September 2017 – Ruff Drafts

Sneaky the Library Cat Talks Books, Blogs, and Groups

Posted on September 21, 2017September 22, 2017 by Debbie

I’m proud to have the library cat from my cozy mystery series here to talk about our books and fill my readers in on the latest Cobble Cove news. Hi, Sneaky. thanks for dropping in on my blog.

Hi, Debbie. It’s mice to be here for a change. For those who don’t know, I have my own blog where I interview cats and other pet characters as well as real-life pets of authors. I’ve had some really interesting guests including a group of llamas recently. You can read and subscribbe to my blog here: https://sneakylibrarycat.wordpress.com

That sounds great, Sneaky. So tell me what’s going on in Cobble Cove. Any news you’d like to share?

Well, you should know more than me, Debbie, because you’re the author, but I have heard some rumors that a fourth book of the series is in the works.

That’s true. I’ve just started writing the fourth Cobble Cove Mystery. I’m not quite ready to give away any hints about it yet, but maybe you’d like to say something about the first three books since you are featured in all of them.

Yep. I’m a regular character along with Alicia, the librarian; John, the newspaper publisher/mystery author; Fido, my dog co-star, and a bunch of other really fun folks who all live in the small upstate town of Cobble Cove, New York, where most of the action takes place. But, let me tell you, for a cozy small town, this place turns out to be a hotbed of crime; and, by “hotbed,” I don’t mean the warm in the sunny bay window type of hotbed.

In the first book, A Stone’s Throw, there are a few scenes on Long Island where Alicia, like you, is originally from. One of the settings of the second book is New York City during the holidays; and in our latest, Written in Stone, we are back on Long Island for a bit.

Since I don’t like to give away spoilers, I will just give a brief overview of each book.

In my first adventure, I am introduced as the library cat of the Cobble Cove Library. I help Alicia uncover clues to a very old mystery in the secret room above the library. It isn’t exactly secret because a previous librarian had stayed there, but I like to add a little drama to my descriptions.

A Stone’s Throw

ebook: myBook.to/Stonesthrow2

paperback: myBook.to/stonesthrow2paper

In the second Cobble Cove mystery, I appear in a children’s storytime at the library. I don’t really help solve the three crimes of burglary, kidnapping, and murder featured in this book, but I provide a bit of comic relief which is an important role in any story.

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

ebook: myBook.to/CobbleCove2

paperback: myBook.to/CC2paper

In my latest mystery, I play a big role. Not only do I go missing from the library, but I turn up clues that lead to the person who killed the lady in the library who was wearing the same blouse as Alicia. I also convinced you to let our publisher put my likeness on the cover. Aren’t I handsome?

Written in Stone

ebook: myBook.to/CC3ebook

paperback: myBook.to/cc3paper

You certainly are, Sneaky, and quite modest. Is there anything else you’d like to say about yourself or our books?

Not purr-ticularly, but I hope I’ve piqued some people’s curiosity and that they check out our series on the links I’ve added underneath the cover of each book. If they want to know more about me or any of the other characters, they can join the Cobble Cove Character Chat group that is hosted each month by a different Cobble Cove resident. I’ve hosted twice and am the current host for September. Each host answers questions from group members, posts excerpts from their scenes in the book, and sponsors a contest for a prize. The winners and new hosts are chosen at the end of each month. https://www.facebook.com/groups/748912598599469/

Thanks for letting the readers know about that, Sneaky. We’re always looking for new members, and I know you are always seeking new pet and pet characters for interviews on your blog.

Yes, Debbie. I love cat chatting with guests. It was fun to talk on your blog, but I must get back to Cobble Cove to help you finish writing our next book and make sure you give me some pawsome scenes.

I promise I will try, Sneaky. Now for a shameless plug by your author for her other books of various genres that feature cats (sorry, Sneaky).

Check out my Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/Debbie-De-Louise/e/B0144ZGXPW. Connect with me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/debbie.delouise.author and Twitter: https://twitter.com/Deblibrarian

Don’t forget to join my author newsletter for updates and monthly contests. Sign up on my website: https://debbiedelouise.com

Anthology, New Releases, Science Fiction, Solstice Publishing

Announcing 2 New Sci Fi Anthologies: Project 9, Volumes 3 and 4

Posted on September 15, 2017 by Debbie

Releasing today, Friday, September 15, two great new Science Fiction anthologies from Solstice Publishing. Both books are full of incredible stories by talented authors. Don’t forget to check out my tale, The Last Librarian, in Project 9 Volume 3.

