New Release: Desperate Daughters featuring @AlinaKField #ReadaRegency

Alina K. Field is visiting today to share her latest release, a sweet Regency novella, “Lady Twisden’s Picture Perfect Match” in a new anthology of stories called Desperate Daughters: A Bluestocking Belles Collection With Friends.

Desperate Daughters cover

Desperate Daughters: A Bluestocking Belles Collection with Friends

This collection of novellas by nine Regency romance authors is a perfect opportunity to sample some new-to-you storytellers. The stories are set around a central premise, a family of all daughters, left destitute by their late father, the earl of Seahaven.

Here’s the blurb for the collection:

Love Against the Odds

The Earl of Seahaven desperately wanted a son and heir but died leaving nine daughters and a fifth wife. Cruelly turned out by the new earl, they live hand-to-mouth in a small cottage.

The young dowager Countess’s one regret is that she cannot give Seahaven’s dear girls a chance at happiness.

When a cousin offers the use of her townhouse in York during the season, the Countess rallies her stepdaughters. They will pool their resources so that the youngest marriageable daughters might make successful matches, thereby saving them all.

So they start their adventures in York amid a whirl of balls, lectures, and al fresco picnics. Is it possible each of them might find love by the time the York horse races bring the season to a close?

But it’s not just daughters finding romance…

Not everyone who finds love is a daughter. The earl’s young widow finds her own happily-ever-after. And my heroine, Lady Twisden, is a widowed aunt who learns that following her passion for painting doesn’t mean sacrificing love.

Lady Twisden’s Picture Perfect Match

Honoria, Lady Twisden

He’s not just a perfect image of a soul-stirring hero, but a perfect-for-her match.

After years of tolerating her late husband’s rowdy friends, Honoria, Lady Twisden, has escaped to York where she can paint, investigate antiquities, and enjoy freedom. Then her stepson appears with a relative in tow, the perfect image of a long-ago relation whose fierce portrait made her shiver with mad imaginings.

Promised York’s marriage mart and the hospitality of his cousin’s doddering stepmother, Major August Kellborn is shocked to find that his fetching hostess is the one woman who stirs his heart. To win her heart, however, he must convince her he’s her perfect match.

Major Augustus Kellborn

Excerpt:

“Where is the footman? We need him to fetch in our trunks.”

We?

Looking past the broad shoulder she saw another figure approaching and…

Good God. Heat swamped her and flamed in her cheeks. Dark eyes shot darts at her over a grimly set, thin-lipped mouth. The palpable sternness of Wes’s companion sent a shiver of awareness through her. It was a familiar shiver, one she’d indulged during her tedious days at Twisden Manor when she’d found herself fighting off mad imaginings.

Wes’s laughter shook her tongue loose. “My goodness, sir,” she said. “You bear an uncanny resemblance to—”

“Old Ebenezer Twisden,” Wes said. “Yes, it is as if the old Warden has come back to life, Mother. As soon as I laid eyes on him in Brampton, I knew he must be a relation. And do you know who he is, Mother?” He laughed again. “I’ve written to Granny to tell her. She’ll be in alt when she reads the news.”

A man of perhaps forty, he was about the same age as Wes’s ancestor, the Warden in the painting at Twisden Hall who’d been in the King’s service for many years when that portrait was done. This new incarnation of Ebenezer wasn’t a particularly tall man, not as tall as Wes, but he still towered over her.

Old Ebenezer cleared his throat.

“But of course,” Wes said. “Where are my manners? Mother, may I present my cousin, Major Augustus Kellborn. Gus, this is my dear stepmother, Lady Twisden.”

While she curtsied, managing not to wobble, he dipped his head, never taking his gaze away.

Good holy heavens.

Buy link: https://books2read.com/u/bMwL17

Author Alina K FieldAbout the Author

USA Today bestselling author Alina K. Field earned a Bachelor of Arts Degree in English and German literature but prefers the happier world of romance fiction. Though her roots are in the Midwestern U.S., after six very, very, very cold years in Chicago, she moved to Southern California where she shares a midcentury home with a golden-eyed terrier.

Website: https://alinakfield.com/

Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/Alina-K.-Field/e/B00DZHWOKY
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alinakfield
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AlinaKField
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New Release: Gunnysack Hell by Nancy Brashear #thriller #giveaway

My friend Nancy Brashear’s first novel, Gunnysack Hell, a psychological thriller, was recently published by The Wild Rose Press (https://www.thewildrosepress.com/). Read to the end to enter Nancy’s drawings.

Gunnysack Hell cover

Blurb:

“There’s more to fear in the desert than scorpions and rattlesnakes.”

