San Francisco astrologer Julia Bonatti’s life is turned upside down when she becomes a target of the Reverend Roy of the Prophet’s Tabernacle. The Reverend, a recently-arrived cult preacher, is determined to drive sin from the city, but his gospel of love and compassion doesn’t extend to those he considers an “abomination unto the Lord.” Julia’s outspoken advice in her newspaper column, AskZodia, has put her at the top of the Reverend’s list. While the powerful Mercury-ruled preacher woos local dignitaries, his Army of the Prophet will stop at nothing to silence not just Julia, but anyone who stands in his way.
Driven out of her apartment in the midst of a disastrous Mercury retrograde period, she takes shelter with a client who’s caring for two elderly aunts. One aunt appears stricken with dementia and the other has fallen under the spell of the Reverend Roy. To add to the confusion, a young man claiming to be a long-lost nephew arrives. The longer he stays, the more dangerous things become. One aunt slides deeper into psychosis while the other disappears. Is this young man truly a member of the family? Can astrology confirm that? Julia’s not sure, but one thing she does know is that Mercury wasn’t merely the messenger of the gods – he was a trickster and a liar as well.
Book Details:
Genre: Mystery Published by: Suspense Publishing Publication Date: October 9, 2020 Number of Pages: 268 ISBN: 0578752654 (ISBN13: 9780578752655) Series: Zodiac Mystery #1 Purchase Links:Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Goodreads
Read an excerpt:
“Thank God you’re there.” Gale sounded very shaky.
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m at the Mystic Eye. Something very strange just happened. I heard a knock at the back door. I thought it might be you.”
“Are you alone?”
“Yes. I closed up and sent Cheryl home. When I opened the door . . . oh God, Julia. Someone left a dead cat on the doorstep.”
I cringed. “I’ll be right there.”
“I’m sorry. You don’t need to come. I wrapped it up and put it in plastic in the dumpster. It looked like its neck had been broken.”
“Don’t argue. I’ll be there in twenty minutes. Less than that.”
I drove the length of California Street as fast as I could, slowing at each red light. Once I was sure no other cars were crossing I ran through several intersections. When I reached the Eye the shop was closed but the display lights were on in the front windows. I pulled down the alleyway and parked next to Gale’s car. I tapped on the door. “Gale, it’s me.” She opened the door immediately. The storeroom was dark. A stack of empty boxes and packing materials stood against the wall. Inside, the only light was a small desk lamp in the office.
Gale is tall and self-assured with a regal bearing. Tonight she was completely shaken. She hugged her arms, more from fright than from cold. “I feel bad now that I’ve called you. I was just so freaked out. I recognized the cat, it was the little gray one that hangs out behind the apartment building next door. I think it’s a stray. Everyone around here feeds it, even the restaurant people, and it’s such a friendly little thing. Some sick bastard probably gave it some food and then snapped its neck. God, I think I’m going to be sick.”
“Shouldn’t you call the cops?”
“And tell them what? I found a dead cat? Please. Like they’d listen. Even if they thought someone had killed it, what could they do?”
“It shows a pattern of harassment. Might be worth making a report.”
She sighed. “Yeah. You’re probably right. I just wasn’t thinking straight. I was so upset.” She collapsed in the chair behind her desk.
I shrugged out of my coat. “Why are you here so late?”
“We just got a huge shipment of books and supplies in. Cheryl’s been working late every night so I sent her home. I had just finished stacking the boxes in the storeroom.” Gale shivered involuntarily. “Look, let’s get out of here. Have you eaten? Why don’t we go up the block and grab some food? Actually a drink sounds even better.”
“Okay.”
“Get your coat. We can leave the cars here and walk. I’ll just get my purse.”
I headed to the front door and checked that the locks were all in place. The drapes separating the display windows from the shop were drawn for privacy. Gale left the desk lamp on in the office and walked out to the front counter. As she reached under the counter for her purse, we heard glass breaking. Then I saw a flash of flame through the doorway to the back storeroom. I screamed. The empty boxes and packing materials had caught fire in an explosive flash. The smoke alarm started to ring, filling the shop with earsplitting sound. Using my coat like a blanket, I dropped it over the center of the flaming pile. It wasn’t going to be enough, but I had to do something before the entire storeroom went up, if not the building.
