Spotlight: Then Comes Lies by Nicole French

Release Date: March 30

Once upon a time, I fell for a dashing London restaurateur named Xavier.

He left me with a broken heart… and a positive pregnancy test.

Now, he’s back in my life and determined to stay.

He asks me just one question: will I move to London with him?

But as I enter Xavier’s world, our differences couldn’t be starker. 

He’s tall, dashing, and practically royal. 

I’m short, bookish, and the definition of common.

First comes love, then comes marriage.

Yet all I’ve got are half-truths and masked secrets.

If Xavier and I catch fire, the only thing left in the embers may be our deceptions.

A note from the author:

THEN COME LIES is the highly anticipated follow-up to the bestselling grumpy-sunshine, secret baby romance, First Comes Love. While it can be read as a standalone, you will enjoy it more if you read Book 1 in the series first. Enjoy!
xo,
Nic

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About the Author

Nicole French is a USA Today bestselling author of contemporary romance. She's also a hopeless romantic, Springsteen fanatic, and total bookworm. When not writing, she is hanging out with her family, playing soccer with the rest of the thirty-plus crowd in Seattle, or going on dates with her husband. In her spare time, she likes to go running or practice the piano, but never seems to do either one of these things as much as she should.

Keep up with Nicole French and receive your FREE copy of one of her books when you subscribe to her newsletter: bit.ly/NicoleFrenchNewsletter 

Connect with Nicole French: https://www.nicolefrenchromance.com/links

Spotlight: Break the Ice by L.A. Cotton

Release Date: March 28

From USA Today and Wall Street Journal bestselling author L A Cotton comes a brother’s best friend sports romance. Lakeshore U, where hockey is religion, and the players are gods. Are you ready to fall in love with a Laker?

When Aurora Hart moves in with her brother and his two teammates, it’s only supposed to be a temporary fix.

Enter Noah Holden. 

Cocky. Heartbreaker. With enough game to have every girl on campus falling at his feet.

When Noah’s best friend asks him to look out for his sister, he doesn’t expect to find her so resistant to his charm.

Or find himself so interested in his new housemate.

He’s Lakeshore U’s biggest player. 
She’s quirky, shy, and one hundred percent not his type. 

Can Noah help Rory let go of the insecurities holding her back from embracing life?

Or will he be unable to break the ice around her heart? 

*𝐵𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑘 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝐼𝑐𝑒 𝑖𝑠 𝑎 100,000-𝑤𝑜𝑟𝑑 𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑎𝑙𝑜𝑛𝑒 𝑛𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑙 𝑠𝑒𝑡 𝑖𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝐿𝑎𝑘𝑒𝑠ℎ𝑜𝑟𝑒 𝑈 𝑠𝑒𝑟𝑖𝑒𝑠.

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Meet L.A. Cotton:

USA Today and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of over forty mature young adult and new adult novels, LA COTTON is happiest writing the kind of books she loves to read: addictive stories full of teenage angst, tension, twists and turns.

Home is a small town in the middle of England where she currently juggles being a full-time writer with being a mother/referee to two little people. In her spare time (and when she’s not camped out in front of the laptop) you’ll most likely find LA immersed in a book, escaping the chaos that is life. 

Connect with L.A. Cotton: https://www.lacotton.com 

Cover Reveal: Broken Dreams by Abbie Roads

(Beautiful Nightmare, #2)
Publication date: May 9th 2023
Genres: Adult, Dark Romance, Romance

Synopsis:

A stalker. A killer. A v!rg!n hero who will sacrifice himself to save the woman he loves.

FBI Special Skills Consultant Lathan Montgomery has a genetic anomaly that he uses to solve cold cases, but it forces him to live in seclusion. When he saves a woman from a roadside attack, instead of her presence causing him to lose control, she soothes him. For the first time in his life, he experiences love.

But someone is watching them and planning to make them both suffer.

Broken Dreams is the second book in Abbie Roads’ Beautiful Nightmare Series of dark romantic thrillers. It features a v!rg!n hero who never thought he’d find love. If you devour true crime and romance novels then you’ll love a series that combines both in a roller-coaster ride of danger, mind games, and swoon worthy love.

Buy this dangerously dark romance today!

Trigger warning: Depictions of SA and violence.

