PREORDER Guts & Glory: Hunter by Jeanne St. James! #TuesdayBookBlog

October 1, 2019 / The Sassy Redhead Book Reviews / Leave a comment

With only a look, he’s hooked.
PREORDER Guts & Glory: Hunter by Jeanne St. James!
Amazon — https://amzn.to/2LNJWkj
Universal — mybook.to/Shadows-Hunter

Release Date: October 5th

When a simple assignment becomes a whole lot more…

For Hunter, what should be an easy job of finding another veteran’s long-lost brother has turned up nothing but dead ends. Even worse, it uncovered problems his team thought had long since been buried. Down to his last lead, he tracks down a woman who has his protective instincts kicking in for reasons he can’t fully understand. While her expressive dark eyes and generous curves catch his attention, it’s her fiery temper that holds it.

Back in her hometown, hiding from a man who almost destroyed her life, Frankie’s thrown off guard when a bossy bearded stranger shows up looking for information on the biker she’d rather forget. And he’s not taking no for an answer. With more to protect than herself now, she knows firsthand what can happen when you place your trust in the wrong person, but something about the former Green Beret has her not only letting him into her home but also her heart.

Hunter’s determined to complete his mission and keep Frankie safe—no matter the cost. Though he didn’t expect that cost to also involve his heart.

Note: Hunter is the third book of the Guts & Glory series, a six-book spin-off from my Dirty Angels MC series. While it’s recommended to read both series in order, each book can be read as a stand-alone. As with all my books, this has an HEA, no cliffhanger or cheating.

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Cover artist/Photographer: Golden Czermak at FuriousFotog
Model: Matt Zumwalt

START THE SERIES TODAY!
Guts & Glory: Mercy by Jeanne St. James is available now!
Amazon — https://amzn.to/2VOLvVv
FREE with #KindleUnlimited

About the Author:

JEANNE ST. JAMES is a USA Today bestselling romance author who loves an alpha male (or two). She was only 13 when she started writing and her first paid published piece was an story in Playgirl magazine. Her first romance novel, Banged Up, was published in 2009. It was rereleased recently under the title Damaged and became a USA Today bestseller. She is happily owned by farting French bulldogs. She writes M/F, M/M, and M/M/F ménages.

Connect with Jeanne!

Website — http://www.jeannestjames.com
Facebook — https://www.facebook.com/JeanneStJamesAuthor/
Bookbub — http://bit.ly/2EkVRSd
Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/jeannestjames/
Newsletter —

Author Insights from the author of Sound by Catherine Fearns @rararesources @metalmamawrites #TuesdayBookBlog

October 1, 2019October 1, 2019 / The Sassy Redhead Book Reviews / Leave a comment

How Walking Helps Me Write

“Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.”
Henry David Thoreau

There is currently a trend within non-fiction for books about walking. Writers such as Robert Macfarlane (with his elegiac modern classic The Old Ways) and Cheryl Strayed (whose hiking memoir Wild was made into a Hollywood movie) have spawned a veritable subgenre of books about why walking is good for the soul. And good for creativity – in particular literary creativity. This is nothing new, of course. Back in the eighteenth century Jean – Jacques Rousseau’s beautiful Reveries Of The Solitary Walker was a homage to wandering alone, while biographers have calculated that Romantic poet William Wordsworth clocked up 180,000 miles on foot in his lifetime.

Perhaps it’s frivolous, inconvenient – since walking is very time-consuming – but walking is absolutely essential to my writing process. To every stage of that writing process. Why?

Inspiration

Walking is when we do our best thinking, and that’s a biological fact. When we walk, the heart pumps faster, circulating more blood and oxygen to all the organs, including the brain. It improves memory, and stimulates new neuron connections. But unlike other forms of exercise, or driving, we don’t have to devote much attention to the act of walking. Our minds are gloriously free.

There’s a difference between the effects of urban and rural walking too. To ‘flaner’, or to wander aimlessly in the city, is an act of wide-eyed stimulation. Whereas to trod a well-known country path is to relax your mind, free from distractions.

When I was a child my family did a lot of hiking in the Lake District, and we would often walk in amicable silence, lost in our own thoughts. I came up with all sorts of abandoned childhood novels that way, but my first book, Reprobation, came to me aged 38 while I was alone in one of my other favourite walking places – Crosby Beach in Liverpool.

Research

Location research is a great excuse to go for walks! My books are set in a real-life place, Liverpool, so it’s important that my locations, their descriptions, and the distances between them, are accurate. Before writing Sound, I spent many happy hours walking around central Liverpool, calculating how long it would take my villain to flee from Duke Street to Lime Street; whether you can see the Kingsway Tunnel vent from the Liver birds, etc etc. In a more general sense, it helps to just ‘be’ in different parts of the city, to get a feel for it.

I noticed that my characters do a lot of walking too; for example Darren on Crosby beach, Helen in the Formby pinewoods. It’s an opportunity for the characters, and therefore the readers, to process their thoughts. It’s also an opportunity to map out locations and distances for the reader.