***
Excerpt from The Madness of Mercury by Connie di Marco. Copyright 2020 by Connie di Marco. Reproduced with permission from Connie di Marco. All rights reserved.
Author Bio:
Connie di Marco is the author of the Zodiac Mysteries featuring San Francisco astrologer Julia Bonatti. The Madness of Mercury, the first book in the series will be re-released in October 2020.
Writing as Connie Archer, she is also the author of the national bestselling Soup Lover’s Mysteries from Berkley Prime Crime. You can find her excerpts and recipes in The Cozy Cookbook and The Mystery Writers of America Cookbook. Connie is a member of Mystery Writers of America, International Thriller Writers and Sisters in Crime.
This is a rafflecopter giveaway hosted by Partners in Crime Virtual Book Tours for Connie di Marco. There will be two (2) winners each receiving one (1) Amazon.com Gift Card. The giveaway begins on December 1, 2020 and runs through January 2, 2021. Void where prohibited.
Bookish Adventures and Page-Bound Journeys: The Joys of Reading and Writing My Way to New People and Places
Books take me places. That’s one reason I love them. I like to travel, and a used paperback is a heck of a lot cheaper than a plane ticket. Plus books allow me access to corners of the world I couldn’t otherwise visit (at least not easily): just this year, I’ve gotten to ride on a Gulf Coast shrimp boat, sit down in a Paris apartment to talk Surrealist art with an expert, and train with sumo stars in Japan. All during lockdown! So when I write, I strive to create a story that will give my own readers the same opportunity to go someplace new . . . or to go somewhere familiar in a new way.
In The Venturi Effect, I’ve worked to drop readers onto the deck of a sailboat in the Gulf of Mexico, into a chair at counsel table in a federal courtroom, and onto a warm street on St. Kitts in the West Indies. In the book’s sequel, The Cult of Mammon, readers will visit the Big Island of Hawaii, an arid hideaway outside San Diego, and the call centers of a major fraud network . . . and they’ll get to revisit American Civil War history. My short-story collection, Love and Other Misunderstandings, wanders from Vegas to Heaven to Harbor Springs, Michigan—in a mere 184 pages. I write about places I’ve been, and places I imagine, including details that (I hope) will give people an authentic sense of those destinations on the page, and perhaps a means to see them in a new light.
Along with scratching bookishly itchy feet, good stories also give me new and interesting traveling companions—people I might not otherwise meet, people with interesting secrets. Whether I’m reading characters created by others or watching what my own prose-based people are doing, it’s fun to peek into lives full of tangled-up pasts and ill-conceived choices. In The Venturi Effect, I’ve gotten to know Devlin Winters, a burned-out former criminal-defense attorney who left a lucrative partnership at a large Chicago law firm and headed south to Texas to escape an imploding career. Ultimately, Devlin has to conquer her demons, return to the law, and face off against a prosecutor named Xavier Charles, whose sincere, but misguided, efforts to achieve justice unlock a Pandora’s box of secrets and drama—for Devlin and for himself.
For those who like a good legal yarn, for those who’ve ever wanted to sail to a Caribbean island, for those who want to find a traveling companion who loves large cats and Greek classics, The Venturi Effect may provide an answer to satisfy a little literary wanderlust this holiday season.
The Venturi Effect
by Sage Webb
on Tour November 1 – December 31, 2020
Synopsis:
After fleeing the crush of a partnership at a large Chicago criminal-defense firm and the humiliation of a professional breakdown, Devlin Winters just wants to be left alone with a couple sundowners on the deck of her dilapidated mahogany trawler on Galveston Bay. But when an old flame shows up on the boardwalk with a mysterious little boy in tow and an indictment on his heels, fate has other plans, and Devlin finds herself thrust onto a sailboat bound for St. Kitts and staring down her demons in the courtroom, as she squares off against an obsessed prosecutor with a secret of his own.
