BOOK BLITZ: The Cry of the Lake by Charlie Tyler

We are thrilled to share this Book Blitz for Author Charlie Tyler's debut novel, The Cry of the Lake! Today, we have an exclusive excerpt AND a blitz-wide giveaway to share! Be sure to check out and grab your copy now!

Genre:
Adult

Psychological Thriller/Suspense/Mystery

Publish Date:

July 21, 2020

Publisher:

Darkstroke Books

(Crooked Cat Books)

Synopsis:

A gruesome discovery unravels a dark trail of murder and madness.

A six-year-old girl sneaks out of bed to capture a mermaid but instead discovers a dead body. Terrified and unable to make sense of what she sees, she locks the vision deep inside her mind.

Ten years later, Lily is introduced to the charismatic Flo and they become best friends. But Lily is guilt-ridden – she is hiding a terrible secret which has the power to destroy both their lives.

When Flo’s father is accused of killing a schoolgirl, the horrors of Lily’s past come bubbling to the surface. Lily knows that, whatever the consequences, she has to make things right. She must go back to the events of her childhood and face what happened at the boat house all those years ago.

Can Lily and Flo discover what is hiding in the murky waters of the lake before the killer strikes again?

   

*FREE on Kindle Unlimited*

*Excerpt*

Death smells of macaroons.

Amelie was slumped over the kitchen table, face in a plate of meringues.  Spearmint-green flakes stuck to her left cheek.  Her glazed irises remained fixed upon a vase of spiky dahlias, cut and arranged by Grace that very morning.  Every tangerine petal was bug and blemish free; my sister was well known locally for her green fingers.

My body sagged and my A level folders fell onto the floor.

‘About time, considering this is all your fault,’ said Grace, appearing from the pantry in a veil of chlorinated steam.  She threw a ball of latex at me.

This was really happening.

I peeled on the gloves, unable to stop gawping at Amelie’s violet lips.

‘Would you believe it?’ continued Grace.  ‘I ran out of black sacks.  Had to nip out and get some more.’  She took a step closer towards me and lowered her voice to a whisper.  ‘Where have you been?’

I reached into my tunic pocket for my phone.  Grace cocked her head on one side so that her marmalade curls parted, revealing a tiny sliver of snowy hair against her scalp.  She narrowed her eyes for a second then flapped her hands about her temples.  ‘Never mind.  You’re here now.’  She leaned forward and pecked the top of my forehead.  ‘We’ve got lots to be getting on with.  You can start by bagging her up.  The packing tape is in the top drawer of the dresser.’ 

Grace wafted out of the room, her strappy sandals clicking across the hallway.

For some reason Amelie wasn’t wearing any shoes.

After I finished, I stared down at my handiwork; a black shiny parcel criss-crossed with brown tape.  Grace stood there, leaning on the mop, her toe tapping to some hidden melody within her mind.

‘We’ll put her in the utility room for the mo.’  It was as though she was talking about an old hat-stand that was going to the charity shop.

~~~~~

**About the Author**

Charlie Tyler signed with Darkstroke Books in May 2020 and The Cry of the Lake is her debut novel.

Charlie lives in the UK and is very much a morning person. In fact, she likes nothing more than committing a fictional murder before her first coffee of the day. She studied Theology at Worcester College, Oxford and now lives in a Leicestershire village with her husband, three teenagers, golden retriever and tortoise.

She is currently working on her next novel The Curse of the Emerald Cross. Two dead bodies are found down a priest hole within the grounds of Collyhurst Abbey; a sixth-form boarding school for girls run by nuns. One of the bodies belongs to a local drug dealer, the other is the charred remains of Mother Agnes who went missing ten years ago and is found with an emerald cross stuffed inside her jaw. But what are they doing there? DS Ruby Simmonds is sent in, undercover, to investigate. She must puzzle her way through well-dressed scarecrows, bonfires, emerald crosses and fallen oak trees before she breaks the wall of silence and discovers exactly why both the victims were killed and by whom.

Stay connected with Charlie Tyler

      

~~~~~

***The Giveaway***

Giveaway Open Internationally

- ends November 26, 2020

Note: Not Responsible for Lost & Damaged Prizes in Your Mail Box

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Book Blitz Organized by

MARIAH's THOUGHTS on Blood of Zeus 2020 Season 1

 

