http://awesomegang.com

Where Awesome Book Readers Meet Awesome Writers

1. Christmas Without Holly

   About Christmas Without Holly:

   Christmas is a time for pampering yourself.

   At least, that is what Holly Nightingale thinks.

   A hard-working nurse, she has given herself an early Christmas gift – three days at Willows, a posh health farm in Surrey.

   She’s looking forward to day after day of skin treatments, dips in the hot tub, and relaxing sessions with the handsome masseurs.

   But not everything is perfect.

   Her fiancé Clive is working in Hong Kong.

   But why does he spend so much time in the Far East? What is he up to?

   As Holly sits by the spa with the pampered, unfaithful wives of the Home Counties, she starts to wonder what kind of married life she is about to embark on.

   And maybe Clive will end up spending Christmas without Holly?

   ‘Christmas Without Holly’ is a sparkling seasonal romantic comedy – a warm, moving tale, that manages to be funny, while also reminding the reader that Christmas is a time to reflect on life and where it is going.

   It was previously published as The Spa Day.

   It is perfect for fans of Jane Green, Sophie Kinsella…and spa treatments.

   Nicola Yeager was born in Lincoln to Dutch parents and is married with two children. She currently lives in London and Amsterdam. Christmas Without Holly is her first novella.

   Endeavour Press is the UK’s leading independent digital publisher.

   Learn more about the author, buy the book, or follow them on social media:
   Visit the Author’s Website.
   Buy the Book On Amazon.

   Author Bio:
   Nicola Yeager was born in Lincoln to Dutch parents and is married with two children. She currently lives in London and Amsterdam. Christmas Without Holly is her first novella.

   Christmas Without Holly is a post from Awesome Gang

2. Private Lines by Emma Gates

   About Private Lines by Emma Gates:

   It’s tough to compete in the global marketplace when you’re an American stuck in Paris during the biggest anti-U.S. protests in European history. No wonder Tyler Harding is tired! He just wants to strike an agreement for his telecom company and get some sleep. But the intriguing Frenchwoman in charge of his deal intends to wake him up – in more ways than one.

   Meanwhile, in the company’s Milwaukee branch, account exec Carly Emerald is juggling the demands of her defense-contract client and its government promoter; her increasingly obsessive lover; her cancer-stricken mother; and the office security monitor handing out duct tape to secure the windows.

   Tyler and Carly cannot seem to catch a break, but when they catch sight of each other during a videoconference set up by Carly to enlist Tyler’s help with her awful London client, sparks fly … until a their company’s international accounting scandal threatens not only their fledgling friendship but their entire careers.

   Private Lines begins during the same events as Ian McEwan’s “Saturday”, but its point of view is uniquely – and poignantly – American.
   “A business-driven debut thriller, laced with romantic entanglements…The artful prose effectively captures the sensual dynamism that underscores the entire narrative…The author also does a credible job of educating readers about the complexities of the telecom industry without burying them in confusing jargon or gratuitous detail. (Gates is an international telecom expert and even went to the same business school as her protagonist, Tyler.) She also nicely juxtaposes the jagged cynicism of big business with the tenderness of the love stories. A light, entertaining tale of love and commercial intrigue.”

   — Kirkus Reviews

   Learn more about the author, buy the book, or follow them on social media:
   Visit the Author’s Website.
   Buy the Book On Amazon.
   Visit the Facebook Fan Page.

   Author Bio:
   Award-winning writer Emma Gates was born in New York and spent her childhood in England. She earned a BA in Spanish/Latin American Studies from Indiana University Bloomington, and an MBA with concentration in Arabic/Middle East Studies from Thunderbird. She worked for three years in Mexico and five in Saudi Arabia. She is an international trade and telecoms specialist currently living near Chicago with her family and two inscrutable cats.

   “I try to write what I want to read — novels that are dense, ‘chewy’, full of ideas, which transport me to different places while taking me deep into the hearts of characters whose lives immediately engage and move me profoundly. Because I’ve lived many years outside the States, I’m interested in how Americans interact with people from other countries, whether here or there.”

   Private Lines by Emma Gates is a post from Awesome Gang

3. Kings and Pawns

   About Kings and Pawns:

   Opportunity seized from global catastrophe, corporations have replaced failed governments as leaders of a

   thriving global economy. Success has bred power and by 2083, through either acquisition or destruction of

   all other competition, 11 companies control the world. Each is responsible for governing their own

   territories and the populations that reside within them.

