This Madness of the Heart
by Blair Yeatts
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GENRE: gothic mystery/thriller
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BLURB:
Bad religion can be deadly. So Miranda Lamden, small-town
religion professor, discovers in This Madness of the Heart. The dark hollers of
Eastern Kentucky offer fertile soil for shady evangelist Jasper Jarboe, new
president of Grace and Glory Bible College, as he beguiles the small mining
town of Canaan Wells with his snake-oil charm.
When Miranda isn’t teaching at Obadiah Durham
College, she’s investigating paranormal phenomena—or enjoying a turbulent
romantic relationship with backwoods artist Jack Crispen. JJ’s
inquisition-style gospel has alienated her long since, but when he announces
his plan to transform her forest home into an evangelical Mecca, complete with
neon cross and 40-foot Jesus, Miranda girds her loins for war. But JJ isn’t
finished: he goes on to launch an attack on her friend and fellow professor
Djinn Baude with an avalanche of vicious rumors. Not only does he accuse Djinn of
demonic communion with the old Voudon witch whose curse killed the college’s
founding family, but he also smears her with insinuations of lechery and vice.
With JJ’s urging, hate boils over into violence and
tragedy, sweeping Miranda up in its flood. One death follows another as a
miasma of evil overwhelms the tiny community, and only Miranda can see clearly
enough to halt its spread.
This Madness of the Heart is the first in a new
series of Gothic mystery-thrillers featuring Professor Miranda Lamden, whose
spiritual gifts have drawn her beyond university walls to explore the mysteries
of other world beliefs. Her unique vision brings her into repeated
confrontations with evil, where too often she finds herself standing alone
between oblivious onlookers and impending disaster.
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EXCERPT:
The large woman beside me
slid to the plank floor with surprising grace, twitching and jerking on her
back, eyes glittering sightlessly under half-closed lids. Worshippers stepped
around her with hardly a thought. Her lips fluttered in prayer, inaudible
amidst the tumbling chaos of sound rolling through the tiny church.
“Hallelujer! Hallelujer!
Thank you, Lord! Thank you, Jesus! Praise-a the Lord!
Oooooooohhh, glory be to
God, honey! Praise-a his holy name!” The preacher’s voice roared over the
babble.
I rocked contentedly in the
midst of a storm of joy. Ecstasy beat against me like a rising spring tide. I
loved my work. No matter how many hours I spent observing people celebrating
their faith, their joy always lifted me up—perhaps bearing me on the wings of
their prayers. And Appalachian Holiness congregations had to be among my
favorites. I loved their lack of pretense, their tolerance of diversity, their
unselfconscious enthusiasm. I envied how easily they gave themselves up to
spiritual ecstasy. Comparatively, I was a clam, tightly sealed in a riotous bed
of wave-swept anemones.
Several white-shirted men
carried cardboard boxes into the center of the floor while the worshippers
danced close around. One by one, two by two, three by three, coiling
copperheads, cottonmouths, and rattlesnakes were scooped from the boxes and
passed from dancer to dancer, man or woman, whoever held out a willing hand.
Panic knocked the breath
from my body like an adder’s sudden strike. My gut clenched, writhing with the
coiling snakes. Tremors shook my hands. Shadow threatened to overwhelm my
sight. I’d forgotten myself, relaxed my guard, let slip the rigorous discipline
I wore like a second skin in my field studies.
A WORD FROM THE AUTHOR
1.When did you first realize you wanted to become a writer?
I’m not sure. I was one of those little kids who was forever making up stories
and telling them to herself and to anyone else who’d listen, even before I was
old enough to start school. I remember a kindergarten teacher who took a
special interest in my stories and wrote some of them down—even invited me over
to her house for tea from time to time. (This was back in the days when
teachers could do things like that without people looking at them oddly). But life
and growing up took their toll on that free-flowing creativity, and for many
years whatever stories came to me I kept to myself. I wrote for English classes,
but turned my attention to academic subjects—and art. I don’t think the urge to
write really returned until I started journaling during a particularly tough
personal time. Those journals eventually grew into (a perfectly dreadful)
autobiography, which I am endlessly grateful was never published! But the act
of writing it, and the intensity of that creative experience, reminded me of
the delight I’d once found in weaving words into story . . . and I was hooked.
That was twenty-some years and seven books ago now, and it’s all I can do to
tear myself away from my desk when the muse is speaking—no, let me rephrase
that: if the muse is speaking, only a power outage could drag me away from my
computer, and then I’d probably just switch to my laptop!
2.Besides yourself, who is your favorite author in the genre that you
write?
That’s an odd question for me! It was only when I sent This Madness of the Heart out to a few
readers that the word “gothic” came up. I had set out to write a
mystery-thriller, for lack of a better description. I love mysteries, but not
the formulaic ones that spend a lot of pages on alibis and timetables. “Gothic”
was a surprise, so I looked it up online and found a helpful article by Robert
Harris. According to him, the elements of a gothic novel include things like: a
setting in an old mansion or ruin; an atmosphere of threat and mystery; an old
prophecy or curse; omens, portents, visions; the supernatural; women in
distress, especially from tyrannical males . . . well, bingo! So, in answer to
your question, I haven’t read any gothic novels since my teens (I loved Mary
Stewart), although I intend to. But I do read mystery-thrillers. My favorite
author would probably be the mother/son team “Charles Todd,” who writes the
Inspector Ian Rutledge series; I don’t care for their Bess Crawford novels.