Speculative fiction, stories that range from fights for freedom to battles to survive. We revel in tales of the past meeting the future, of humanity overcoming adversity. Join these six talented authors on a journey through the time/space continuum, where imaginations run wild and events don’t turn out as you might think they should.

Can society exist without libraries?

Time travel is not for the timid.

On her way to invade another world, Clara makes incredible discoveries.

Pay monthly to live or die.

Josey finds an AA meeting.

Knowledge is a dangerous thing.

https://youtu.be/Oaf7l3bbY2A

Six science fiction tales that cover the spectrum from speculation to far off worlds. Join with these talented authors for an experience you won’t soon forget: Debbie De Louise, Jim Cronin, E.B. Sullivan, K.A. Meng, Nicole Luttrell, and Ken Newman.

https://bookgoodies.com/a/B075MMJCHR

Are you ready for journeys to all sorts of different worlds? Where experimentation runs amok, or invaders run afoul of humans determined to protect their homes? Can a pill or pills give people intelligence? Can a single entity save the galaxy? What happens in between? Does darkness really reign in the universe?

Can The Warp save Earth?

Darkness has a new name

Destinies link in the In-Between

Hairy science, hybrid secrets

There are tests and then there are tests

We are survivors!

https://youtu.be/g1SomKumzLY

Six science fiction tales that cover the spectrum from speculation to far off worlds. Eric Ian Steele, Rob McLachlan, Tanya Reimer, Josie Montano, Palvi Sharma, and K.C. Sprayberry bring you stories that will send shivers up and down your spine while entertaining you.

https://bookgoodies.com/a/B075MNYK64

New Releases, Uncategorized

New Release: Where in the Dark by Karen Millie James

Posted on September 10, 2017 by Debbie

Two envelopes. Two holocaust survivors. Two anonymous bearer

bonds each worth one million pounds. Corporate forensic

investigator, Cydney Granger, with help from beyond the grave,

enters a world previously unknown to her to unravel the truth

behind a web of secrets, lies, corruption, blackmail and hidden

Nazi loot as new horrors of the Third Reich come to light.

Still struggling to come to terms with the apparent death of her

husband, Captain Steve Granger, five years’ earlier Cydney puts her

personal feelings to one side and is determined to bring to justice

an escaped Nazi criminal, Adolf Weissmuller, living under the assumed

name of Albert Whiteman, whose son is about to run for the US

presidency. Can Albert ever make amends for his crimes against

humanity, or are some actions beyond forgiveness …?

Will Cydney, along with her trusted and tough protector, former

sergeant, Sean O’Connell, also uncover the truth surrounding

her husband?

The consequences of Cydney’s investigations, stretching back

before WWII, are far reaching with the potential to bring down a

banking dynasty as she faces insurmountable odds from which

there is only one final solution.

The dramatic follow-up to The Shadows Behind Her Smile,

a compelling debut which takes the reader from the heart of Cydney’s

corporate world to the ruins of war-torn Damascus and where men

will stop at nothing to achieve their goals.

From ch7:

Albert Whiteman had led his life for the last fifty-eight years feeling confident he had left his past behind. Now, through his own fault, it was about to come back and bite him extremely hard and harm everything he had set in motion for his son to become president of the United States of America. How his fellow officers would have laughed to even think that the son of a Nazi officer, his own child, might one day hold that position.

He had not thought about his past until recently. It was almost as if it hadn’t happened, an episode in a book he’d read, as if he was so detached from his previous existence, repressing any memories and never haunted by images. Now, he questioned whether in fact he should feel any guilt for his actions. He’d never considered this or any consequences of the actual mass murders he had committed and the exterminations, but the thought alone and the questioning in his mind was eating away at him on a daily, almost hourly basis. He couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, and was unable to function. It was essential to his existence and to his life to have answers, especially now he didn’t have long left on this earth and would have to face his Maker. He felt no remorse; how could he when everything he had done had been on the orders of his senior officers?

Never a religious man at all or God fearing, he had started to attend a catholic church in the last year, initially chosen purely because the architecture and the statue outside of the Madonna and Child attracted him more than any others. The church dated back to the 1830s and was built in a pseudo-gothic style, and somehow it had managed to escape destruction in the civil war. With its sweeping vista across the gorge of the Shenandoah River, it gave the man a sense of peace which he didn’t receive where he lived one hundred and fifty miles away, and he was struck by the richness of everything about it.

