resonance that has earned her a devoted following.
From rain-slicked streets where magic and murder collide to the far reaches of space-time itself, Done With Mirrors demonstrates the genre-hopping brilliance of one of speculative fiction’s most versatile voices.
Nine stories. Nine worlds. One unforgettable collection.
Contains the short stories: Honey Fall; Scrubbing Clean; Last Chance; Great Reckoning in a Small Room; Horse’s Heart; Do No Harm; Dead End Rhodes; Knights of Time; Done with Mirrors.
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 to ask.
Your writing prompt this week is: AFTERNOON