Previously published under the title Hunt the Dawn

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About the Author

Abbie Roads is the best-selling author of the Fatal Dreams Series and the Fatal Truth Series. Her novels have been finalists in many prestigious contests including The Golden Heart, The Greater Detroit Booksellers Best, The Oklahoma National Readers’ Choice Award, The Write Touch, The Strut Your Stuff Contest, The Aspen Gold Contest, The Gayle Wilson Award of Excellence, The Heart of Excellence Readers’ Choice Award, The Midnight Sun, The Kathryn Hayes Contest, The Chanticleer, The Daphne du Maurier, The National Readers’ Choice Award, The New England Readers’ Choice Contest, The Beverly Award, and The Maggie Award. Her debut novel Race the Darkness was Publishers Weekly Top 10 Pick for Fall and Never Let Me Fall is an Amazon Editor’s Pick.

By day Abbie Roads is a mental health counselor always focusing on the bright side. By night she writes on the dark side, putting her characters through the wringer before she gives them their happily-ever-after. She loves a good inspirational quote and is a fan of true crime.

Connect:

https://www.abbieroads.com/

https://www.facebook.com/abbieroads2

https://twitter.com/Abbie_Roads

https://www.instagram.com/Abbie_Roads/

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/8179024.Abbie_Roads

Spotlight: Everyday War: The Conflict Over Donbas, Ukraine by Greta Lynn Uehling

Everyday War provides an accessible lens through which to understand what noncombatant civilians go through in a country at war.

What goes through the mind of a mother who must send her child to school across a minefield or the men who belong to groups of volunteer body collectors? In Ukraine, such questions have been part of the daily calculus of life. Greta Uehling engages with the lives of ordinary people living in and around the armed conflict over Donbas that began in 2014 and shows how conventional understandings of war are incomplete.

In Ukraine, landscapes filled with death and destruction prompted attentiveness to human vulnerabilities and the cultivation of everyday, interpersonal peace. Uehling explores a constellation of social practices where ethics of care were in operation. People were also drawn into the conflict in an everyday form of war that included provisioning fighters with military equipment they purchased themselves, smuggling insulin, and cutting ties to former friends. Each chapter considers a different site where care can produce interpersonal peace or its antipode, everyday war.

Bridging the fields of political geography, international relations, peace and conflict studies, and anthropology, Everyday War considers where peace can be cultivated at an everyday level.

Excerpt

Svetlana’s Kitchen Table

In spite of the bombing taking place on the outskirts of her city, Svetlana sought to create a sanctuary from violence in her home. After all, she had male friends fighting on both sides of the conflict. Svetlana suggested to me over a heaping basket of French fries that the picture most people have of Donetsk is distorted. In spite of the ongoing violence, and regardless of the unscrupulous separatists who became de facto authorities, she argued, daily life continues. Even though the region is marked by ongoing fighting, people still go to school, graduate, get married, celebrate birthdays, and mark anniversaries. To make her point, she told me that while she still lived in the city of Donetsk, men who were enlisted in opposing military forces sat across from each other at her kitchen table. As she explained: “I have two friends in the military, one of them is on one side and the other one is on the other side. But nevertheless, we sit at the same table.”

“Do they talk to each other?” I asked.

“Yes. One gets a salary there in the DNR [the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic], the other one gets a salary here [in government-controlled Ukraine]. One friend is DNR, and the other one is Ukrainian, he is in the National Guard in the ATO [Antiterrorist Operation] zone. They talk to each other as we do, you and me.”

“And what do they talk about?”

“Well, about everything that is not related to the violent situation. I want to tell you that in my everyday life, even at work I don’t talk about war. I don’t want to, everyone has his own truth, you know.”

In other words, people who drank tea with one another in the evening could be put in a position to kill one another someday. It was, in effect, an interper­ sonal politics to set aside geopolitics. Considering the conflict’s lethality, this is an enormous feat that goes beyond the cliché of agreeing to disagree.

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About the Author

Greta Uehling’s scholarship is broadly concerned with international migration and forced displacement. Major projects have examined the experiences of refugees, asylum seekers, and the internally displaced. Her current project explores the subjective experience of military conflict and forced displacement in Ukraine. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, she documents how the military conflict reconfigured social worlds that became the site of a different, everyday kind of war. 

Prior to teaching in the Program on International and Comparatives Studies, Uehling consulted with a number of international organizations including the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and the Watson Institute at Brown University. 