When Albert sauntered into the church it enraptured him, which came as a shock. The first time he had simply entered through the open door and stood inside the vestibule before going through into the nave where he gazed wonderingly around him, admiring the stained-glass windows and statues that honoured religious figures and illustrated the Bible’s words. Around the walls were plaques of the story of Christ’s crucifixion. He felt drawn by the sense and smell of it all and the fullness of an all-consuming silence, and the cold, instead of repelling him, was somehow comforting. From childhood, religion to him was cold. The few times he was forced to attend church with his parents as a young boy, he’d found it unemotional and uncaring. He had never understood the draw or why you had to pray to God or anyone you couldn’t see or hear. Was the lack of heat to give you a sense of Hell in comparison? The preacher always drummed into him that was where everyone would end up if they didn’t abide by the rules set out in an ancient text. Now he may be thinking differently because that’s all he had left.

Buy Links:

Hardback, Paperback, Kindle and audible: http://amzn.to/2fJv6O4

Social Media Links:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/karenmilliejames/

Twitter: www.twitter.com/@KMillieJames

Website: www.karenmilliejames.com

New Releases

Announcing A.B. Funkhauser’s New Release, Shell Game

Posted on September 6, 2017 by Debbie

Book Description:

Carlos the Wonder Cat lives free, traveling from house to house in a quiet suburban neighborhood. Known by everyone, his idyllic existence is jeopardized when a snarky letter from animal control threatens to punish kitty owners who fail to keep their pets indoors. The $5,000 fine/loss of kitty to THE MAN is draconian and mean, but before Team Carlos can take steps, he is kidnapped by a feline fetishist sex cult obsessed with the films of eccentric Pilsen Güdderammerüng. Stakes are high. Even if Carlos escapes their clutches, can he ever go home?

The third novel in the UNAPOLOGETIC LIVES series, SHELL GAME follows SCOOTER NATION (2016) and HEUER LOST AND FOUND (2015) this time, with an eye on a seemingly pastoral community with a lot to hide. More than a cat and mouse story, Shell Game is an examination of community—who we are and how we relate to one another in a questioning world. Written with tongue firmly in cheek, it asks us to open our eyes, see better, and have a little more patience.

Excerpt:

Escorted with force up creaky wooden stairs into a passageway straight out of Kafka, the cat squirmed as the space opened into a large windowless room. There, light from tall lamps shot white hot from floor to ceiling, their beams reminiscent of Nuremberg on its worst day. These, uniform in design, were placed with deliberate care every six feet or so, like the stations of the cross in a Catholic cathedral. The lack of adornments on the walls and in the cornices, however, made this place anything but holy, the ecclesiastical taking a back seat to amateur theatrical.

Kitty growled a thousand growls, all unheard.

Unlike their hooded counterparts from down below, the humans upstairs concealed their identities not with comic book capes, but with papier mâché masks, obscuring what were probably facial features of little worth. Their bodies once unshrouded, offered an array of tattoos and piercings. Many were on the heavy side, their adipose jiggling with the multitudes that tried to copulate in interesting ways. Nothing at all like Güdderammerüng’s Blod av Däggdjur, which supported an aesthete both elegant and worshipful, this sexy orgy party tried way too hard to be what it clearly was not.

Large cat statues in the Egyptian fashion added to the absurdity of the occasion. Eight feet tall, the polystyrene golden statues came by way of a prop wrangler and his girlfriend, who had purloined them from a storage locker after a film wrap in Vancouver. Under red-pink lights, the cat sentinels were positioned in equal numbers on either side of a large altar, marked by numerous fetish objects and eschatological symbols. In line with the forced revelry that abounded, their uses gained currency with the rather strange choice of Seventies-era rock music that assaulted the senses.

Working up a large hairball, Carlos barely caught his breath for all the hookah vapors filling the room. Humans of all genders did what they did together, separately and severally. Many appeared older, their sagging midsections reminding him of the old Tom’s that lived out their lives in the Banford barn outside Cavan.

Claiming to want something more, something more in line with Güdderammerüng’s vision, their attempts at consciousness raising from the “darkness to the light” fell flat. These humans, for all their writhing and hookah smoking, fundamentally lacked what the cats had: that state of grace that comes with knowing who you are and what you’re here for.

PRAISE

“…writes with a take-no-prisoners style of prose.”

