Bell Bridge Books

DEEP IN DECEMBER

By Kathleen Eagle

The weather outside hasn’t been frightful up here in the North Country lately, but in the last few days Jack Frost woke up and started sprinkling tiny ice stars on the grass. Right now I’m watching snow sift softly like powdered sugar from an angel’s donut, and tonight we’re promised our first white winter blanket.  Because, baby, it’s cold outside.

It’s no accident that we celebrate our brightest holidays in the winter. It’s a dark time, and we need to brighten up our surroundings with fire and stars and smiling faces. It’s cold, and we need to wrap up and make a circle and share warmth. It’s quiet. It’s the perfect time to share food and gifts, songs and stories.

Romance comes from the heart, which is why so many holiday classics tug at the heartstrings. They’re love stories in the broadest sense. One of my favorites when I was very young was “The Little Match Girl.” The original Hans Christian Andersen story is pretty tragic, but the TV adaptation I remember had a happy ending. I cried every time the little girl stood outside in the cold, and when she was invited to come inside and stay, I sobbed.  Family, friends, finding a soul mate—holiday stories celebrate people coming together, face to face, hand in hand.

What a joy it is to have THE LAST GOOD MAN chosen for Amazon’s holiday store for the month of December. The story was inspired by my beautiful, brave baby sister, who is a breast cancer survivor. This book is a good answer to the question, “Where do your stories come from?” The characters and events are completely fictitious, but the emotional experience is drawn from life. THE SHARING SPOON—my collection of three novellas with three very different settings and common holiday theme—is also specially priced this month. I can just see readers taking time for themselves with one of my stories during this busy season. A comfy corner, a cup of cheer, and a book.  A gift for yourself. Read a good story and then pass it on to someone dear to you.

And speaking of holiday gifts, my daughter brought me something special on Thanksgiving. We mothers treasure the gifts our kids have made themselves, and my grown daughter—Lady Elizabeth’s Dreamwear Catalog from THE LAST GOOD MAN is a nod to her name—still makes many of her gifts for family and friends. And there’s always some special significance, not to mention imagination and skill involved. The coasters she made for me this year are covered with my words—pages scanned from one of my books. She chose THIS TIME FOREVER because she was there when I received the RITA award for that book. What a lovely memory. What a lovely daughter! And what a lovely time of year for heartwarming stories.

The Last Good Man by Kathleen Eagle is on sale the entire month of December for just $1.99! Click the cover below to purchase!

Top 5 Things That Are Guaranteed to Get Me Out of My Jammies

By Susan Sleeman

A bomb. A submachine gun. A plane crash. The roof torn from a car. CSI investigation.

Sounds like a book right. Or movie. Or even something a writer might conjure up in her mind. Wrong. It’s a day in the life of a romantic suspense author. A day in my life. Several days actually.

Not my typical schedule, though. I write fulltime so I’ve become a real homebody, sitting in my comfy chair—some days not even bothering to get dressed. But then, there have been crazy, amazing days when research has pulled me from my chair to participate in things I never imagined myself doing. Here are a few of my favorite events.

1. Detonating a Bomb – Lest you think the FBI is coming after me for this, let me first tell you that I was with the FBI bomb squad at the time. As a participant in the FBI Citizen’s Academy, I joined agents for six weeks to learn about their job and mission. Some things I experienced first hand. What better way to experience the power of bombs than pressing the detonator in an empty field. The flash was blinding. The ground rumbled. And the explosion was deafening. AMAZING! Here’s a short video of one of the explosions. The video doesn’t have nearly the impact of the actual event, but it gives you an idea. As a bonus, you can also hear gunshots from the nearby firing range.

2. And speaking of guns, shooting a submachine gun—Same day, up the hill at the FBI firing range. We shot pistols, submachine guns, and a rifle. I’d only ever fired a weapon once before this
   day and let me tell you, the power behind the semi-automatic was incredible. Here’s the range and the targets we tried to hit, plus our instructors waiting to teach us how to proper procedures.