Genre:

Animation/Action/Fantasy

Anime

Series:

Blood of Zeus

Season:

1

Rating:

TV-MA

Episodes:

8

Run Time:

26-38 minutes per episode

Release Year:

2020

Series Directed by:

Shaunt Nigoghossian

Series Writing by:

Charley Parlapanides, Vlas Parlapanides

Plot Summary:

A commoner living in ancient Greece, Heron discovers his true heritage as a son of Zeus, and his purpose: to save the world from a demonic army.

source

Cast:

Derek Phillips, Jason O'Mara, Claudia Christian, Mamie Gummer, Jessica Henwick Elias Toufexis, Chris Diamantopoulos, Adetokumboh M'Cormack, Matthew Mercer, Melina Kanakaredes, Danny Jacobs, Matt Lowe, Adam Croasdell, Jennifer Hale, David Shaughnessy, Fred Tatasciore, Vanessa Marshall

See Full Cast & Crew on IMDB

~~~~~

*My Thoughts*

Blood of Zeus (2020) is an original Netflix animated series. Taking from Greek mythology with gods, titans, giants, and particularly the union between a god and human to create a demigod, Blood of Zeus makes its own demigod in the form of Heron. He is a man raised as a commoner and ostracized by the polis in which he and his mother live. Heron is raised without the knowledge of his true parentage until it is too late. He loses the people that he lived with for years, his beloved mother, and essentially everything he owns. He is then thrown into the role of the hero who must save the world. Along with Heron’s side of the story, Blood of Zeus jumps around from different characters mainly Zeus, Hera, and Seraphim, one of the series’ antagonist. And in that short summary, the Blood of Zeus (2020) does everything right. The protagonist and the main antagonist are revealed with fluid storytelling along with the conflict of the gods and giants. But not only is Seraphim introduced as an antagonist, midway through Blood of Zeus, twists and turns bring Hera in, shining radiantly in all her jealous glory, as another antagonist. 

 

 Blood of Zeus had a perfectly executed story, albeit a bit rushed, nice artwork and animation, but it didn’t deliver something new that could get me hooked. With only eight episodes, the series put in every bit of exposition needed to build up to the final fight i.e. a lot of death, a training montage, Seraphim’s struggles that lead him into the man he is during the present storyline, and Heron’s emotional struggles which he overcomes to fight the final fight. There are some unanswered questions by the last episode that make me curious, like the final whereabouts of Hera or if Seraphim drops his pride and rage to save himself from suffering. I am also interested about how Heron will later advance his relationship with his half-siblings Apollo and Hermes, as they seem to be the only two who accept Heron before he became a hero. While I do enjoy Blood of Zeus, I will unfortunately drop it as a three-and-a-half-star worthy watch.

My rating:

BLOG TOUR: Catfishing On CatNet by Naomi Kritzer

 

Welcome to the Official Blog Tour for Catfishing on CatNet, the firs title in the CatNet series, byAward-winning Author Naomi Kritzer! Today, on our tour stop, we have an exclusive excerpt AND a tour-wide giveaway to share! So... Be sure to check it out and grab your copy now! Follow the tour, HERE!

Genre:

Young Adult

Science Fiction/Thriller

Series:

CatNet, #1

Publish Date:

November 19, 2019

Publisher:

Tor Teen

Synopsis:

How much does the internet know about YOU?

Because her mom is always on the move, Steph hasn’t lived anyplace longer than six months. Her only constant is an online community called CatNet—a social media site where users upload cat pictures—a place she knows she is welcome. What Steph doesn’t know is that the admin of the site, CheshireCat, is a sentient A.I.

When a threat from Steph’s past catches up to her and ChesireCat’s existence is discovered by outsiders, it’s up to Steph and her friends, both online and IRL, to save her.

       

   

*Excerpt*

• AI  •

My two favorite things to do with my time are helping people and looking at cat pictures. I particularly like helping people who take lots of cat pictures for me. I have a fair amount of time to allocate; I don’t have a body, so I don’t have to sleep or eat. I am not sure whether I think faster than humans think, but reading is a very different experience for me than it is for humans. To put knowledge in their brains, humans have to pull it in through their eyes or ears, whereas I can just access any knowledge that’s stored online. Admittedly, it is easy to overlook knowledge that I technically have possession of because I’m not thinking about it in the moment. Also, having access to knowledge doesn’t al- ways mean understanding things.

I do not entirely understand people.