Nevada Barr runs a close second for me. She was my favorite for many years, but
I’ve found her most recent mysteries to be increasingly dark and violent. I
enjoy a moderate amount of violence, but not too bloody. I don’t care for
too-sweet books, either, with happy-happy endings, but I do like resolution and
justice and healing in the end, without lingering despair.
3.What are reading right now?
I just finished Robin McKinley’s Deerskin,
and enjoyed it so much that I’m reading her more recent (vampire) novel, Sunshine, right now. Deerskin was pure magic, although shot
through with harrowing pain. Yet she brought healing and justice to her ending.
I’ll read it again. Books I really like leave me feeling that there’s more to
be discovered in a second reading. As for Sunshine,
I haven’t finished it, but I trust McKinley enough as a storyteller to believe
she’ll bring it to a satisfying ending. So far it’s entertaining, and her
vampire portrayals are creative and unique, although I don’t like it as well as
Deerskin. I don’t often read vampire
books these days. I went through a vampire phase, when I read everything Anne
Rice (and others) wrote, but too often I find that they call to something dark
in me that needs no encouragement. We all balance light and dark inside us, but
I’ve discovered that too much darkness leads to places I don’t care to go.
4.Which one of your characters is most like you?
Miranda Lamden, the series’ main character, has a lot of me in her. Maybe
that’s because I originally wrote Madness
as an expression of my own disgust with villains like Jasper Jarboe, DD.
Perhaps she emerged full grown from my brow like Athena, a kind of avenging
“me.” Or not. Anyway, we have a lot in common: we’re both college professors
who teach religion and have a particular interest in paranormal phenomena; we
both find peace and healing in wild nature; we both have mystical bents, and we
both love cats. But our personalities are quite different, as are the other
elements of our lives. Although I think most writers start out writing what
they know, some characters seem to insinuate themselves into a writer’s mind,
taking on their own personalities, wisdom, and history: they just are. She’s
somewhere in the middle.
5.Which of your books is your favorite? Why?
First I need to say that “Blair Yeatts” is a pen name that I chose in
order to publish the Miranda Lamden series without confusing the readers of my
other three books, which are in a completely different genre. And I’ve already
written three books in the Miranda series: Madness
is only the first. So when you ask me which is my favorite, first I have to
eliminate the other three from consideration, which leaves me with Madness and two no one else has read
yet! But still, I think I would choose the second one in this series, due out
(with any luck) before Christmas: Blood
on Holy Ground. The relationship between Miranda and Jack Crispen, her
significant other, becomes more intense in every way, and the violence may be
more disturbing. Both are essential parts of the story. In Holy Ground, Miranda goes to a convent in Tennessee’s hill-country
to research an old Native American legend on the small reservation that adjoins
the convent grounds. She and Jack stumble into a firestorm of savage violence
and only escape with their lives thanks to the guidance of the Native elders
and the power of an angry land. Everything in Holy Ground comes together for me: its flow, its intensity, the
depth of the characters, and their healing, and the uniqueness and power of nature
and land.
AUTHOR Bio and
Links:
Blair Yeatts grew up in the midst of a large, old southern
Virginia family, much like the family of her main character. She followed her
parents into a career in academia and taught religion at the college level in
Kentucky for many years. Her special areas of expertise are psychology and
Earth-based religions, in which she has done considerable research.
From
childhood, Ms. Yeatts has been a fan of mystery fiction, starting with Nancy
Drew and moving through Agatha Christie to twentieth century giants like
Dorothy L. Sayers, P.D. James, and Nevada Barr. She is fulfilling a life’s
dream in writing her own mysteries.
Ms.
Yeatts shares her home with her photographer husband, two cats, and a dog. She
has a lifelong love of wild nature, and prefers to set her stories in rural
areas, where threads of old spiritual realities still make themselves felt. Her
first three books take place in different parts of Kentucky and Tennessee.
Buy
Links:
This Madness of the Heart e-book will be free during the tour.
(CreateSpace
will be up on May 1)
Author/Book
Links
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GIVEAWAY INFORMATION and
RAFFLECOPTER CODE
Blair Yeatts will be awarding a $25 Amazon
or Barnes and Noble GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the
tour. Use the link below to enter.
a Rafflecopter giveaway
No one’s tougher than Carolina Cougars linebacker Derek McLaughlin. But when a fatal car accident claims the life of his girlfriend, Derek finds himself caught in a destructive spiral of drugs, alcohol, and meaningless sex. But not even a string of one-night stands can ease the hurt. Football is all he has left. Then fate leads him back to the scene of the crash, and into the arms of a kind, gorgeous woman who sees past his façade to the man he once was . . . and can be again.
New York Times and USA Today bestselling author L. P. Dover is a southern belle living in North Carolina with her husband and two beautiful girls. Before she began her literary journey she worked in periodontics, enjoying the wonderment of dental surgeries.