Relaxation

The writing stage itself is very intense, and emotionally exhausting. Even at your most inspired, you are rarely going to write more than 3000 words of new stuff in a day. And while the physical act of doing that doesn’t take very long, there’s a necessary amount of faffing about that has to go on for the rest of the day. And it’s far healthier to faff about walking than faff about on social media. Although I do treat myself to a bit of social media too, to reconnect. I usually write out of the house, in coffee shops, so I plan my little walks with a destination in mind – the next coffee shop for example. This gives me a goal, something to look forward to, and when I arrive at the new change of scenery, my mind is fresh for the next onslaught.

Sound Fearns-square-web

A walking-reading list:

Jean-Jacques Rousseau ‘Reveries Of The Solitary Walker’
Henry David Thoreau ‘Walden’
Cheryl Strayed ‘Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail’
Geoff Nicholson ‘The Lost Art of Walking’
Rebecca Solnit ‘Wanderlust: A History of Walking’
Robert Macfarlane ‘The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot’
Stephen Graham ‘The Gentle Art of Tramping’
Lauren Elkin ‘Flaneuse: Woman Walk The City’
Kate Humble ‘Thinking On My Feet’

Blog Tour, Giveaway and ARC Review of Sound by Catherine Fearns @rararesources @metalmamawrites #TuesdayBookBlog

October 1, 2019 / The Sassy Redhead Book Reviews / Leave a comment

Sound

Sound
Can you hear it?

A professor of psychoacoustics is found dead in his office. It appears to be a heart attack, until a second acoustician dies a few days later in similar circumstances.

Meanwhile, there’s an outbreak of mysterious illnesses on a council estate, and outbursts of unexplained violence in a city centre nightclub. Not to mention strange noises coming from the tunnels underneath Liverpool. Can it really be a coincidence that death metal band Total Depravity are back in the city, waging their own form of sonic warfare?

Detective Inspector Darren Swift is convinced there are connections. Still grieving his fiancé’s death and sworn to revenge, he is thrown back into action on the trail of a murderer with a terrifying and undetectable weapon.

But this case cannot be solved using conventional detective work, and D.I. Swift will need to put the rulebook aside and seek the occult expertise of Dr. Helen Hope and her unlikely sidekick, guitarist Mikko Kristensen.

Sound_frontcover
Purchase Link – mybook.to/sound

Author Bio –
Catherine Fearns is a writer from Liverpool. Her novels Reprobation (2018) and Consuming Fire (2019) are published by Crooked Cat and are both Amazon bestsellers. As a music journalist Catherine has written for Pure Grain Audio, Broken Amp and Noisey. Her short fiction and non-fiction has appeared in Toasted Cheese, Succubus, Here Comes Everyone, Offshoots and Metal Music Studies. She lives in Geneva with her husband and four children, and when she’s not writing or parenting, she plays guitar in a heavy metal band.

Sound Fearns-square-web
Social Media Links –
Twitter: @metalmamawrites
Website: https://www.catherine-fearns.com/

Giveaway to Win a signed trio of Catherine Fearns books plus merchandise (Open Internationally)

SOUND Giveaway - merch

Prize includes – SOUND t-shirt, coaster, magnet and bar blade, plus signed copies of Reprobation, Consuming Fire and Sound.
*Terms and Conditions –Worldwide entries welcome. Please enter using the Rafflecopter box below. The winner will be selected at random via Rafflecopter from all valid entries and will be notified by Twitter and/or email. If no response is received within 7 days then Rachel’s Random Resources reserves the right to select an alternative winner. Open to all entrants aged 18 or over. Any personal data given as part of the competition entry is used for this purpose only and will not be shared with third parties, with the exception of the winners’ information. This will passed to the giveaway organiser and used only for fulfillment of the prize, after which time Rachel’s Random Resources will delete the data. I am not responsible for despatch or delivery of the prize.

Raffle Copter Giveaway Link:
http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/display/33c69494284/?

My Review:

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 5 out of 5-stars

I devoured this book. It pulled me in from the first page and wouldn’t let me go until the end.

I love Ms. Fearns books and find that they make me think and ponder on the subjects and the content of her books. While they are centered around religion they are not books about religion, but about the world around us and how most people ignore what is around them. I found the quote below to be true and eye opening.

“Nowadays we are afraid of silence. We need the constant buzz of television, music, chatter. But I say to you today, do not be afraid of silence, for it is only when we are silent that we can be close to God. Is it any wonder that deaf children were once thought of as angels? For their ears are unsullied by the corrupt sounds of this Earth?”

A story of a detective searching for something to make him feel alive again, a retired nun who teaches theology at a local college, and her love for metal music, and a Swedish metal band that all seem to somehow come together to solve such terrible crimes. They are each from such different worlds, yet they all work so well together.

I really enjoyed reading this book and give it a 5-star review. I highly recommend it to readers who are looking for a story that’s a bit different, but enjoy police procedural, crime, and psychological thrillers. If you are interested in any of these genres, then you really should pick up Sound by Catherine Fearns, but you need to read Reprobation and Consuming Fire first.