   In San Francisco, the headquarters of Cronus Enterprises, Alex Klein is alone. His parents long ago taken

   from him, he is an outcast endowed with a position of privilege inside the world’s most influential

   corporation. Despite his rank, he sees no prospect of fulfillment in continuing down his current career path.

   Gifted with a bloodline of superior athletic prowess, his only passion is for the worldwide obsession

   Breakers Unlimited, an evolution of sporting experience that marries technology and physical ability.

   Once matched against others in common pursuit, only the best survive the demanding competition that

   relegates those who fail to inescapable misery. Battling for survival tests growing friendships and fosters a

   realization that a life lacking personal autonomy, no matter how comfortable, will never be satisfying.

   United and climbing the standings of the Breakers Unlimited circuit, Alex and his teammates discover

   distinct similarities among them despite radically different backgrounds. Sacrificing security, they use their

   athletic fame as a platform to reveal their contempt for Cronus Enterprises and challenge it’s entire system

   of governance.

   Cronus Enterprises will not standby and allow any campaign of dissent. The world’s preeminent super

   power demands absolute obedience and when threatened will move swiftly to eliminate all insurgents

   without mercy.

   Faced with overwhelming odds, the team enters a most dangerous game of rebellion. Armed only with

   their convictions, they battle for the minuscule chance that they can actually inspire free thought and real

   change. In their mission, Alex faces sacrifice, finds love and discovers what it truly means to be happy.

   Learn more about the author, buy the book, or follow them on social media:
   Visit the Author’s Website.
   Buy the Book On Amazon.

   Author Bio:
   At an early age Zach fell in love with stories and eventually ventured out to write his own. Kings and Pawns is a project nearly four years in the making and modeled after his favorite action-adventure fiction. Inspired through a love of reading Clive Cussler, James Patterson, Tom Clancy, Dan Brown and of course J.K. Rowling, he strove to create something that embodies his passions and hopefully an adventure that others will enjoy reading as much as he enjoyed writing.

   After graduating from Princeton University in 2008 where he majored in History with a concentration on United States History, he moved to San Francisco. He immediately fell in love with the city and it was an easy choice to make it the backdrop for the story. For more information and to contact Zach, visit ZachBeckmann.com

   Kings and Pawns is a post from Awesome Gang

4. Fallen Out

   About Fallen Out:

   When Jesse McDermitt retires from the Marine Corps, he has no idea what he will do for the rest of his life. At 37, his greatest skill is killing people from up to a mile away. He knows there aren’t many job opportunities in the civilian world for that. However, he knows the south Florida waters, is an experienced diver, loves to fish, and knows his way around a boat.

   A waitress in a waterfront restaurant in north Key Largo gives him an idea and he runs with it. An old friend helps get him set up as a charter fishing and dive boat Captain and a new friend helps him buy just the right boat.

   Danger lurks in the sleepy little town of Marathon, in the middle of the Florida Keys, as well as in the swamps of the Everglades. But danger doesn’t expect to run into a man like Jesse, who will not only respond swiftly, but with a vengeance unexpected.

   Learn more about the author, buy the book, or follow them on social media:
   Visit the Author’s Website.
   Buy the Book On Amazon.
   Visit the Facebook Fan Page.

   Author Bio:
   Wayne Stinnett is an American novelist and Veteran of the United States Marine Corps. Between those careers, he’s worked as a deckhand, commercial fisherman, Divemaster, taxi driver, construction manager, and over the road truck driver. He lives in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, near Travelers Rest, SC with his wife and youngest daughter. They also have three other grown children, four grand children, two dogs and a whole flock of parakeets. He was born in St. Albans, WV, grew up in Melbourne, FL and has also lived in Marathon, FL, the Bahamas, Dominica, and Cozumel, Mexico. His next dream is to one day visit and dive Cuba.

   Fallen Out is a post from Awesome Gang

5. The Eighth Day

   About The Eighth Day:

   Tonight the world ends. Billions will die, and I am the cause of it all.

   Every living thing, every human, will cry to the heavens… helpless… hopeless… doomed, and I am the cause of it all; to know why, you have to go back to another, simpler time.