3. Tour a police CSI Lab – Don’t believe everything the amazing CSI labs that you see on TV have,  with state-of-the-art equipment in these bright, airy rooms. Not so much with real police labs. They are strapped for money and cramped in small spaces, but still, I learned so many things. One was how to process fingerprints, and then how to use a fuming chamber to obtain fingerprints from uneven surfaces and hard-to-dust surfaces such as bottles, knives, guns, etc.

4. Participate in a plane crash – What? A crash. Okay it was a mock disaster drill at the Portland International Airport, but hey, the emergency response workers didn’t treat it as a drill. They screamed onto the tarmac to help victims wearing gory makeup meant to simulate serious injuries. Mock family members arrived at the airport and were taken to special rooms to await the news of their loved ones. It all felt so real and gave me everything I’d need to write such a disaster. I’m just waiting for the right book. And as a bonus, I got a great t-shirt and medal for participating.

5. Using the jaws of life to remove the roof from a car – Okay, this one involved hunky firefighters, nuff said, but there was actual research here, too. The firefighters first demonstrated how to cut off the roof, then I was given the chance to step into turnouts and open up another car with my fellow participants enrolled in the local Police Academy.

So as you can see, being a romantic suspense author can be thrilling, and I try to put that realism and thrill into my books. For example, I have included a bomb in Web of Deceit.

Web of Deceit is the first book in a three book series featuring female FBI agents assigned to an elite Cyber Action Team. When agent Kaitlyn Knight’s brother-in-law, the notorious cybercriminal Vyper, kills her sister then goes on a murderous spree taunting Kait, homicide detective Sam Murdock must find Vyper before he takes another life. As the body count rises, Sam discovers the killing spree is really about striking back at Kait, and he must put everything on the line—including the relationship he’s developed with Kait—to ensure her safety. Vyper is waiting, watching her every move, and he won’t stop until he’s exacted his revenge and reclaims his rights to raise his daughter now in Kait’s custody.

Web of Shadows releases in December and Web of Lies in April. In honor of all three books, I’ve been giving away official FBI insignia items like the ones in the picture. These are official items purchased at the Portland FBI campus store. All my giveaways will be featured on my Facebook page, so stop on over and like the page to keep from missing any of the giveaways.

Web of Deceit by Susan Sleeman is only $1.99 today only! Click the cover above to purchase!

Give cats a little Christmas cheer!

By Corwyn Alvarez

Dear readers, I would like to begin by thanking everyone who has purchased my book, The Dog Walker.  I sincerely appreciate your patronage.  I would also like to thank Bell Bridge for the opportunity to contribute to their blog.  In keeping with my themes which tend to revolve around the needs of homeless animals, I would like to mention that we are fast approaching winter and with this season some homeless animals struggle merely to survive.  I am drawing particular attention here to the needs of feral cats.  Interestingly, I was not a cat lover until several years ago when my friend told me the story of a feral cat in her neighborhood whom she had named Papi kitty or Pop for short.  It seems that her feral cat – that is now around twelve years old – at one time had a wife and two kids.  Over the years his entire family died, either they froze to death or were run over or got sick.  The only one who survived was Pop.

When I heard his story I immediately went into action and began feeding him in the sewer where he lives (when he is done eating I retrieve the empties so it doesn’t clog the sewer).  I have been doing this now for about three years.  When it snows I make sure that I shovel out the sewer opening facing the road so it is clear for him to go in and out.  Needless to say, Pop has won my heart and we have established an understanding with each other and he knows I’m his friend.  I love all cats now as never before, in large part because of Pop.  So if this winter you see any feral cats in your neighborhood I would ask that you please show them some kindness and help them out if you are able.  They are beautiful animals and it breaks my heart to see them roaming the streets, especially when it is cold and the weather is harsh.  Anything that you can do for them, whether as elaborate as having them spayed and neutered, or providing them a warm shelter, or providing them with some dry or wet food would be a great blessing for them.  They depend on our kind actions to survive, no matter how great or how small.  I have attached a photograph of Pop for those of you who might be interested.  A photo of Pop is also posted on my Amazon page.  I wish each and every one of you and everyone at Bell Bridge a safe and joyful holiday season.

