Book 1: The Mermaid's Pendant
Genre: Contemporary Fantasy/Fairy Tales
THE MERMAID’S PENDANT includes two volumes, An Ordinary Drowning and Grounding Magic (these are also sold as standalone books). Together, they tell a modern fairy tale based upon The Little Mermaid and imagine the reality of the happy-ever-after that awaits the young couple once they settle down to marriage, parenthood, and life in the suburbs of Boston.
In An Ordinary Drowning, John Wilkerson, a computer-science graduate student who’s disillusioned with research and his domineering girlfriend Zoë, escapes to the beautiful island of Culebra. He’s hoping for a chance to clear his head, to recharge under the brilliant Caribbean sun, and to figure out what he wants from life and love. What he doesn’t count on is meeting two women: the whimsical, innocent Tamarind, who makes him see the world as a place filled with possibility, and the darkly seductive Raimunda, who appeals to his baser instincts. John’s personal crisis comes to vivid life in the terrifying winds and rain of Hurricane Marilyn, which descends on Culebra. As the storm batters the tiny paradise that had sheltered him, John discovers that real life means facing choices and accepting their consequences.
In Grounding Magic, John and Tamarind’s story turns more realistic, darker, and less filled with easy magic. The goddess pendant that Tamarind had imbued with her love and faith in An Ordinary Drowning, the one that bound her and John together in an extraordinary union, loses its power. Now the young couple, no longer filled with the early magic of passion and the unknown, must face the less exciting reality of work, parenting, and loneliness. John finds himself caught between a job that doesn’t match his idealistic aspirations and a naïve wife who needs more from him than he can give. Tamarind, for her part, wonders if she’s got what it takes to walk among humans. Her developing friendship with widowed neighbor Lucy gradually brings Tamarind to her own moment of choice: does she choose the subtle magic won by joint work in marriage or should she return to the wilder, easier magic of the sea?
Book 2: Saint Sebastian's Head
Genre: General Fiction/Literary Psychological Thriller
Weeble has a secret so painful she's hiding it even from herself. At ten, she meets Lauren Case, a book-loving daydreamer who offers Weeble refuge from the everyday degradations of life in her poor Midwestern family. Weeble fiercely protects Lauren, just as she protects her sister Annie. But there are forces at work she can't withstand. When Richard Lee Grady arrives in town, he rips lives apart, including Weeble's. Four years after college, Weeble has a new life, new friends, and the potential for love-if she can only admit what happened one hot July day in 1982. SAINT SEBASTIAN'S HEAD is a dark and riveting journey into the human heart, where fairy tales and incest, angels and demons, magical thinking and guilt, haunt one incredibly resilient woman.
Book 3: The Last Stratiote
Genre: General Fiction/Urban-Fantasy Thriller
Blood Law. It’s the foundation of all human relationships, as old as humanity itself. In the Balkans, it’s been enshrined in written code since the Middle Ages.
For Elira Dukagjini, a stratiote, an Albanian mercenary who loves Shakespeare and composes blood haiku, it’s what drives her—at least until she meets James Goodman, an ICE agent pursuing the same trio of sex traffickers one explosive March night. For James, a Special Forces veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan who earned a degree in philosophy on his career path, it’s not just about bringing criminals to justice. The sex traffickers have kidnapped Mirjeta Gjakova, the woman he loves, at the behest of a man he burns to pay back. For Mirjeta, a concert violinist who escaped her Balkan homeland as an orphaned teen, the strict accounting of Blood Law threatens to collect a heavy debt: her life.When Elira’s blood hunt collides with James’s pursuit of the kidnappers, what she chooses to do will change their lives forever, setting a precedent in the law governing human behavior.
Complex, gritty, and brutally human, THE LAST STRATIOTE alternates between dramatic action and a challenging, richly symbolic exploration of life, religion, and philosophy. It is a story informed by the intrinsic motives underlying our desire for love, lust, revenge, healing, and redemption.
“The Last Stratiote contains the relentless pace of James Patterson’s novels; the political intrigue and pragmatic characters found in Daniel Silva’s and Jeffery Archer’s books; and the historicity, philosophy, and theology of Anne Rice’s work. ... The result is a novel that conveys sensuality and eroticism that stimulate the libido and the mind.”―Lee Gooden, Five-Star Clarion Review
About the Author
Website: www.nealreilly.com
Facebook Author Page: www.facebook.com/
Goodreads: https://www.
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WIN these three books during the Cookie's Book Club Annual Christmas Giveaway, commencing this Saturday, December 21.
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