Off to the Eppie Awards!

I am counting down the days until I go to my first ever Epicon, this year held in Las Vegas, NV. It's a counting task I can handle: I leave in two days. I'm particularly excited because this year, two of my Amber Quill Press books are finalists: High Risk in the mystery/thriller category and Orientation in the GLBT category. For those of you who don't know, the Eppies are given out annually by EPIC (the Electronically Published Internet Connection) to recognize outstanding achievement in e-publishing. Wish me luck!

And if you want to know a bit more about my nominated books, here's a little taste:
High Risk
Her Secret Life...

Beth Walsh seems like such a demure housewife. Taking care of her attorney husband and doing volunteer work, the young woman is someone you’d meet at a church social. But Beth has a secret life. While her husband works, Beth slides into what she calls her “slut clothes” and goes on the prowl. She becomes a completely different woman, wanton and uninhibited, with dozens of handsome strangers. Until she meets the one blindingly gorgeous stranger who will make her more than sorry for her secrets and lies…

Abbott Lowery is every woman’s dream: handsome, muscular, with intense blue eyes that contrast with his thick black hair. Women want him. Men want him. But Abbott is deeply damaged, and inside lurks a monster just waiting to be released. When Beth Walsh pursues him, it pushes a deeply-buried rage to the fore and he becomes determined to punish her.

Beth meeting Abbott lights the fuse on a bomb. Its explosion leads to a tale of terror and desperation so intense it will sear everyone who knows them. High Risk is a story of secrets, tainted histories, murder, kidnapping, and an ending so brutal and shocking readers will be left breathless.

To read an excerpt, see reviews, or to purchase, click here.

Orientation
Christmas, 1983: A young man, Robert, tends to his soul mate, Keith, who is dying from AIDS. Robert tries valiantly to make this a special Christmas for his lover, but loses the fight late Christmas night.

Christmas, 2007: Robert ventures out late Christmas night and finds a young girl about to fling herself into the unforgiving waters of Lake Michigan. He rescues her, and the two form a bond forged from an odd feeling they share of familiarity, and even love. Neither understands it, since Jess is a lesbian and Robert has never been attracted to women. But there’s more...Jess begins having strange dreams, reliving key moments she couldn’t know about in Keith and Robert’s life and courtship. Robert and Jess begin to wonder if their inexplicable feelings might be rooted in something much more mystical than a savior/victim relationship.

As the two move toward and pull away from each other, Ethan, Robert’s younger lover, plots the unthinkable. His crystal meth-addled mind becomes convinced there’s only one way to save himself, and that is through Robert’s destruction. Christmas 2007 spirals downward to a shattering climax in which both love and lives hang in the balance.

There’s a murder attempt...salvation...redemption...

And a new love is born.

To read an excerpt, see reviews, or to purchase, click here.