   I was a boy. I remember my father, my mother and my sister…helplessly hanging from the eaves of the porch of our ranch. And I remember the Preacher, Jacob, slipping the noose around my neck. He was searching for a woman, the last of her kind. He’d been hunting her for longer than he could remember and her death would end a war that had raged for thousands of years. It was supposed to be the final battle, but she was clever, unpredictable and again she had eluded him. Instead of finding her, he found us. He found me, and even though he didn’t realise it at the time, I had made it a whole new war; one that would rage for centuries, unseen, unknown, until tonight.

   My name is Gabriel Armstrong and I am immortal.

   Learn more about the author, buy the book, or follow them on social media:
   Visit the Author’s Website.
   Buy the Book On Amazon.
   Visit the Facebook Fan Page.

   Author Bio:
   I have loved books from a very early age and have always had a fascination with stories of the fantastical, supernatural and science fiction. My story is inspired by classic – H.G.Wells, George Orwell, Frank Herbert – and contemporary – Stephen King, James Herbert, George R. R. Martin – writers. I love the way they can craft a universe of such vivacity and imagination, and that is probably where any similarity with my story ends. I hope, with my first outing as a writer I can inspire such worlds and creations within my readers. I live in Stourbridge, England with my wife, son and the world’s most lovely dog Shem. My story is the first in a series.

   Thank you for buying my book, I hope you enjoy it and appreciate your feedback.

   My Twitter link is

   https://twitter.com/donovangray6

   The Eighth Day is a post from Awesome Gang

6. The Lion Trees

   About The Lion Trees:

   Ten years in the writing, The Lion Trees is a work of literary fiction approaching 576,000 words. Its central characters are a family of five – the Johns family—living in twenty-first century Columbus, Ohio. The year is 2005. George Bush has been re-elected. The Iraq War is raging. Hurricane Katrina has landed. The Johns family is quietly, and then not so quietly, unraveling. In shades of Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full, Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, the Johns family story, at turns dramatic and comic, is woven in four distinct narrative voices: Hollis, Susan, David and Tilly.

   Hollis Johns.

   If there is a center to the Johns family hurricane, it is its disaffected, unappreciated paterfamilias, Hollis. The world, it would seem, no longer values personal substance or wisdom. A commercial banker by trade, Hollis Johns resents his callous nudge into early retirement by a merge-happy bank looking to make room for younger talent. Hollis is home now, amid indistinguishable days, taking stock of his many attributes and exploring new pursuits to deepen his consciousness—like Buddhism, bonsai trimming, vibrational meditation and, increasingly, enophilia – pursuits that others, lost in the fog of their shallow, media-driven narcissism, pointedly fail to appreciate.

   Certainly Susan, Hollis’ wife of nearly four decades, has long since ceased to acknowledge her marital fortunes and is far more likely to remind Hollis of his failings as a husband and a father. The marriage is faltering on many fronts, incompatible values being only one. For instance, as Hollis is secluded in his basement den trying to deepen his consciousness, Susan is obsessing over the recent nomination of their daughter, Tilly, for a Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. This, Susan insists, much to Hollis’ annoyance, is news that is worthy of broad dissemination among their family and friends. There are people to call and parties to plan and Hollis must stop his nonsense and participate. It does not help matters that Hollis reserves a special and conspicuous disdain for the cesspool of celebrity culture, that his daughter has become a tabloid darling for sleeping with her directors, or that Susan blames Hollis for Tilly’s enduring estrangement from the family. Tilly has not spoken to Hollis in years and refuses to come home until Hollis consents to marriage counseling with Susan. Hollis’s oldest son, David, who is wasting his potential as a public school teacher, only seems to come around for help on the mortgage.

   The respect and deference for which Hollis yearns comes, unexpectedly, with the arrival of Suki Takada, the daughter of Akahito Takada, a powerful Japanese bank president. When Akahito asks Hollis the favor of escorting his daughter on a tour of Ohio business schools, there is only one answer; after all, the request is an honor bestowed by one great and wise man to another. But Suki Takada is nothing like Hollis ever imagined. She is a sweet, dewy-eyed blonde, American born, who prefers the name Bethany and who concedes Hollis’ superior substance and wisdom with an enthusiasm that eclipses anything his family has ever shown. Young enough to be Hollis’ own daughter, Suki is a kind of confirmatory narcotic, addictive and aphrodisiacal, offering herself up as an affirmation that will either return Hollis to the full potency of his lost youth or, as he races cross-country chasing ghosts of the past, strip away every dignity and conceit of his identity until there is nothing left but the truth.