Book Details:
Genre: Legal Thriller Published by: Stoneman House Press, LLC Publication Date: November 15th 2020 Number of Pages: 329 ISBN: 9781733737944 (Ebook: 9781733737951) Links:Amazon | Goodreads
Author Bio:
Sage Webb practiced criminal defense for over a decade before turning to fiction. She is the author of two novels and the recipient of numerous literary awards in the U.S. and U.K., including second place in the Hackney Literary Awards. Her short stories have appeared in Texas anthologies and literary reviews. In 2020, Michigan’s Mackinac State Historic Parks named her an artist in residence. She belongs to International Thriller Writers and PEN America, and lives with her husband, a ship’s cat, and a boat dog on a sailboat in Galveston Bay.
Red metal boxes lined the wood-railed tourist boardwalk, giving children access to fish food if the kids could finagle quarters from parents wilted and forlorn in the triple-digit Gulf Coast heat. With the food, kids could create great frenzies of red drum, snook, spotted sea trout, or whatever fish species gathered at the boardwalk’s pilings in agitated silver vortices. Devlin Winters lifted her ballcap and wiped a sleeve across her brow. She favored long-sleeved t-shirts for just this reason—their mopping properties . . . and to protect her from the Galveston Bay sun in its unrelenting effort to grill her and the other boardwalk barkers. In the two years she’d been on the boardwalk, she’d never fed the fish.
A kid stopped beside one of the boxes.
“Can I have a quarter, mommy?” the boy asked.
He looked about eight or nine, though Devlin had little interest in guessing accurately the ages of the pint-sized patrons fueling her income stream.
“I’m not sure I have one,” the mom replied.
She appeared a bit younger than Devlin, maybe late twenties.
Once upon a time, Devlin would have looked at a mother like that and made a snide remark about crib lizards and dead ends, but nine bucks an hour in the sun makes it awfully hard for a carny to judge others. Lacking a more interesting subject, Devlin watched the woman paw through a backpack-sized purse. The chick produced a quarter and handed it to the kid, who dropped it into the box’s payment slot and ground the dial, catching in his miniature palm a limited portion of the fish food that spilled out of the machine when he lifted the metal flap. The majority of the pellets rained down onto the wooden boardwalk planks, bounced, and disappeared through the cracks between the planks.
Devlin fancied she could hear the tiny fish-food BBs hitting brown water: plink, plink, plink. Once upon another time, when she was still at Sondheim Baker, but toward the end, she would go outside in the middle of the day. Instead of sitting at her desk, drafting appellate briefs for the Seventh Circuit, she would ride the elevator down to La Salle, down seven hundred feet of glass and stainless steel and terribly expensive architecture. She would drop down those elevator cables at random times, at times rich, successful attorneys should have been at their desks. And she would turn left out of that great glass building the color of the sky and walk over to the river, that nothing-like-the-Styx river that mankind had turned back on itself, contrary to nature.
She would stand and look down into the water, which was sometimes emerald, sometimes the color of jeans before they are ever washed. Once or twice, she had reached into her purse (expensive purses, Magnificent Mile purses from Burberry and Gucci and Hermès) and she had dug around until she’d found a penny. She’d dropped the penny into the river and, even now, on the sauna-hot boardwalk with the whistle of the kid-sized train behind her and the pulses of unimpressive pop music overhead, she was sure she could hear those pennies hit the Chicago River, hit and sink down, down, and farther down.
Plink. Plink. Pli—
“You want to try this one?”
The fish-feeding entertainment had run its course and the mother stood in front of the water-gun game Devlin guarded. She gestured toward Devlin and the row of stools in front of their narrow-barreled water guns.
“Is it hard?” The kid looked up at his mom, and the mom turned to Devlin.
“He can do it, right?” she asked. “I mean, he can figure it out, right?”
