GUEST: Casi McLean - #CoverReveal - Between The Shadows

Between The Shadows

Blurb:

She never expected to confront deadly villains…let alone fall in love with one…

After her friend, York, encounters the ghostly image of a young woman, Mackenzie Reynolds seizes the opportunity to initiate a time jump, thrusting them back to 1865 Georgia. Resolved to thwart the girl’s untimely fate, Kenzi stumbles into a deadly conflict over a stockpile of stolen Confederate gold.

An injured Civil War survivor, James Adams departs for home with a war-fatigued companion he’s determined to help. After pilfering a horse and kidnaping a woman, he never dreamed his hostage would steal his heart.

Kenzi and James must unravel a deadly plot, while helping York save his ghost woman from a brutal death. But can she leave York in a violent past to save James’s life?

A Gripping Novel By Award-Winning Author Casi McLean

Excerpt

“Don’t you dare die on me, James Adams.”

Kenzi pressed the blood-soaked gauze against the left side of his abdomen. “I won’t lose you. Not now.”

Barely clinging to life, he opened his eyes a slit, raised his hand still clenching Colin’s gun, and shot two rounds.

Stunned, Kenzi snapped around. “No.” She screamed and dove for the gun through the hazy blue mist engulfing them.

“Brady...” His voice faded as he slipped into semiconscious mumbling.

Yanking the pistol from his grip with her right hand, she maintained pressure with her left. A heartbeat later, the cylinder encasing them rotated open. Kenzi stood then sprinted across the room and pounded on a fist-sized alert button affixed to the wall. The resulting alarm shrieked through the underground chamber, reverberating as it radiated throughout the compound. Two men dressed in white jumpsuits burst through double doors.

“Gurney. Now.” Kenzi screamed at the attendants. “And O-Neg blood. Hurry. Go, go, go.” She ran to James and knelt beside him. Lifting his head, she slid a knee underneath it for support and smoothed a chunk of his dark brown hair from his face. “I’ve sacrificed way too much to have you die now,” she whispered. “My ass will burn for this. Not to mention the repercussions for abandoning York.”

Pulse racing, she checked his bandage. Despite her efforts, streams of crimson still oozed from the wound. Pressing again on the gauze, she shook her head. “Geez. You’ve lost so much blood. Please, hang on.”

Again, the double doors swung wide. This time, a gurney pushed through, followed by the two assistants. One man ran to Kenzi.

“Help me lift him.” Her hands, slick with blood, shot to her white T-top, already drenched in crimson. On second thought, she swept them down the rear of her jeans. Sliding her slippery arms beneath his back, she braced her stance with one bent knee.

“One, two, three.” They heaved him in tandem onto the gurney. She doused her hands with Betadine then splashed more on James’s forearm, snatched an IV from the attached supply basket, and punctured a vein on the inside of his wrist with the sterile needle. Once connected, she hooked the blood pouch on the IV pole and barked at the team, “Let’s move. If this man bleeds out, there will be hell to pay.”

The men, poised with hands on the side of the rails, awaited their next move. “Where to, Dr. Reynolds?” 

Kenzi stared at James’s ashen face, worried her meager experience wasn’t enough to save his life––but she had no option. “Surgery.” 

Springing into action, one man rolled the gurney down the hallway, while a second leapt onto the base and slipped an oxygen mask over James’s nose and mouth. “I hope this guy isn’t allergic to Propofol.” He attached an anesthesia drip to the IV. “Damn, what caused this gaping wound?”

“He was shot...with a musket.”  

Available for pre-order at Amazon: https://amzn.to/2m5Pjxn

Pre-order price is 99 cents.

Thanks again…so much, for hosting my cover reveal!

Casi McLean

Romantic Suspense, Time Slips, And Supernatural Mystery with a Sprinkle of Magic ….