Uehling holds a PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of Michigan. In 2004, she completed a post-doctoral fellowship with the Solomon Asch Center for the Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict at the University of Pennsylvania. Her first book is Beyond Memory: The Deportation and Repatriation of the Crimean Tatars. Her newest book is Everyday War: The Conflict over Donbas, Ukraine. She is also the author of numerous scholarly articles and the editor of two edited volumes. 

Spotlight: Control by Melissa Cassera

Genre: YA Paranormal Romance

About Control

For Natalie Covington and Henry Thorne, only one thing is certain: things are about to get out of control.

18-year-old Natalie has big ambitions but very little control over her situation. She’s trapped at an elite boarding school on a private island, where cell phones are forbidden, militant guards line the iron gates, and her practically prearranged boyfriend has eyes for another girl. 

Everything changes when a mysterious new student arrives named Henry Thorne. Henry is a “precog”—a hidden society of people who can see the future, and who are forbidden to reveal their powers. When Henry has a grisly vision of Natalie being murdered, he ultimately decides to save her and face the consequences. But the consequences of changing the future are more dangerous than Henry imagined, unlocking a wide conspiracy among his kind that’s linked to Natalie’s past, and a desire that threatens to consume them. 

CONTROL is the first installment in The Lockwood Trilogy. This fast-paced Upper YA/New Adult Paranormal Romance is filled with thrilling turns, self-discovery, spicy language, light steam, and a cliffhanger ending that will leave you obsessing for more. 

Reader Discretion: this book contains graphic language, violence, and some heat. Best suited for 16+.  

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Control Audio Coming Soon! 

About the Author

Melissa Cassera is a Professional Screenwriter, Author, and award-winning Publicity Expert based in Washington State. 

Melissa and her work have been featured in Variety, LA Times, Success Magazine, and Fast Company. She was named one of the nation’s Top Personal Branding Experts by The Huffington Post

On-screen, Melissa is the writer of THE OBSESSION THRILLOGY (Lifetime Network’s first trilogy of movies.) She is also the writer of the films SECRET LIVES OF COLLEGE ESCORTS, NIGHTMARE NEIGHBORHOOD MOMS, MOMMY’S LITTLE STAR, DADDY’S PERFECT LITTLE GIRL, HER STOLEN PAST, and GIRL FOLLOWED. Melissa also sold an eight-episode dark comedy series, ADDICTED, to Fullscreen. She has two additional feature films, WHO KILLED OUR FATHER and NIGHTMARE PAGEANT MOMS, coming to Lifetime Network in 2023, and six additional film projects in active development.

When Melissa is not whipping together obsession-worthy words, she can be found drinking too much coffee, playing at the lake with her dogs, or getting lost in the romance section of a bookstore.

Follow Melissa at her website: https://melissacassera.com/ or on Instagram: @Melissa.cassera

Connect with the Author: Website | Instagram | Newsletter

Spotlight: Stars on Fire by Sky Gold

(The Sable Riders, #1)
Publication date: February 26th 2023
Genres: Adult, Paranormal, Romance, Science Fiction

Synopsis:

The thing is, Selene, I don’t do forever. It’s not what this is.’ – Kainan Sable.

He’s lethal, wraith-like, a warrior who lives in the twilight, the hidden inferno amongst the stars.

She’s driven, ambitious, and unrelenting, with an allure that forces him from the shadows.

He needs to control the intensity of his reaction to her.

She fights the temptation glinting in his sapphire wildfire eyes.

He wants revenge.

She wants forever.

But he can’t give her ‘forever’.

Or can he?

War is stirring in the skies and stars above Eden II. Between empires in ascension and realms in decline. Kainan and Selene find themselves caught up in the maelstrom. Together they’ll light the stars on fire, even as darkness beyond their control seeks to turn their destiny – and their forever – to ashes.

__________________________

If you’re in the mood for:

  • A strong, smart heroine AND a sexy, badass anti-hero

  • Unrequited love and a personal growth saga that spans a universe

  • Steamy, hot epic jolts!

  • Paranormal action

  • All the feels AND heartfelt escapism

Then take to the Skies Above Eden II. A whole new world awaits you. 

Excerpt

Stepping down the ramp of the sleek fighter was a figure. 