“Sure, it’s easy.” Devlin lifted her cap for another mop across her hairline, and then wiped perspiration away from her eyes under her sunglasses. “It’s fun, little dude,” she said to the kid in his obviously secondhand clothes.
She wanted to care, wanted to be “affable” or whatever it is a carny should be toward summer’s ice-cream-eating cash-crop flux of kids. But wanting alone, without effort, is never enough.
The mom held out a five-dollar bill.
“You both wanna do it? I gotta have more than one person to run it for a prize.” Devlin rubbed the top of her right flip flop and foot against her left calf.
“Oh,” the woman said, “I wasn’t planning to play. I’m no good at these things.”
“Um,” Devlin stepped out of the shade of the game’s nook and cast her eyes up and down the boardwalk, “we’ll find some more kids.” She took the woman’s money without looking away from the walkway and the beggarly seabirds.
A young couple, likely playing hooky from jobs in Houston, held the hands of a girl sporting jet-black pigtails and lopsided glasses.
“Step right up, princess. You wanna win a unicorn, right?” Devlin reached back into her game nook and snatched a pink toy from the wall of unicorns, butterflies, bees, and unlicensed lookalikes of characters from movies Devlin had never heard of. She dangled the thing in the girl’s direction.
“Would you like to play, habibti?” The mom jiggled the girl’s arm.
“Tell ya what.” Devlin turned to the mom. “The whole family can play for five bucks. We’re just trying to get some games going, give away some prizes to these cuties.” She turned back to the first mother. “And don’t worry, I’ll give him three games for the fiver.”
“Hear that, Vince? You’ll get to play a few times. Is that cool?”
Vince picked at his crotch. Devlin looked away.
“Yes, we’ll all play,” the second mother said. The dad pulled a twenty out of a pocket and Devlin started to make change while Vince’s mom hefted Vince onto a stool.
“Just a five back,” the father said. “We’ll play a few times.”
“Sure thing,” Devlin replied. Then she raised her voice to run through the rules of the game, to explain how the water guns spraying and hitting the targets would raise plastic boats in a boat race to buzzers at the top of the game contraption. She offered some tired words of encouragement, got nods from everyone, and counted down. “Three, two, one.”
She pushed the button and the game loosed a bell sound across the boardwalk.
A guy in waiter’s livery hurried past, hustling toward one of the boardwalk’s various restaurants, with their patios overlooking the channel and Galveston Bay. He’d be serving people margaritas and gimlets in just a few more steps and minutes. Devlin wanted a gimlet.
She drew a deep breath, turned back to her charges. “Close race here, friends.”
An ’80s-vintage Hunter sailboat slid past in the channel, leaving Galveston Bay and making its way back to one of the marinas up the waterway on Clear Lake.
When Devlin turned back to her marksmen, the girl’s mother’s boat had almost reached the buzzer.
“Looks like we’ve got a leader here. Come on, madam. You’re almost there.”
Devlin checked her watch. She’d be off in less than an hour. She’d be back on her own boat fifteen minutes after that, with an unopened bottle of Bombay Sapphire and a net full of limes rocking above the galley sink.
The buzzer blared.
“Looks like we have a winner. Congratulations, madam.” Devlin clapped three times. “Now would you like a unicorn, a butterfly, or,” Devlin pulled a four-inch-tall creature from the wall, not knowing how to describe it, “this little guy?” She held it out for the woman’s inspection.
“Habibti, you pick.” The mom patted her daughter’s back. The kid didn’t say anything, just pointed at the butterfly.
“Butterfly it is, beautiful.” Devlin unclipped the toy from the wall of plush junk and handed it to the girl. “Well, we’ve got some competition for this next one, folks, now that you’re all warmed up. Take a breather. We’ll start the next game when you’re ready.”
“Can I try?” A boy pulled at a broad-shouldered man’s hand, leading the guy toward the row of stools. It was hard to tell parentage with these kids and their mixed-up step- and half- and melded-in-other-ways families, and with this one, the kid’s dark curls and earnest eyes contrasted with the dude’s Nordic features and reminded Devlin of a roommate she’d had in undergrad, a girl from Haiti who’d taught Devlin about pikliz. Devlin hadn’t thought about Haitian food in ages. She decided she would google it later and see what she could find in Houston. A drive to discover somewhere new to eat would do her good.