   Susan Johns.

   Susan has spent her married life tending to her husband and to the demands of raising a family. It is not the life she had imagined back at Kent State University, where she had blossomed into a fiercely political consciousness, embracing the idealism and social-sexual mores of the day. She had been, back then, more of a mind to change the world than change the sheets and diapers. But young Hollis Johns, the charming outsider who would become her husband, had wooed her away from that path and down another; a path that would see the abandonment of a teaching career, the subordination of her identity to that of her three children, and her pledge of commitment to a man who would never acknowledged her sacrifice. Deferring against her better judgment, Susan had followed Hollis into a life not sufficiently her own. It will take nothing less than George W. Bush and the carnage of the Iraq War to bring her back to consciousness. But the road of rediscovery, she finds, is fraught with old pain and hard decisions, including what in her life, and who, she must sacrifice in order to reclaim her true self.

   David Johns.

   David, first born to Hollis and Susan, is a teacher of history hopelessly mired in the past. He works at the same high school from which he and Tilly once graduated. But as his ferociously independent sister is rapidly becoming a Hollywood star, David feels like he is traveling in circles teaching rhymes about the year 1492. He cannot help but labor beneath the weight of disappointment that he has brought his parents, particularly his father, whose life-long example of single-minded ambition, industriousness and good judgment is a path David has steadfastly failed to follow. Witness, for example, David’s adolescent expulsion from a prestigious junior academy for getting caught in a bathroom stall with the principal’s daughter; or his choice of a New Orleans party college rather than a “serious” Ohio university as Hollis had insisted; or his decision to pursue a degree in secondary education rather than follow Hollis into something more lucratively business-minded. Not to mention David’s affinity for cannabis which, post college, is increasingly difficult to find and expensive to obtain.

   While teaching history is something for which David has a genuine and abiding interest, his job provides him very little in the way of inspiration. Glib, incurious narcissism is a contagion. Even if he can occasionally detect sentience in his students, he is unable to find any grounds for optimism about the future. His textbooks offer only the fairytales of history and the school administration is more concerned with defending America’s sanitized identity than it is in actually educating. To make matters worse, David’s well-to-do paralegal girlfriend has left him, pornography has rendered his laptop a useless paperweight, he cannot make the mortgage payments he owes to his father, the word rapist now mysteriously despoils the passenger side of his Civic, and the school principal wants to fire him for teaching the truth about Christopher Columbus, Jesus, Al Qaeda and the Crusades.

   Perhaps, then, it should not have been so surprising that when one of his students goes missing, David quickly becomes the unrelenting preoccupation of the Columbus Police Department. Proving his innocence – if that is possible—will require more than the help of Glenda LeVeau, his high-priced, colorfully embonpoint lawyer who just may be interested in sexually offsetting her fee. It will require more than the help of Lonnie Lumkin, a public defender who eats root vegetables out of his briefcase. Not even the inimitable Caitlin Carson Lewis, an out-of-nowhere, southern, pot-smoking hospice worker who drives a decommissioned ambulance and who seems to know David better than he knows himself will be enough to save him. As his fate hangs in the balance, David must plumb the depths of his own personal history, examining his childhood memories for the judgments he has sewn into the fabric of his identity, and that threaten to pull him beneath the surface.

   Tilly Johns.

   Matilda “Tilly” Johns, a successful novelist, lingers in a coma at the end of a long life. It is 2065, sixty years since Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans. A hurricane that the news has taken to calling Katrina’s Mother is spinning its way into the gulf, preparing to repeat history. From her Columbus hospital room, Tilly recalls a life of poor choices, driven by subconscious forces she did not understand. As a young English Lit major, Tilly abandons her family and Ohio for Los Angeles, likely the last place Hollis would have allowed had it been up to him. There, Tilly writes for a literary review and waits tables with out-of-work actors and the cleaner fish of the entertainment industry. Eventually, the gravitational pull of Hollywood is too great to resist and she falls prey to those who would provide one opportunity after another for her to live down to the worst of her father’s expectations. With Hollis and all of Ohio bearing witness, Tilly sleeps her way onto the tabloids, bad crime television, and a string of low-budget horror films.