It’s the summer of 1962, middle of the Cold War, and the O’Brien family has moved off-grid to the Mojave Desert in Southern California. After all, the desert has to be a safer place to raise a family than the crime-ridden city, and there they can build a new future.

But evil also stalks dusty desert roads, and eight-year-old Nonni finds herself harboring a terrible secret: Only she can identify the predator who has been terrorizing the community. And he knows where she lives.

Buy links:

Barnes & Noble buy link: (Barnes and Noble) Gunnysack Hell: Nook and Paperback
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/gunnysack-hell-nancy-brashear/1138547553

Amazon buy link: Gunnysack Hell: Kindle and Print
https://amzn.to/3pFfBpk

Apple iBook buy link: https://books.apple.com/us/book/gunnysack-hell/id1546966537

Excerpt:

I read this morning that Donald Fricker was granted parole after serving twenty years in prison. Once I saw his name in print, the decades disappeared in the flick of a newspaper page. My childhood flooded back to eight-year-old me, too scared to identify him and save my family.

It was May of 1962. My family had recently moved to our new home, our grandparents’ one-room homestead cabin in the California high desert with tarpaper and chicken-wire lining the walls. It never occurred to me to ask my father why we had moved from our three-bedroom suburban home by the beach to “off the grid.”

All I knew was that we used kerosene lanterns, the chemical outhouse under the tall water tank, a wood- burning stove, and an old-fashioned ice-box that our father replenished daily with a big block of ice from Jolly’s Corner.
Tessa, my six-year-old sister, and I walked home alone, every school day, from the bus stop, a mile and a half down an isolated dirt road.

That’s when it happened, the thing that changed our family. I’ll never forget that day. I protected Tessa even though I broke all of my promises to Mama I’d made just the night before. To walk directly home from the bus stop, not to talk to strangers, and to stay away from open wells.

That afternoon, when the bus’s hissing air brakes signaled our stop, we leapt from the bottom step onto the dirt shoulder of the road.

I picked the perfect stone from the side of the road. It had to be small and round, with no sharp edges, and light enough to kick all the way home.

Tessa followed on my heels, talking my ear off, and stepping on the heel of one of my tennies. “Gave you a flat!”

Back off!” I glared at her. Mama said those shoes were like gold, and we were to protect them. I gave the rock a punt and forged ahead.

Oblivious to things going on out there in the desert, we were lulled into a sense of safety and routine. Like Eve, we didn’t feel the danger around us until it was too late to escape. Instead, I should have been paying attention to the truck following us slowly.

Down the deserted road.

Yes, this is our story.

My story.

Endorsement: “I can’t recall the last time I was so impressed with someone’s writing style. It’s pure genius! Gunnysack Hell, told through the various family members’ point of view, takes the readers down a tunnel filled with mystery, thrills, and excitement. This masterpiece is not to be missed.”~L. C. Hayden, Award-winning and best-selling author, http://www.lchayden.com/

(The Harry Bronson Thriller Series, When Memory Fails as seen on NBC and ABC, and others)

Author Nancy BrashearAbout the Author:

Nancy Brashear lives in Orange County, California, with her husband, Patrick, and their rescue dog, Goldie, where her grown children and seven grandgirls have supported her writing adventures. A professor emeritus in English, she has published short stories, poems, academic articles, textbook chapters as well as website content and writing projects with educational publishers. Gunnysack Hell is her debut fiction novel and was inspired by a true-crime event. And, yes, she did live off-grid with her family in a homestead cabin in the Mojave Desert when she was a child. Visit www.nancybrashear.com to learn more.

Goldielicks

It looks like Nancy’s dog Goldie has the same shoe fetish my Callie does.

Find Nancy online:

Author website: www.nancybrashear.com
Author FB: www.facebook.com/nancybrashearauthor
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nancybrashearauthor/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/drnancybrashear
BookBub: https://www.bookbub.com/profile/nancy-brashear
Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/Nancy-Brashear/e/B083JNZGPR%3F
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/dashboard
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/nancybrashear/

Ready or Not! coverAlso by Nancy Brashear – Ready or Not: A Creepy, Retold Fairytale for Grownups
https://amzn.to/3reLgOK

Enter Nancy’s Free eCopy Giveaway Drawing of Gunnysack Hell at her website (ends February 26) by leaving your name and choice of the version you’d like if you’re one of the three winners: Mobi (Kindle), ePub (Nook), or PDF! Winners will also be mailed a postcard of Gunnysack Hell.
(https://www.nancybrashear.com/february-drawing-for-free-e-copy-of-brashears-gunnysack-hell-ends-feb-26/)

Enter new Rafflecopter drawing (ends March 7) by following Nancy Brashear on Amazon to enter (and meet new authors and their books, too):
http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/display/e226730a70/