Steve Cronin, AMERICAN FUNERAL DIRECTOR MAGAZINE

“Funkhauser digs down deep into each character and shatters the lines of morality, showing us the darkness and light within all of them…”

Angela D’Onofrio, Author FROM THE DESK OF BUSTER HEYWOOD

“Funny, quirky, and sooooo different.”

—Jo Michaels, JO MICHAELS BLOG

Author Biography:

Toronto born author A.B. Funkhauser is a funeral director, classic car nut and wildlife enthusiast living in Ontario, Canada. Like most funeral directors, she is governed by a strong sense of altruism fueled by the belief that life chooses us, not we it.

Her debut novel Heuer Lost and Found, released in April 2015, examines the day to day workings of a funeral home and the people who staff it. Winner of the Preditors & Editors Reader’s Poll for Best Horror 2015, and the New Apple EBook Award 2016 for Horror, Heuer Lost and Found is the first installment in Funkhauser’s Unapologetic Lives series. Her sophomore effort, Scooter Nation, released March 11, 2016 through Solstice Publishing. Winner of the New Apple Ebook Award 2016 for Humor, and Winner Best Humor Summer Indie Book Awards 2016, Scooter picks up where Heuer left off, this time with the lens on the funeral home as it falls into the hands of a woeful sybarite.

A devotee of the gonzo style pioneered by the late Hunter S. Thompson, Funkhauser attempts to shine a light on difficult subjects by aid of humorous storytelling. “In gonzo, characters operate without filters which means they say and do the kinds of things we cannot in an ordered society. Results are often comic but, hopefully, instructive.”

SHELL GAME, tapped as a psycho-social cat dramedy with death and laughs, is the third book in the series and takes aim at a pastoral community with a lot to hide. “With so much of the world currently up for debate, I thought it would be useful to question—again—the motives and machinations championed by the morally flexible, and then let the arbiter be a cat.”

Funkhauser is currently working on THE HEUER EFFECT, the prequel to HEUER LOST AND FOUND.

Other Books by A.B. Funkhauser:

HEUER LOST AND FOUND (2015)

Unrepentant cooze hound lawyer Jürgen Heuer dies suddenly and unexpectedly in his litter-strewn home. Undiscovered, he rages against God, Nazis, deep fryers and analogous women who disappoint him.

At last found, he is delivered to Weibigand Brothers Funeral Home, a ramshackle establishment peopled with above average eccentrics, including boozy Enid, a former girlfriend with serious denial issues. With her help and the help of a wise cracking spirit guide, Heuer will try to move on to the next plane. But before he can do this, he must endure an inept embalming, feral whispers, and Enid’s flawed recollections of their murky past.

Geo Buy Link: http://myBook.to/heuerlostandfound

Book Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llaBBPQIcoc

SCOOTER NATION (2016)

Aging managing director Charlie Forsythe begins his work day with a phone call to Jocasta Binns, the unacknowledged illegitimate daughter of Weibigand Funeral Home founder Karl Heinz Sr. Alma Wurtz, a scooter bound sextenarian, community activist, and neighborhood pain in the ass is emptying her urine into the flower beds, killing the petunias. Jocasta cuts him off, reminding him that a staff meeting has been called. Charlie, silenced, is taken aback: he has had no prior input into the meeting and that, on its own, makes it sinister.

The second novel in the UNAPOLOGETIC LIVES series, SCOOTER NATION takes place two years after HEUER LOST AND FOUND. This time, funeral directors Scooter Creighton and Carla Moretto Salinger Blue take center stage as they battle conflicting values, draconian city by-laws, a mendacious neighborhood gang bent on havoc and a self-absorbed fitness guru whose presence shines an unwanted light on their quiet Michigan neighborhood.

Geo Buy Link: http://myBook.to/ScooterNation

Book Trailer: https://youtu.be/oqmrW_t92jc

LINKS

Geo Buy Link: http://myBook.to/ScooterNation

Geo Buy Link: http://myBook.to/heuerlostandfound

Walmart: http://www.walmart.com/ip/Scooter-Nation/53281677

Website: www.abfunkhauser.com

Amazon Author Page: www.amazon.com/author/abfunkhauser

Twitter: https://twitter.com/iamfunkhauser

Facebook: www.facebook.com/heuerlostandfound

Branded: https://branded.me/abfunkhauser

Google Plus: https://plus.google.com/u/0/118051627869017397678