The Dog Walker by Corwyn Alvarez is on sale the entire month of December for just $1.99! Click the cover above to purchase! 

Tikis and Tinsel in the Tropics

by Jill Marie Landis

Celebrating the holidays on a tropic isle is far from the images you see on traditional greeting cards or conjured up by the song White Christmas. I live in a very small town on the North Shore of Kauai, the inspiration for my Tiki Goddess Mystery series from Bell Bridge Books. Hanalei Town definitely has its own unique truly-tacky- tiki style when it comes to dressing up for the occasion.

In mid-November, one of the first signs that the holidays are on way is when poinsettia leaves begin to turn from green to red — one leaf at a time – until they are in their full glory. Gardens pop with showy reds, pinks, and variegated varieties of poinsettias against a backdrop of palms and ferns. Christmas trees are imported and begin to dry out the minute they’re unpacked from the shipping containers. A better bet is a potted palm or star pine, though hanging ornaments on palm fronds can be tricky.

Hotels, shops, and restaurants decorate with island style for tourists who arrive with families in tow to celebrate on the sand. Christmas trees wear hula skirts. Tikis wear tinsel. Blow-up Santas are strapped down so they don’t fly away on the trade winds. There is something so not right about a huge plastic snowman standing under a coconut palm in eighty degree heat.

Festivals of light are celebrated with boat parades where decorated floating craft range from yachts to kayaks. There’s nothing like the sight of bright colorful Christmas lights reflected on shimmering water. Santa is usually the parade’s grand finale as he floats by in his sleigh pulled by eight leaping dolphins or paddles onto the beach in an outrigger canoe full of presents.

Local and tourists alike get together at beach pot-lucks, luaus, fancy hotel buffets, or smaller gatherings at home after a quick surf session, if the waves are good, or a walk on the beach if the sun is shining. Of course, if it rains while you’re out walking, there’s usually a stunning rainbow when the sun breaks through the clouds.

Like everywhere else in the world, Christmas and the Holidays are a time for giving. Tis’ the season, so this month, Three to Get Lei’d, the third book in my Tiki Goddess Mystery series, will be featured as an Amazon Monthly Deal. A quick trip to the tropics might be just the pick-me-up you need whenever you can sneak a quiet moment for yourself or you might gift a copy to a friend as a little treat to savor.

No matter where you are or how you celebrate the season, I wish you and yours Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year.

As we say here in the islands, Mele Kalikimaka and Hau’oli Makahiki Hou!

Jill Marie Landis is a best-selling, award winning novelist of at least thirty novels (she’s lost count) who lives on an outer island in Hawaii with her hubby and a very spoiled cat. When she’s not writing she’s probably at the beach soaking up the sun or off somewhere dancing the hula. Read about her Tiki Goddess Mystery Series at www.thetikigoddess.com or join Jill Marie on Facebook and Twitter.

Three to Get Lei’d by Jill Marie Landis is on sale the entire month of December for just $1.99! Click the cover below to purchase!

MEMORY LOSS: THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE UGLY

by Don Donaldson

I once saw a guy on TV who could tell you what the weather had been every day of his life since he was six years old. He was what they call a Savant.  He wasn’t normal.  The normal brain is supposed to forget experiences like that, thereby keeping itself uncluttered enough that it can remember more important things. For example, while driving your car, it’s always good to remember which pedal works the gas and which one stops the vehicle. When crossing the street on foot, does the upraised hand on the signal across from you mean stop or go? Okay, I think you get the idea.  So forgetting what you had for breakfast on Sept. 15, five years ago, is nothing to worry about.  And nobody does.  (Except for detectives who are always asking people where they were or what they were doing so long ago nobody could give them a satisfactory answer.)