   Tilly’s fortunes change rather dramatically with a co-lead role in an independent film that catapults her into a far more respectable spotlight. It is at that precarious juncture in her career that Tilly receives an offer to play the role of Colonel Elena Ivanova in the screen adaptation of Angus Mann’s classic story, The Lion Tree. It is the role of a lifetime, not only because Tilly so powerfully identifies with Colonel Ivanova, but also because of her formative associations with two men behind the disaster-prone production. One of those men is acclaimed director and executive producer, Blair Gaines, who is determined to own Tilly, even if it means sacrificing the project. The other is Angus Mann himself, a reluctant consultant on the film, who seems to generally loathe the existence of Hollywood and its perversions of literature, including the very possibility that someone of Tilly’s reputation might inhabit his beloved Ivanova.

   Tilly’s reminiscence recounts a lifelong journey of self-discovery, forgiveness and redemption, threading its way from Ohio to California to Africa and back again. It is a journey populated by Tilly’s family, Hollywood’s elite and its servant class, the media, the police, the Los Angeles underworld, talent agents, directors, lovers, husbands, lawyers, legends and ghosts. Each of the mileposts on that journey – including her tragic and highly public relationship with a Hollywood heartthrob, a secret sex video, a dangerous kinship with a 1930’s starlet long dead of suicide, and a criminal investigation into a designer drug trafficking ring – bring Tilly ever closer to understanding the identity she has been serving at her own expense. But no single twist of events in Tilly’s life will prove to be more revealing than the dark past that haunts the great Angus Mann and that wrought his most famous story. Ultimately, her work with Angus and Blair on The Lion Tree will raise for Tilly fundamental questions of the self, the answers to which will lead her back to Ohio, to her father Hollis, and to the secrets buried in the basement of her childhood home. Only there will she find her true self and confront the lion tree of her own heart.

   By turns comical and poignant, the Johns family is tumbling toward the discovery that sometimes you have to let go of your identity to find out who you are.

   “[A] cerebral page turner…a powerful and promising debut.”—Kirkus Reviews

   “[FOUR STARS]… In its structure and nature, [The Lion Trees] reminds me above all of John Updike’s wonderful Harry Rabbit novels and their ability to summarize the essence of change in American society across a decade at a time.” – BookIdeas.com

   “[FIVE STARS]… [A] powerful, gripping and realistic story…The Lion Trees does what so very few great novels can: it will take a lot out of you, but leave you with much more than you had when you began.”—Pacific Book Reviews.

   Learn more about the author, buy the book, or follow them on social media:
   Visit the Author’s Website.
   Buy the Book On Amazon.

   Author Bio:
   Owen Thomas lives and writes in Anchorage, Alaska. His novel “The Lion Trees” is available in paper and electrons at Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Owen is also the author of a collection of short stories and novellas entitled “Signs of Passing: Letters from Winchester County” winner of the 2014 Pacific Book Awards for short fiction. Owen’s story “Everything Stops” is being published in September 2014 by Fiction Attic Press as part of an anthology of short fiction called “Modern Shorts” and is available on Amazon.

   To make sure he stays at least somewhat grounded in reality, Owen keeps very busy avoiding his responsibilities. When he is not writing, Owen can be found recreating and taking photographs in the grandeur of his Alaskan backyard and in the middle of the dream that is Hawaii, some of which are now accumulating on Owen’s nascent photo blog, 1000 Words per Frame which can be found on his author website at http://www.owenthomasfiction.com.

   For the fifth consecutive year since he has been measuring his commercial success as an author, Owen has not won the Orange Prize for Fiction. Also, to great acclaim, he has not won the Man Booker Prize. Most recently, in April of 2014, Owen was not nominated for a Pulitzer.

   Owen has come to understand that there is a strange disquiet in referring to oneself in the third person. Owen is seriously afraid he will not be able to stop.

