Debut Showcases for Early August

Due to my semi-hiatus, this is my first Debut Showcase in about a month. My apologizes for the authors I missed, but this is a blog, not a news source, so I’m just going to carry on with this week’s debuts. If you are curious about those missed debuts, just look on my debut calendar–you can scroll backwards and forwards. In the meantime, I shall just wince and go on.

Death Most Definite
by Trent Jamieson
Orbit Books

Steve knew something was wrong as soon as he saw the dead girl in the Wintergarden food court. Nothing new – he saw dead people all the time – but this one was about to save his life . . .

Steve is a necromancer in the family firm, tasked with easing spirits from this dimension to the next after death. And he’s kind of OK with that, until someone high up the corporate hierarchy makes a bid to be Australia’s new Regional Death. This means killing all of the current Death’s staff. After his parents, relatives and pretty much every other necromancer he ever knew has been killed, Steve is left to make a reluctant stand.

But to do this he must stay alive. Threatened at every turn, Steve and the perilously attractive (and dead) Lissa go on the run to save what’s left of their world.

Despite the horror-ish plot, this novel is classified as an urban fantasy. It looks like the zombie trend continues!

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The Vigilante’s Bride
by  Yvonne Harris
Bethany House
Trade Paperback

Christian Romance

Robbing a stagecoach on Christmas Eve and kidnapping a woman passenger is the last thing Luke Sullivan expects to do. He just wanted to reclaim the money stolen from him, but ends up with a feisty copper-haired orphan thrown over his shoulder who was on her way to marry Sullivan’s bitter enemy. Emily McCarthy is an orphan out of options. Forced to marry because she was too old for her orphanage, she doesn’t take kindly to her rescue. Still she trusts God can turn any situation to good especially when it seems Sullivan may just be the man of her dreams. But Sullivan’s crossed a dangerous man unused to losing and Emily may just be the prize he’s unwilling to sacrifice. When a rugged cowboy rescues a feisty mail-order bride headed for danger in 1880s Montana, crossing his enemy is just the beginning of his troubles.

This looks adorable. I have a fondness for prairie romances, but I’ve only enjoyed them in movie form so far. Now I have one that I can look for. I would like to humbly suggest to the author that she invest some time into some search engine optimization, because I only found her website after a determined search. There is a children’s author with the same name, which complicated matters.

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Ok, so this made for a pathetic debut showcase. I will go back another week.

The Exile of Sara Stevenson
by  Darci Hannah
Ballantine Books
Trade Paperback

Historical Novel

In 1814, Sara Stevenson, the well-bred but high-spirited daughter of celebrated Scottish lighthouse designer Robert Stevenson, falls in love with a common sailor, Thomas Crichton. On the day of their clandestine elopement, Thomas mysteriously disappears, leaving Sara heartbroken, secretly pregnant, and at the mercy of her overbearing family. Refusing to relinquish her hopes that Thomas will someday return to her, Sara is banished to an eerie lighthouse on lonely and remote Cape Wrath. There she meets William Campbell, the reclusive yet dashing light-keeper who incites her ire—and interest. Soon Sara begins to accept her life on the cape and her growing attraction to William—until a mystifying package from an Oxford antiquarian arrives, giving intriguing clues to Thomas’s whereabouts. Through her correspondence with the antiquarian, Sara slowly uncovers the story of her beloved’s fate. But what she doesn’t immediately grasp is that these letters travel an even greater distance than she could have imagined—as the boundaries between time and space unravel to forge an incredible connection between a woman and a man many years apart.

And to think, I almost didn’t announce this one. A time travel romance! Another weakness of mine! Or actually, its the time travel thing that hooks me more than the romance. I wish the blurb had spent a little more time on the time travel aspect.

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The Sixth Surrender
by  Hana Samek Norton
Plume
Trade Paperback

Historical Novel

In the last years of her eventful life, queen-duchess Aliénor of Aquitaine launches a deadly dynastic chess game to safeguard the crowns of Normandy and England for John Plantagenet, her last surviving son.

To that end, Aliénor coerces into matrimony her two pawns—Juliana de Charnais, a plain and pious novice determined to regain her inheritance, and Guérin de Lasalle, a cynical, war-worn mercenary equally resolved to renounce his.

Lasalle does not intend to be a husband to the shy young woman, nor to become entangled in John’s own matrimonial mire,but at the heart of Aliénor’s scheme is the mystery of his own past that could cost John his thrones—and Juliana her life.

Eleanor of Aquitaine was one fierce mama–she has a significant entry in a nonfiction book I have called Woman Warriors. I found the publisher’s blurb to be very weak and I’m afraid this one (from the author’s website) is only slightly better. I think the cover is beautiful, however.

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Wow; we’re a bit on the historicals this week. Of all of these, I think I like The Vigilante’s Bride the best. I’m in the mood for something that and I have definitely been leaning toward the historicals in my reading selections lately. Any float your boat?

And I still want to pick up that Punjabi mystery I announced way back in May!