It takes a lot of memory to function normally.  What does my car look like?  Where do I live?  What’s my name? People generally don’t have trouble with questions like that because those memories are extremely important and they get reinforced practically every day.  But for many of us, anniversaries and birthdays sometimes get lost in the myriad of activities a typical day requires. If asked, we could recite the date of those special events, but we just forget to remember them at the appropriate time.  For men, those memory slips can be classified as bad or very bad depending on the temperament of their spouse.

In contrast to what I’ve described above, suppose you look at the clock one day and discover that you’ve lost four hours and have no idea what you did or where you were during that time. That’s not only an example of an ugly kind of memory loss, it’s one that would terrify you.  Now imagine that it happened for the first time shortly after you started your new job at a mental hospital where some of your patients were criminally insane. Did you leave any of the insanity wards unlocked?  Were you alone with any of the dangerous inmates?  What the h… is happening to you?

That’s the situation facing the lead character in my book, THE MEMORY THIEF. Marti Segerson has accepted a job as staff psychiatrist at an old mental hospital in a rural area of Tennessee.  She’s there to seek revenge on one of the inmates for something that happened to her when she was a child. She has a good plan, but couldn’t have anticipated the horrific events that soon overtake her.

In all my medical thrillers I try to push the existing frontiers of knowledge just a bit farther into the future.  It’s interesting to me that some readers will not accept such a thing.  They judge an event or situation in a novel to be believable only if it has already really happened somewhere.  But where’s the fun in that? To me that’s like preferring to get a nap in the hotel while the rest of the group is climbing on a bus for a sightseeing trip to some exotic location. When it comes to writing, I’d rather get out of the hotel.  In THE MEMORY THIEF, The nature of memory, how it’s captured, how it’s recalled, where in the brain it’s stored; all provided fertile ground for the kind of story I like to tell. I hope it’s one you won’t soon forget.

So who wants to go sightseeing with me?

Don Donaldson’s THE MEMORY THIEF is on sale for just $1.99 til the 15th! Pick it up today! 

Click the cover to view:

Why is there no Grandmother’s Day?

This is a trick question.

Every book I write, including The Crossroads Café, focuses not only on a core romance story but is also about family;  mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, and grandparents. Sometimes the theme may be subtle, sometimes not. Family is the parallel core, regardless.

My mother made me what I am today.

All the good stuff and the bad. Some of it sad, but forgiveness was always a given between us.

She was simple, easy, heartbreaking, wonderful. Ma was normal, flawed, like me, but kinder than I am and more realistic. I miss her every moment of every day. She died in my home nine years ago next December, her bedroom filled with Christmas decorations, with me standing beside the rented hospital bed, yelling for help from the hospice nurse.

I am writing this in a sunroom that is now my office, just outside her bedroom. Fifteen feet from where she lay in that sad, rented bed with its undulating air-pump mattress to prevent bed sores, its pull-up rails to keep her from tumbling out, and the loud, gasp-and-release gush of the oxygen concentrator that fed life into her cigarette-ruined lungs.

A few of her clothes still hang in the room’s closet. I store my yarn in there, and so I often stroke her dresses while searching for a skein or hank. Her soft fleece jacket, her nightgowns. I talk to them. To her.

I want her forgiveness for something. It’s always there, the need to be forgiven by her.

Forgiveness was never an issue with my grandmother, however. Forgiveness was for weaklings. She wanted to mold me into a fire-breathing dragon, the spitting were-cat of Southern womanhood. Just like her.

As a result, I’m a product of a mixed marriage.

Submissive, chain-smoking, hard-drinking, tender-hearted Mama.

Dominant, teetotaler, hard-hearted Grandmother.

I have the fantasies of a Valkyrie mixed with the manners of a furious wildcat shellacked with the veneer of Melanie Wilkes.

Why, bless your heart. And to hell with you.  

There she is. Grandma is peeking around the corner of my mind, whispering to me. Good angel or fallen angel? Both?

She defended me fiercely during my years as a whacky teenager, but would come into my tiny bedroom when I slept too late and throw a pan of sizzling, oven-broiled buttered toast on me.

On the eve of my wedding, she very dramatically (at 85 years old) staggered down her hallway and collapsed loudly against my bedroom door.