Award Winning Author

2016 Best Romantic Suspense  Gayle Wilson Award of Excellence 

Winner 2016 Best Heroine Still Moments Magazine

2016 Aspen Gold Finalist for Best Romantic Suspense

2015 Top Pick by Night Owl Reviews

2015 Chicago Fire and Ice Finalist

2014 Winner 2014 AWC Short Story Award

Fiction:

  Lake Lanier Mysteries

     Beneath The Lake

     Beyond The Mist

     Between The Shadows 

Website Twitter Facebook Goodreads Amazon Author Page Blog Pinterest Instagram

Readers,  if you sign up for Casi's website, you will receive a free story. You can access her award-winning short story, Destiny, through this link:

http://casimclean.com/welcome-to-my-inner-circle/

and after you click the link, you can scroll down to receive an additional special prize on her website too.

Meet Author Susan Coryell

It's a pleasure to welcome Susan Coryell to my blog today. I've known Susan via Authors Helping Authors for several years. Here she is to tell us her story.

A retired English teacher, I have enjoyed using my new leisure time to write. Long married to my high school sweetheart, I have three children and seven grands. My husband and I live at beautiful, rural, bucolic Smith Mountain Lake in Southern Virginia. I look out from my wee writer’s loft onto pristine blue waters encircled with a wreath of green-covered foothills. Nice inspiration!

Lucky to live on a lake, I spend leisurely hours kayaking, boating, jet-skiing and just plain dock-sitting and enjoying the scenery and action. Each winter hubs and I visit our youngest son and his family in Hawaii for six weeks or more. Smart boy to marry a Hawaiian! We love to spend time with our other kids and grands on the East Coast. A member of two book clubs and writers’ groups, I also practice yoga and join the ladies weekly for golf.  I have to discipline myself to spend time writing.

Readers can connect with me via Face Book: https://www.facebook.com/Susan-Coryell-Author-149075331807592/
Twitter: @SCoryellAuthor.  Blog: www.susancoryellauthor.blogspot.com
Website: www.susancoryellauthor.com

I have always known I am a writer. In fact, my family is riddled with writers. Both brothers are well-published; our maternal grandfather was a published poet; all three of my children are published and at least one grandchild, at the age of nine, has declared herself a writer. Seems we can’t escape it!

I do hours and hours of research for the history background behind my cozy mystery/Southern Gothic series, the Overhome Trilogy. I visit museums, battlefields, historic homes and farms, and I read, read, read! I use actual history for my contemporary stories with a Civil War background.  But I consider attention to all details important.  For NOBODY KNOWS, my new release, for example, I read two whole books on large-animal veterinary, as well as many articles and I interviewed a tech-vet at length.  This was all for a minor part of one character in the book. I learn lots and often find it hard to know when to quit researching and start writing.

Thus far, I have published four novels. My first was a YA anti-bully novel, EAGLEBAIT, which won some major national and international awards. In its third edition, updated with cyber-bullying, EAGLEBAIT is available in both print and e-book.  My latest is a series, the Overhome Trilogy. These cozy mystery/Southern Gothics take place at fictional Moore Mountain Lake, which is based on my actual home here in Southern Virginia. A RED, RED ROSE and BENEATH THE STONES were both nominated for a literary award by the Library of Virginia. NOBODY KNOWS, my new release, finishes up the story of Ashby Overton’s life and times at Overhome Estate where her sixth sense helps her solve mysteries and problems caused by ancient spirits inhabiting the historic house and grounds. Sorry, I cannot pick a favorite as I tend to fall for every character I invent! All three of the Overhome books are published by The Wild Rose Press in New York.

Blurb for NOBODY KNOWS: 

Why do ancient spirits hover at the crossroads between two worlds: the living and the dead? 

With a successful writing career and blissful marriage, Ashby Overton is fulfilled and content at historic Overhome Estate in Southern Virginia'until a stranger walks into her life. The arrival of Professor Ellis O. Grady coincides with a violent and bizarre turbulence emanating from the dark world of Overhome's ancient spirits.

As paranormal events build into chaos, Ashby must use her sixth sense to sort out the real from the imagined in both the visible and the invisible worlds as, stirred into fury, the souls of Civil War slaves engage in a dangerous battle destined to reveal long-held secrets of the past.

What is the connection between the enigmatic professor, a slave-built chapel and a restored overseer's cottage on Overhome Estate? Ashby struggles to find the answers before the spirits destroy her family's heritage, and the lives of those she loves.