A HUGE man. So extensive, so broad, his shoulders blocked all internal views of his ship. He was taller than anyone she’d ever seen before. He was also more muscled than most, with large, powerful ropey limbs that were easily twice as wide as hers. Clad in a matte black, short sleeve jumpsuit moulded to every inch of his massive frame, he sported broad shoulders, slim power-driven hips and enormously thick thighs that eased into equally gigantic boot-clad feet. 

He’d strapped a contoured blaster to his hip, and she saw the outline of throwing knives tucked into his boots. His skin was a light lustrous caramel, the thick neck, broad upper arms and hands covered by a series of stunning gold and sapphire tattoos in the shape of an evocative nebula, marks he seemed to wear like a badge of honour. This was unlike any man she’d ever seen.

She blinked twice in disbelief. Yet his magnificence kept giving. A long messy mane of dark locks crowned his head. They were shot with highlights of sapphire and gold with silver at the temples. It trailed thick and lustrous down past his shoulders. 

The same iridescent sapphire, gold and silver hues flashed on his beard, squared jaw and full moustache. His lips were full, his cheekbones high, and his nose long and flaring powerfully as he paused to draw in Zaalalum’s pure forest air. 

His forehead was a wall unto itself, the dark brows thick and unyielding, but it was his eyes that stopped the wind, halted her breath and stilled all sound around her.

Holy Dunia, she thought, as her gaze and what felt like her entire soul fell into pools of molten gold flecked with flashes of electric sapphire. 

Each spark in his deep-set eyes was charged with a blue energy band and pulsed with electric centres that graduated in colour and frequency, glowing as they seemed to flow from his corneas toward her. His life force washed over her in waves, and she broke into a hot flush. One that travelled over her skin and down her spine. 

The sensation was almost familiar. That thought alone threw her off.

She took a tentative step back and almost lost her balance but managed to recover before losing her dignity.

He kept coming towards her, casually lifting a sizeable palm. Not in greeting, but a cool command to drop her weapon. 

He was, hands down, the most lethal man she’d ever seen or met.

She jerked her gun at him. ‘Stay.’

He arched an eyebrow and paused, his sapphire and gold eyes coolly assessing her as he came to a stop. At that moment, she knew her tiny handheld piece would have no effect whatsoever on him. Still, she kept it trained on him.

His lips twitched. Then he crossed his massive arms across his chest and jerked his chin towards the corvette behind him.

‘Your transport awaits, Excellency.’

Selene blinked in surprise. ‘You know who I am?’

‘I do.’ 

His voice was deep, rough and gravelly, echoing with a lingering melody that roused a stir in her innermost being. 

She tamped down the sudden stab of whatever-the-fokk-it-was that almost took her breath away. ‘You’re my ride?’

He lifted a dark eyebrow, and his sapphire-flecked eyes glimmered. She instantly knew where his mind had leapt to. 

She felt a flash of heat. Straight to her core, dammit.

To his credit, he didn’t indulge the thought further. 

Naam. I’m your pilot.’ 

His voice was deep, mellow, smooth, and accented. She couldn’t quite place it, but he spoke Standard fluently. 

‘What were you expecting?’ he continued.

‘Maybe less of a sneaky fly-in and more of an obvious and on-time announcement of your arrival?’ she snarked.

He shrugged his massive shoulders. ‘But I was on time. To be exact, I was here before the agreed time. Purely precautionary, of course. I didn’t know what I’d be walking into.’ 

She had to lean back her petite frame to look up at him even though he stood a few feet away. ‘Well, neither do I, so excuse me as I check in with my people.’

His lips quirked once more before he stepped back to give her privacy.

She kept one hand on her weapon and tapped her wrist comm, slightly turning away from the stranger. The holo screen popped up, and Rina grinned at her. ‘Still here!’

Selene cursed under her breath and whispered. ‘Of course you are. Can you confirm that my ride to Eden II is a stealth fighter slash corvette piloted by an unidentified scary-looking colossus?’

Her best friend nodded chirpily. ‘Sounds about right.’ Rina’s voice dropped to a whisper as she peered at the view behind Selene. ‘And what a ride, might I add. And I’m not talking about the ship.’

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About the Author

Sky Gold is a best selling author, writer and lover of all things delicious, fun and courageously life affirming. She imagines herself a warrior for the people she loves and values she stands for! She looks to her gorgeous husband, her whimsical kids, her loyal friends, her sweet Russian Blue Cat, and the stars themselves for her heavenly inspiration.