Any chance at plantains and pikliz would have to wait, though. The kid and the dude now stood in front of Devlin. Ultra-dark sunglasses hid the guy’s eyes, and a ballcap with a local yacht brokerage’s logo embroidered on it cast a shadow over his face. Devlin cocked her head. She narrowed her eyes and hoped her own sunglasses were doing as good a job of being barriers. He reminded her of—
“Still time to add another player?” The dude pulled out a wallet and handed Devlin a ten.
“Sure,” she said. “Is this for both of you? You should give it a try, too. This’ll get you both in on the next two games.”
She didn’t wait for confirmation. She shoved the money in the box beside her control board of buzzer buttons and waved the guy and his kid toward stools on the far side of the now-veteran players already seated.
“Uh, sure,” the guy said, putting a hand on the kid’s back and guiding him to a seat.
Running through the rules again, Devlin envisioned those gimlets awaiting her. With Bombay Sapphire dancing before her, she counted down and then pushed the button to blast the bell and launch the game. The buzzer over the newcomer father’s boat’s track rang moments later. What kind of scummy guy just trounces a kid like that? Devlin rolled her eyes behind the obscuring lenses.
“Looks like our new guy is the winner, ladies and gentlemen. Now, would you like a unicorn, a butterfly, or this little dude?” Devlin again proffered the hard-to-describe creature, walking it over for the fellow to examine.
“What is it?” the guy asked.
Devlin shrugged. “What do you get when you cross an elephant and a rhino?”
The guy’s sunglasses gave away nothing. But something she couldn’t articulate made her feel like he was studying her.
“An ’el-if-I-know,” she said.
Still nothing . . . except that feeling of scrutiny.
“Dude, I’ve got no idea,” she replied to her reflection in the lenses.
“Grant, which one do you want?” The guy turned away and handed the unnamed creature to the kid, and then gestured at the identifiable unicorns and butterflies hanging on the wall over Devlin’s control station.
“Those are for girls,” Grant said, waving at the recognizable plushes on the wall.
“So is this one okay?” The guy patted the thing in the kid’s hand.
Grant wrinkled his nose. “Yeah, I guess so.”
“All right, folks. You’ve all got another game coming here. Competition is fierce. Who’s gonna take this last one?” Devlin strode back to her place at the control board.
“Deep inhale, everyone. Relax. All right, here we go. Three, two, one.” She pushed the starting button.
Up shot the new guy’s boat again. What a bastard. Poor Grant. This patriarchal showmanship would be worth about five or ten grand at the therapist’s in twenty-five years.
Out in the channel, two jetskis purred past, headed toward the bay. The day’s heat had cracked and the sky hinted at evening. Behind her, the victory whistle sounded. She turned. The dude with the sunglasses sat patting Grant’s shoulder, with Grant’s boat at the top of its track. So the guy wasn’t a complete fool.
“A new winner here, ladies and gentlemen.” She walked to Grant’s stool. “Now, little man, because you’ve won two prizes today, you can trade that one you’ve got and this one you’re going to get for one bigger one. You can pick from these if you want.”
She pointed at a row with only-slightly-bigger caterpillars, ambiguous characters, and a dog in a purple vest.
“That one,” Grant said, pointing at the dog.
“That one it is, good sir.” Devlin retrieved the dog, taking back the first creature and returning it to the wall in the process.
As she retraced her steps to Grant, the dog in her hand, fuzzy pictures coalesced in a fog and mist of bygone memories.
Devlin handed the dog to Grant. “There you go.”
She looked at the guy again, focusing on him for longer than she should have, feeling him perhaps doing the same to her. Yes, she had it right: it was him. She pushed a flyaway strand of bleached hair back into place beneath her cap and turned away.
“Thanks for playing this afternoon, folks,” she called. “Enjoy your evening on the boardwalk.”