   The Lion Trees is a post from Awesome Gang

7. Dissension

   About Dissension:

   The great cataclysm wiped almost all life from the face of planet Earth, but tiny pockets of survivors crawled from the ashes, with only one thought: survival, at any cost.
   But not all survivors were human.
   In the dark, militant society that has risen in the aftermath, vampires, once thought to be mythical, have been assimilated and enslaved. Used for blood sport their lives are allowed to continue only for the entertainment of the masses. Reviled as savages, they are destined to serve out their immortal lives in the arena, as gladiators.
   And there is no greater gladiator than Mira: undefeated, uncompromising…and seemingly unbreakable. When an escape attempt leads Mira into the path of Lucian Stavros, the city’s Regent, her destiny is changed forever.
   Lucian, raised in a culture which both reviles and celebrates the savagery and inhumanity of vampires, finds Mira as intriguing as she is brash. An impulsive decision – to become Mira’s patron – changes more than just Lucian’s perception about vampire kind. The course of his life is altered in ways he could never have predicted – a life that is suddenly as expendable as hers.
   Can Mira prove to Lucian that all is not as it seems? Can Lucian escape centuries of lies, bloodshed, and propaganda to see the truth? Or will the supreme power of the human overlords destroy them both?

   Learn more about the author, buy the book, or follow them on social media:
   Visit the Author’s Website.
   Buy the Book On Amazon.
   Visit the Facebook Fan Page.

   Author Bio:
   Katie Salidas is a Super Woman! Endowed with special powers and abilities, beyond those of mortal women, She can get the munchkin off to gymnastics, cheerleading, Girl Scouts, and swim lessons. She can put hot food on the table for dinner while assisting with homework, baths, and bedtime… And, She still finds the time to keep the hubby happy (nudge nudge wink wink). She can do all of this and still have time to write.

   And if you can believe all of those lies, there is some beautiful swamp land in Florida for sale…

   Katie Salidas resides in Las Vegas, Nevada. Mother, wife, and author, she does try to do it all, often causing sleep deprivation and many nights passed out at the computer. Writing books is her passion, and she hopes that her passion will bring you hours of entertainment.

   You can find out more about Katie Salidas,and her vampire novels at KatieSalidas.com

   Dissension is a post from Awesome Gang

8. Deadly Straits

   About Deadly Straits:

   When very part-time spook Tom Dugan becomes collateral damage in the War on Terror, he’s not about to take it lying down.

   Falsely implicated in a hijacking, he’s offered a chance to clear himself by helping the CIA snare their real prey, Dugan’s best friend, London ship owner Alex Kairouz. Reluctantly, Dugan agrees to go undercover in Alex’s company, despite doubts about his friend’s guilt. Once undercover, Dugan’s steadfast refusal to accept Alex’s guilt puts him at odds with his handlers.

   When a tanker is found adrift near Singapore with a dead crew, and another explodes in Panama, Dugan is framed for the attacks. Out of options and convinced an even more devastating assault is imminent, Dugan eludes capture to follow his last lead to Russia, only to be shanghaied as an ‘advisor’ to a Russian Spetsnaz unit on a suicide mission.

   Deadly Straits is a non-stop thrill ride, from London streets, to the docks of Singapore, to the decks of tankers feeding the world’s thirst for oil, with stops along the way in Panama, DC, and Teheran. Richly spiced with detail from the author’s 30 years in the marine industry, it is, in the words of one reviewer, “fast-paced, multilayered and gripping.”

   Learn more about the author, buy the book, or follow them on social media:
   Visit the Author’s Website.
   Buy the Book On Amazon.
   Visit the Facebook Fan Page.

   Author Bio:
   I grew up on the coast and a seagoing career just came naturally. After graduation from the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, I sailed a number of years before spending a decade in shore side ship management. I struck out on my own in 1986, and formed a company specializing in ship construction management and supervision. I’ve traveled widely and lived for extended periods in both South America and the Far East (Singapore and China). By far the most interesting aspect of travel (and life in general) is the folks you meet along the way, and I’ve had the good fortune to encounter a lot of interesting characters. Bits and pieces of some of them make their way into the characters of my novels.

   I write stories I’d like to read — tales of ordinary people in extraordinary situations. I dislike heroes who are some combination of brain surgeon/nuclear physicist (or who have equally far-fetched skill sets) and who just coincidently are ace helicopter pilots and fifth degree black belts in multiple martial arts. Like the rest of us mortals, my characters are normal people who screw up from time to time and live with the results.

   I currently live in Tennessee with my lovely (and patient) wife of 39 years. In addition to writing and travel, I occasionally (when cornered) complete a task on my ‘honey do’ list, and from time to time, join my wife in badgering our children to produce grandchildren. All in all, a rewarding life.