“Have your fun and spend your money the way you want to before you get married. After that, you’re stuck.”

No offense to my beloved Husband of lo’ these many years, but she had a point, at least in her experience. She’d given up her career at Western Union in the 1940’s, as a trainer of telegram operators, because my grandfather (who also worked for Western Union) said she must stay home and become a fulltime mother to my Dad.

Dad turned out to be an only child. Go figure.

She put aside her daily downtown Atlanta life, where she rubbed shoulders with Margaret Mitchell, shopped at Rich’s Department Store, and was among the first at Western Union to know that President Roosevelt had died at Warm Springs—top secret messages came through her office on their way to Washington, D.C.—to become a farm wife wearing aprons and canning vegetables.

The anger in her was immense. As a child I watched her gleefully wring chickens by the neck; she patrolled her property with a sawed-off shotgun and challenged neighbors to so much as set foot inside her territory. Before electric or even hand-cranked can openers, she jabbed the wicked blade of a hand-held can opener into quivering tin containers. She pumped the blade around their rims like an oysterman cracking a shell.

She could kill people with that can blade. I’m not sure she hadn’t stabbed a few. Some of her nefarious siblings (from a dirt-poor family of eleven kids) challenged her as long as she lived.

She adored her baby brothers—they could do no wrong, in her mind—the preacher, the polio survivor, the dead war hero, and the youngest brother who joined the navy not long after World War One and eventually settled in sunny California with a bawdy, lovable, California beach babe.

But her sisters? Whoa. It was whispered she’d hauled her indiscreet younger sisters to back-alley abortionists in their teens; she’d even incarcerated one sister in a Catholic “school” for girls. Grandmother didn’t care about religion, not seriously, so she had few prejudices in that regard. To her, Catholic nuns were admirably strict.  She judged them on that merit, alone.

Grandmother didn’t take excuses for an answer. This was the girl who got on a train in 1911 and traveled to the far end of Georgia. She was seventeen years old and had never been outside her own home county before.

She worked her way through a teacher’s college amidst the hot cotton fields of South Georgia, waiting tables in the faculty dining room.

It was a co-ed school. The boys studied farming. Modern agriculture. Grandma became sweethearts with a football player. She posed for a picture on a tennis court, of all things, holding a racket and pretending she would ever willingly smack a ball for fun; besides, the college’s dress code was still rooted in the 1800’s. So there she stood, the farm girl corseted into a dark, full-length dress with puffed seeves. Her brown hair was done up in a high Gibson Girl ’do.

Her expression looked grim.

You’re going to aim a stupid little ball at me? You’ll wish you’d been skinned alive, instead. 

She never doubted herself, never apologized, never backed down. At the end of her life, as she lay in a nursing home at ninety-two, with me holding her hand, I said, “I love you.” I had hardly ever said that to her before. She’d never said it to anyone, me included.

“I love you,” I said.

“I know,” she answered.

Couldn’t pry a return confession out of her. Not even with Death’s scepter as the can opener.

Remember your family with THE CROSSROADS CAFE – an April Monthly Deal for only $1.99!

What Women Really Want

by Judith Arnold

A few years ago, a woman in my circle announced that she and her husband of many years were separating. Nothing permanent, she assured us. They were going to sell their house, rent two apartments, and reevaluate in a year. They still loved each other; they just wanted to live apart for a while.

The predominant reaction among my friends was…envy.

Mind you, we’re all in solid, long-term marriages. We love our husbands. Yet every woman I spoke to expressed the wish that she could do what my friend was doing.

I remembered my mother’s envy when my sister graduated from college and took an apartment in Manhattan. To call this apartment small would be charitable. I’ve seen bigger closets. But it was hers and hers alone, and my mother—who at that time lived in a comfortable seven-room house and had been married to my father for about twenty-five years—said, “This is my dream! An apartment like this, all to myself!” My father died some months after their sixtieth anniversary, and though she misses him, my mother now has—and loves—a cozy little apartment all to herself.

