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Showing posts with label gothic elements. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gothic elements. Show all posts

Thursday, October 18, 2018

Shadow's Way


This post is part of a virtual book tour organized by Goddess Fish Promotions. The author will be giving away a $25 Amazon/BN GC. Click on the tour banner to see the rest of the stops on the tour.

Prepare to be spellbound. Barbara Frances' long-awaited third novel, Shadow's Way, takes you to the coastal, deep South, where the past and the present mingle in a gothic tale of insanity, murder, and sexual intrigue.

You'll meet the beautiful Elaine Chauvier, former actress and proprietor of Shadow's Way, her family's antebellum home; the esteemed Archbishop Andre Figurant and his fallen identical twin, Bastien; newly arrived Ophelia and Rudy, here to explore their Chauvier roots and their ties to Shadow's Way; and the mysterious Madame Claudine. Under a veneer of piety and graciousness, i.e., the questions: What is good? What is evil? What is reality?

Read an excerpt:

Archbishop Figurant gazed down the extended maple table, luminous from layer upon layer of bee’s wax. Soon they would be arriving. It was going to be a hard hitting but necessary meeting, long overdue. Abandoning protocol, he would be going against the Church’s hierarchy to expose a long-lived charade of denial and hypocrisy. No longer was he going to ram his head up his self-righteous ass. He was going to act.

Lanita entered the room with a large tray of chicken sandwiches and fruit pastries. “Oh, ‘cuse me, your Excellency. I didn’t know you were already here. I’ll be out of your way in no time.” Her words hummed with the rhythmic cadence of a Caribbean island. Neat as a pin in a freshly starched uniform and hair tucked away in a plain white turban, she slipped from point to point, smooth and efficient.

“You’re fine, Lanita. I’m trying to get my thoughts in order. You’d best put out some ashtrays. I anticipate Monsignors Flannigan and Murphy will burn up a field of tobacco when they hear what I’ve got to say.” She laughed out loud. “Maybe I should put out the whiskey, too, yes?

“No, they’ll have to survive on coffee or water today.” He smiled at her. “Be good for them.”

He and Lanita had a comfortable relationship. She had been his housekeeper for six years. He knew some of her secrets and she knew some of his. Late afternoons he often watched her from the upstairs window as she rode her bicycle home, hair fanning out in an Afro halo and a colorful skirt billowing in the wind.

Two chapters available at http://shadowsway.com/chapters.html

About the Author:
Barbara Frances has plenty of stories and a life spent acquiring them. Growing up Catholic on a small Texas farm, her childhood ambition was to become a nun. In ninth grade she entered a boarding school in Our Lady of the Lake Convent as an aspirant, the first of several steps before taking vows. On graduation, however, she passed up the nun’s habit for a college degree in English and Theatre Arts. Her professors were aghast when she declined a PhD program in order to become a stewardess, but Barbara never looked back. “In the Sixties, a stewardess was a glamorous occupation.” Her career highlights include dating a very gentlemanly Chuck Berry and “opening the bar” for a planeload of underage privates on their way to Vietnam.

Marriage, children, school teaching and divorce distracted her from storytelling, but one summer she and a friend coauthored a screenplay. “I never had such fun! I come from a family of storytellers. Relatives would come over and after dinner everyone would tell tales. Sometimes they were even true.” The next summer Barbara wrote a screenplay solo. Contest recognition, an agent and three optioned scripts followed but, weary of fickle producers and endless rewrites, she turned to novels. Shadow’s Way is her third book. Her first, Lottie’s Adventure, is aimed at young readers. Her second, Like I Used To Dance, is a family saga set in 1950’s rural Texas. Barbara’s fans can be thankful she passed up convent life for one of stories and storytelling. She and her husband Bill live in Austin, Texas.

Barbara welcomes questions or comments about Shadow’s Way at barb@barbarafrances.com.

http://shadowsway.com
http://barbarafrances.com

Buy the book at https://www.amazon.com/Shadows-Way-Barbara-Frances-ebook/dp/B07FZ895H1/ref=sr_1_1

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Tuesday, November 15, 2016

Fallen Star Review



Fallen Star
by Allison Morse

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GENRE:  Pschological Mystery with Strong Gothic Elements

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BLURB:

Who killed 1940s screen goddess Gloria Reardon? Her unsolved murder hypnotized the public with its scandalous details and shocked two generations. 

In this coming of age gothic tale, avid feminist and aspiring filmmaker Kate Bloom discovers long lost footage that holds the key to who murdered her grandmother. Legendary movie star, Gloria Reardon, may be dead, but friends and lovers from the Golden Age of Hollywood’s heyday are still very much on the scene, and it seems everyone has something to gain or lose from Kate’s discovery. Enlisting the youthful and brash film restorer Dylan Nichols as her closest ally, Kate becomes haunted by Gloria’s glittering past. Caught between glamorous Old Hollywood and the gritty, exciting New Hollywood of the 1970s, Kate is determined to find out what really happened to her grandmother and in the process, becomes the killer’s new target.

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EXCERPT:

Two hours later, she sat in Dylan’s rumbling Mustang, heading toward her childhood home. The companionable silence of the drive was made all the more soothing by the summer sun dappling through the shade of the elm trees lining blocks of Claremont Village. That was, until he parked in front of her house.

She felt the now familiar lap of moist heat brushing her skin.

She gritted her teeth. Weren’t ghosts supposed to be cold! This feeling was too warm, too seductive to be ethereal.

Ghosts? No. That’s crazy talk.

Yet, maybe gothic castles and windswept moors weren’t the only places where spirits lingered. Here, at her celery green home with its single car attached garage, small lawn, and one lonely palm tree, she sensed her mother’s anger at a world that had taken so much from her. And she felt Gloria as if she sat right beside her.

With a sense of panic, Kate double checked what she was wearing. No swan pin, no revealing bathing attire, only her wonderfully large tee shirt, scuffed jeans and boots.

Yeah! She was still herself!

My Review

Ms. Morse can write. I found myself thinking of the book when I wasn't reading it, and I was in a hurry to find out how it all ended. The gothic elements are very well done. They give you a creepy feeling without going overboard which is so easy to do in that genre. Her characters were all flawed which was fantastic. It made them seem like real people and not cardboard representations of what someone decided was the perfect human being. The plot moved along well, and I loved trying to solve the mystery of the star's death. And I do love that cover. I can recommend this one with no trouble at all. 5 stars.   

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AUTHOR Bio and Links:

Allison is the author of two novels: The Sweetheart Deal and Fallen Star. She lives with her husband in a house in the hills that’s filled with books.
For book club resources and to learn more about Allison and her new fiction, please visit her Website at http://www.allisonmorseauthor.com/

Twitter ID:  AllisonMorseLA

Buy links:

Amazon - http://amzn.to/2aHLICj

Barnes & Noble - http://bit.ly/2bnsv8Q

KOBO - http://bit.ly/2bntdDm


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GIVEAWAY INFORMATION and RAFFLECOPTER CODE

Allison Morse will be awarding a $20 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