I love the writing process—really! Everything about it—even revision, which many authors hate. My process begins with theme—underlying meaning. What do I want my readers to take away from my books? With EAGLEBAIT self-esteem was a major theme—how to build this characteristic as a shield to school bullies. For my Overhome Trilogy, a major theme is understanding the culture and society in the South where long-held, hard-felt ideas battle with modernity. Of course, every literary novel is multi-themed. Family ties, finding self, understanding how history shapes us and our lives—all are present in my series—along with “actual” ghosts of the past to drive home these themes.

All writers are shaped by their experiences. My thirty years of teaching embeds itself in my books whether I intend for that or not. I wrote EAGLEBAIT while teaching middle school—the petri dish for bully germs! Not much research needed there. My current series pulls from my teaching years--observing people and working to understand and motivate them. It’s a natural transition into fictional characters with any mix of personalities to spice up the plot.

I am excited about my new release, NOBODY KNOWS—first because it finishes the series—always satisfying for writers—but also because in the novel I was able to explore a theme dear to my heart: man’s inhumanity to man. Viewing a documentary on the systemic re-enslavement of those freed after the Civil War, I knew I had found my guiding theme for the final book in the trilogy—providing both closure for the series and, to my own mind, restitution for one of the most horrific times in our American and Southern past. 

All three of the novels in the Overhome Trilogy are cross-genre:  cozy mystery and Southern Gothic. What’s not to like about cozies? Rural, pastoral setting, quirky characters, long on mystery and short on gore and sex. The Gothic involves an old house, troubled villains and ghosts.  I find it an irresistible medium for getting across my message about life in the South today.

EXCERPT from NOBODY KNOWS: 

     Walking over the weedy ground, I felt the desolate abandonment of those long-dead. A few tilting gravestones, so blurred with time that their epitaphs were illegible, listed toward the ground as if sheltering from a punishing wind. Scattered among the patchwork grasses were small, thin stone markers set in the dirt, little more than raw rocks, though several bore the faint outline of initials which had been chiseled into them so long ago. Ellis and I surveyed the bleak cemetery, each harboring our own thoughts.  I don’t know how long we stood there breathing in the silence. Then, I heard the voice.—so clear, so distinct, that I startled and almost fell back. Did my companion hear it, too? I darted a look at him. He stood with eyes closed, evidently completely lost in his own reverie. I held my breath and listened with all my senses on alert. The voice wavered this time, as though trailing away, but its repeated message was identical to the one I had first heard at the Overseer’s Cottage when the candlestick went missing. I had thought, then, that I heard “red apple,” which made no sense. Now I understood. “Jared Chapel,” the voice warned. Yes, its tone was severe. Demanding. “Jared Chapel.”
     I touched Ellis’s arm. “It’s here, Ellis. I know it is.” And when he blinked uncomprehendingly, I added, “You wondered if Jared Chapel offers anything in your search for your ancestry. It’s here—there’s something here. I feel it and I...I know it.”
     He blinked several times, a serious expression on his face. “You know because...”
     “Sometimes the past speaks to me. I can’t explain it, but I have to trust the voice that tells me things.” 
     He rubbed his chin. “You know...this is odd. Really odd.”
     I raised my eyebrows in a silent question and he continued. “Because I thought I heard something. I definitely felt...a presence I can’t explain. Someone trying to get my attention. Someone very, very seriously trying to make me understand.” He shook his head. “Understand what? I confess, I’m baffled.”
     “It’s a sign,” I said. “Something I’ve learned over my years at Overhome. We ignore the signs at our own peril.”

Nobody Knows will be released on October 14. It's available for pre-order.

print: https://amzn.com/1509210504.

e-book :https://amzn.com/B01L5TXLJ6

Remember, everybody: HALLOWEEN creeps in at the end of October. What better way to celebrate than by reading a spooky trio of ghost stories in the Overhome Trilogy.

Thanks, Diane, for a chance to participate on your awesome blog!

You are very welcome, Susan. Glad to learn more about you.