When you’re a novelist, you can make your dreams come true on paper, if not in real life. The dream my friend was living with her husband in their his-and-hers apartments seemed like a great premise for a novel. Thus was born Goodbye to All That. When female acquaintances of a certain age asked me what I was working on, I’d describe the book to them and they’d sigh and say, “Oh, I wish I could do that!”

The romance novels I’ve written explore the joys and emotional risks of falling in love. But for many women, after we’ve done the falling-in-love thing, the ’til-death-do-us-part thing, the happily-ever-after thing, routine sets in. We spend our days doing whatever needs doing that no one else wants to do. We make sure the kids have their school lunches with them. We remember the doctor appointments and the music lessons. We run the laundry, stock the refrigerator, and get the car to the shop for servicing, because if we don’t do it, it won’t get done. We do, do, do for everyone else.

We take care of our families because we love them. But the notion of living only for ourselves, tending to our own needs before we tend to anyone else’s, is as exciting a fantasy as being swept off our feet by a sexy hero.

My husband and I will be celebrating our thirty-fifth anniversary this fall. I adore him. He still makes me laugh. He still makes me think. He’s still cute. But every now and then, I find myself thinking about Ruth Bendel, the family matriarch who one day says “goodbye to all that” in my novel and moves into her own apartment, just to see what it feels like to be in charge of the remote control, to sleep in the center of the bed, to answer to no one but herself. A woman can dream, can’t she?

Find what YOU really want in GOODBYE TO ALL THAT – an April Monthly Deal for only $1.99!!

“The Mother I Will Never Forget”

by Phyllis Schieber

My mother, a survivor of the Holocaust, thought it was a miracle that she could feed, clothe and keep her children safe. For a woman who had survived the Tranistria Death March when she was fourteen, it must have seemed an extraordinary triumph. But many years later, she discovered Dr. Leo Buscaglia, an inspirational writer and speaker, on television, and she learned that it was also important to verbally express love to those you cherished. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know.” From then on, every conversation ended with, “I love you.” I admired her willingness to learn and to grow. She was charming too. People were drawn to her, captivated by her beauty, her wit and flirtatious ways. But she was fragile, damaged. I seem to have always known that just as I always knew it was my responsibility to care for her.

After The Manicurist was released, I was interviewed on Blogaid Radio. The host, Mananna Stephenson, suggested that the relationship between Tessa, the protagonist in The Manicurist, and Ursula, her mother, had a dynamic similar to my relationship with my mother. Ursula, who is extremely troubled and needy, depends on Tessa to help navigate the world. Though I shouldn’t have been, I was surprised by the resemblance between the circumstances of Tessa’s life to my own life.

I frequently write about the complex relationships between mothers and daughters. I loved my mother. She could infuriate me with her stubbornness and her neediness, but she could also touch my heart in ways that no one else could. Though she hardly wore any, she loved make-up and always bought items that came with a special offer. Once I said, “Mom, why do you buy all this stuff?” She smiled and said, “Because once in awhile, you just feel like a new lipstick.” She was right. My mother was shaped by an experience so devastating that I often wondered how she managed to still find joy in anything, to still love. But she did.

The relationship between Tessa and Ursula is so laden with disappointments and pain that it seems unlikely the two will ever be able to overcome their differences. Yet, throughout, they are unable to escape the bond between mother and daughter, even if it is a tenuous bond. From time-to-time in her later years, my mother would ask, “Was I a good mother?” I always reassured her that she had been a very good mother. And it was the truth. She did the best she could. And I believe that Ursula does the same. She wants to be good mother. That matters to her as it does to all of us who are mothers.

I dream about my mother sometimes. She’s always young, always smiling and laughing. Sometimes I’m cutting the threads between the scarves she sewed for a few cents each. I’m reading to her as the pastel colored chiffon tumbles around me, and she nods, listening and humming a song she could never quite remember the words to. That’s the mother I choose to remember. She was a good mother.  That’s the mother I remember, the mother I will never forget.

 THE MANICURIST by Phyllis Schieber is a March Monthly 100 for only $1.99! Get it today! 