   Deadly Straits is a post from Awesome Gang

9. Crimson Son

   About Crimson Son:

   Heart pounding action and an emotional coming of age tale narrated by a “kid” with enough snark to claim it as his own superpower, Crimson Son delivers on all fronts.

   His mother kidnapped, his superhero father absent, powerless Spencer Harrington faces a world of weaponized humans to prove himself and find the truth.

   Nineteen-year-old Spencer is the son of the Crimson Mask, the world’s most powerful Augment. Since witnessing his mother’s abduction by a psychotic super villain two years ago, he’s been confined to his father’s arctic bunker. When the “Icehole” comes under attack from a rampaging robot, Spencer launches into his father’s dangerous world of weaponized human beings known as Augments.

   With no superpowers of his own save a multi-tool, a quick wit and a boatload of emotional trauma, Spencer seeks to uncover his mother’s fate and confront his absentee superhero father. As he stumbles through a web of conspiracies and top secret facilities, he rallies a team of everyday people and cast-off Augments. But Spencer soon discovers that the Black Beetle isn’t his only enemy, nor his worst.

   Learn more about the author, buy the book, or follow them on social media:
   Visit the Author’s Website.
   Buy the Book On Amazon.
   Visit the Facebook Fan Page.

   Author Bio:
   In the fourth grade, Russ Linton wrote down the vague goal of becoming a “writer and an artist” when he grew up. After a journey that led him from philosopher to graphic designer to stay at home parent and even a stint as an Investigative Specialist with the FBI, he finally got around to that “writing” part which he now pursues full time.

   Russ creates character-driven speculative fiction. His stories drip with blood, magic, and radioactive bugs. He writes for adults who are young at heart and youngsters who are old souls.

   Crimson Son is a post from Awesome Gang

10. Dark Digital Sky

    About Dark Digital Sky:

    LA Private Investigator Chalk has pulp fiction ink in his veins. But he brings more than gumshoe wisecracks to the new noir landscape. The tools of his trade are an unregistered Glock, a Porsche 911 and the hacker hardware to read your emails and listen in on your phone calls.

    “Dark Digital Sky” is the first in the Dark Pantheon series. It starts with a job to find three adult sons fathered through a sperm bank. But then the brothers connect to a violent underworld heist. They become the critical link to a domestic terrorist stealing pharmaceutical drugs for veterans. And this madman is planning a video game style attack against the nation.

    These are quotes from crime blogs and zines:

    “The next generation of PI has arrived and his name is Chalk.”

    -Crime Thriller Hound

    “Fresh. Fast. Innovative. A cyberpunk revival of 1950’s hardboiled crime.”

    -Mav Skye, Pulp Metal Magazine

    “A geeky technothriller for the 21st Century.”

    -Marika, Mystery Sequels

    “‘Dark Digital Sky’ is probably the closest we’ll ever get to a model of ‘geek noir.’ It’s a must-read for anyone looking for a distinctive, unique literary voice.”

    -Blog THIS Pal

    This is a small sample of what readers are saying on Amazon:

    “Imagine if Phillip Marlowe’s genes were spliced with Sherlock Holmes in this day and age. You’d end up with the anti-hero of this book, the brilliant, if heavily troubled, cynical gumshoe named Chalk.”

    -Rick Gualtieri

    “ . . .Chalk is decidedly like Marlowe or Mickey Spillane, Lew Archer or Sam Spade: you want him on your side when the chips are down.”

    -E. Lee Zimmerman

    “Carac has erected a whole new temple unto crime, which sets the bar extremely high for others wishing to imitate Carac’s genius.”

    -D. West ‘Bones’

    Learn more about the author, buy the book, or follow them on social media:
    Visit the Author’s Website.
    Buy the Book On Amazon.
    Visit the Facebook Fan Page.

    Author Bio:
    Carac Allison started playing with PET and Tandy computers when he was a young teen. He learned to write on a Commodore 64 but he was never much of a programmer.

    When he finished his undergraduate degree, Carac started working for the University of Western Ontario as a low level clerk. He went on to found the Web and IT Team in Student Services and has directed projects on database security, electronic data interchange, mobile devices and distributed online identity. As a member of Western’s Information Group on Security, the Risk Assessment team and an investigator in student hacking cases, he has seen the good, the bad and the ugly of the digital frontier.

    Dark Digital Sky is a post from Awesome Gang