The parents gathered their kids, and Devlin walked back toward her control board. Waiting for Grant and him to head off down the row of games and rides, she fussed with the cashbox and then lifted her water bottle to her lips. She could feel him and the kid lingering, feel them failing to move along, failing to leave her to forget what once was and to focus on thoughts of gimlets at sunset on the deck of a rotten old trawler.
“Um.” His voice sounded low and halting behind her. A vacuum, all heat and silence, followed and then a masculine inhale . . . and then the awkward pause.
He cleared his throat.
“Sorry to interrupt, but are you from Chicago?”
***
Excerpt from The Venturi Effect by Sage Webb. Copyright 2020 by Sage Webb. Reproduced with permission from Sage Webb. All rights reserved.
Tour Participants:
Visit these other great hosts on this tour for more great reviews, interviews, guest posts, and giveaways!
This is a rafflecopter giveaway hosted by Partners in Crime Virtual Book Tours for Sage Webb. There will be Fourteen (14) winners for this tour. Seven (7) winners will each receive a $15 Amazon.com Gift Card and Seven (7) winners will each receive a physical copy of The Venturi Effect by Sage Webb (US addresses only). The giveaway begins on November 1, 2020 and runs through January 2, 2021. Void where prohibited.
What was your inspiration for this book? What gave you the idea to write it?
Inspiration comes to me from many places – literally as well as figuratively. In 2014, the good Lord decided to plop into my head the idea of a woman inside a Christmas wrapped box outside of a hotel room. He does this to me all the time … especially when I’m driving and can’t jot it down until a red light. It usually starts off with one or two words or a simple idea.
The Christmas Mistake started off as a one line pitch from out of nowhere. It sat in the back of my head for years while I worked on other novels. Then, the characters started demanding my attention. By that I mean that I would daydream about scenes, and they would swirl around my brain until I wrote them down.
In December of 2017, I had shoulder surgery. I watched a lot of Christmas movies. So much that I was inspired to get this story written.
As for particular chapters (or scenes), I write like I’m watching a movie. I take a lot of pictures when I go places, and I use these to help describe those places in my novel. Sometimes, those pictures spark other ideas either for the story I am working on or for a new story.
The Christmas Mistake was super fun to write, and at first I was going to write it all from Carina’s perspective. Then the idea hit to do one chapter in her point of view and then the next chapter to rewrite from Rad’s viewpoint. That really stretched my writing skills!
The setting for The Christmas Mistake is New Orleans and Baton Rouge. As I live in the latter city, it makes it easier to describe places around town. Additionally, adding local lore and traditions give flavor and authenticity. For instance, in The Christmas Mistake, I incorporate everything from dinner at The Court of Two Sisters in New Orleans to Mardi Gras Baton Rouge style.
Now grab a cup of hot chocolate and your favorite blanket because it’s time to get cozy on the couch with a sweet holiday romance story – The Christmas Mistake.
Enjoy!
The Christmas Mistake Josephine Templeton Publication date: December 1st 2020 Genres: Adult, Contemporary, Romance
Dressed in nothing but Christmas lingerie, Carina has a bellhop deliver her in a gift box to her fiance’s hotel room, but the last thing she expects when she is unwrapped is to see a sexy stranger in holiday boxers who looks like he just stepped off a magazine cover – definitely NOT her fiancé! How in the silver bells was she delivered to the wrong room?
As the owner of a small flower shop, Carina’s surrounded by romance on a daily basis. Her workaholic fiancé has been distant for the past several months, so she decides to drive from Baton Rouge to New Orleans to surprise him on Christmas Eve. However, that distance between them has brought loneliness, and the mere thought of the sexy stranger plucks at her mistletoe. When she discovers the reason for her fiance’s lack of attention, will she put him on Santa’s naughty list and take the stranger for a sleigh ride?
Josephine Templeton has six published novels that range from historical romance to urban fantasy. She has been to numerous conferences, including Heather Graham’s Writers for New Orleans, as well as a former member of Romance Writers of America.
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