“Like Lightning in a Bottle”

by Anne Stuart

Every now and then a writer has something absolutely fabulous happen to her.  All the stars are in alignment, the gods are smiling, and life is good.

About twenty years ago I wrote what still remains possibly my favorite book ever, NIGHTFALL, and the circumstances were blessed indeed.

I’d been busy writing romances for the Harlequin American, Harlequin Intrigue, and occasionally the Silhouette Intimate Moments lines.  Series writing is always full of rules:  I had editors count how many times I said “bitch” and “bastard” (and if you’re familiar with my work you know my hero and heroine tend to think of their true love in such cantankerous terms).  I’ve traded two “bitches” for a “bastard” when I really wanted it, and made a mostly unsuccessful attempt at behaving myself.  As anyone will tell you, I’ve never been very good at being good.

I wrote books where the hero was the son of a mass murderer, or he thought he was the reincarnation of Jack the Ripper and the heroine was the reincarnation of a victim.  I had heroes pretending to be crazy, heroes who were unrepentant cat burglars, disfigured hermits, 1930’s pilots, shapeshifters before they were popular, ghosts from the Valentine’s Day Massacre, fallen angels.  I broke all sorts of rules and had a good time doing it, but everyone kept asking me when I was going to do a “big book.”  It was a time when most series writers were moving out of the category business, but I kept writing my edgy books and staying exactly where I was.  Whenever I came up with a proposal for a mainstream romantic suspense novel it was turned down and ended up going to Silhouette Intimate Moments (and both times becoming a RITA finalist – NOW YOU SEE HIM and SPECIAL GIFTS).  I finally gave up trying to please anyone and began writing historicals, having a wicked good time with them (literally) when out of the blue Jennifer Enderlin, then at Penguin/Signet called up my agent and offered a six figure contract for two romantic suspense novels.

After being flabbergasted for a few hours I said yes, and the idea appeared to me like manna from heaven.  I’d had no plans, no ideas, and suddenly it was all there before me.  I took all sorts of bits from the news – Norman Mailer got a murderer named Jack Henry Abbott paroled on the basis of his poetry (and his own ego) and Abbott ending up murdering someone.  There was a famous crime in Philadelphia where a teacher murdered a woman and her two children, though the two children were never found.  One of our endless Middle Eastern wars was on, giving me good role models for the father-in-law, and it all came together in a book so good it could cure cancer.

Now I’ve been told that’s a very offensive thing to say – that books can’t cure cancer.  But I’m basing it on Norman Cousins’s classic work, ANATOMY OF AN ILLNESS, where he discussed how laughter, watching Marx Brothers’ movies, cured him of a wretched disease.  It seemed completely logical to me – I think music or any art form can do the same thing.  When a book or a symphony or a movie speaks to you so exactly that you’re transported to another dimension then your body fills with all sorts of good stuff like endorphins.  Stuff that will heal you.  Personally I think that’s one reason athletes are healthy.  Not because they exercise, but because being a professional athlete requires you to get in “the zone” which is exactly where those endorphins etc.  lurk.

NIGHTFALL can cure cancer for some people – if it happens to speak directly to their fantasies.  It could, presumably, make other people ill with its intensity and darkness before the ultimate redemption.  I consider it a great gift to be able to write books that are that powerful.  Many reviews of my work say “Anne Stuart is not for everyone” or “not for the faint of heart,” and while I wish everyone could love my work I know that’s impossible.  At least I take comfort in the fact that few people are lukewarm about my work, and about NIGHTFALL in particular.

(BTW Norman Cousins was a good man, a peace activist but a sexist pig who believed women didn’t belong in the work force.  No one’s perfect).

A book like NIGHTFALL is like lightning in a bottle – no matter how powerful your will and your talent, you can’t make one happen.  It’s one of those rare, blessed times in a long career that carries you through the less inspired times, and reviews, sales, etc. mean nothing.  It’s my badge of honor, and I wear it proudly.

NIGHTFALL is a March Monthly 100 for only $1.99! Grab it today!