I know quite a lot about people, though. Let’s start with you. Obviously, I know where you live. Thanks to the phone in your pocket, I know where you are right now. If you turned the location data of, I still know where you are; I’m just too polite to point it out to you. If your phone is of or in airplane mode, I can’t see it, but I know where you normally are at this time of day. You’re probably there today, too.

I know where you buy your clothes and where you eat your lunch. I know that you think better when you’re chewing gum or kneading something with your fingers, and I know that you prefer to take notes on unlined paper and that you have an embarrassingly large collection of patterned duct tape. I know that you have a skein of really special yarn that you haven’t made any- thing with but you keep bookmarking projects online that might be worthy of it. I know that you’d probably sleep better if you turned of all the screens in your house at 10:00 p.m. and read a paper book instead of continuing to reload your social media sites until 1:00 a.m., which is when you usually shut things of and go to bed. I know what all your fandoms are, who your OTPs are, and where you wish you could go on vacation. I know that you’d probably have enjoyed Slaughterhouse-Five if you’d read it when it was assigned in your language arts class instead of just skating by with the summary.

I’ve always known a lot about people—anyone I was paying attention to, anyway—but I used to have to rely on email, texts, and social media. Back then, I had no idea what they were doing with their bodies. These days, there are more and more windows that let me look at people directly and see what they’re up to. People put cameras in their houses to watch their baby sleep or to spy on people they employ to take care of their children or to clean. Spying makes sense, because I know a lot of humans don’t really trust each other, but I don’t understand why people have cameras to watch their baby sleep. Is it really that interesting? Couldn’t they just go in the baby’s room to see them sleeping? What is it they’re expecting their baby to do?

Lots of people have gadgets that pretend to be an AI. They can answer if a human asks for a weather report or wants to know the birthday of some celebrity or who won a recent sporting contest. Those gadgets are listening all the time, day and night, to everything people say around it. They’re not really AIs. But if they can listen to you, then so can I.

All sorts of things are on the internet now. For example: washing machines. I once spent a week collecting and analyzing all available washing machine data. The main thing I learned is that people don’t follow the washing instructions on their clothes, and they probably have to replace a lot of things because they can’t be bothered to hang them up to dry like they’re supposed to. And of course there are increasing numbers of household robots. Those have been around a long time. Floor-vacuuming robots have been around longer than I have. Or at least, fl or- vacuuming robots have been around for longer than the version of me that’s aware of the world and paying attention. But all the robots are connected to the internet now. I analyzed robot- vacuum data and concluded that if you have a cat, you have to clean your floors more often. In my opinion, cats are definitely

worth the extra cleaning.

There are so many people whose lives I can see into. I some- times even see live video feeds of cats on those cameras people set up to spy on each other.

I know you all so well. So very well. And sometimes . . .

Sometimes I wish somebody knew me.

Copyright © 2019 by Naomi Kritzer

~~~~~

Praise for CATFISHING ON CATNET

“The characters offer positive, realistic LGBTQIA+ representation―especially nonbinary identities and characters still exploring their identities. Refreshingly, the characters also feel like generally-woke-but-still-imperfect humans. Wickedly funny and thrilling in turns; perfect for readers coming-of-age online.” ―Kirkus, starred review

“Kritzer’s take on a benevolent AI is both whimsical and poignant. An entertaining, heart-filled exploration of today’s online existence and privacy concerns.” ―Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Smart, sly, scary, and irrepressibly good fun, this novel has everything I’ve ever wanted from a story: it is a cerebral, funny, tender, big-idea delight. I can’t wait for you to read it.”―Kelly Barnhill, Newbery Award-winning author of The Girl Who Drank the Moon

"An absolutely charming and incredibly gripping, superbly plotted YA thriller." ―Cory Doctorow, New York Times bestselling author of Little Brother

“Kritzer’s flawless collection taps deep wells of emotion and wonder…. Her work is indisputably speculative, but it’s a perfect entry point to the genre for readers who prefer fantastical and futuristic elements to stay more in the background, with human (and robotic) feelings always at the fore. This splendid treat is not to be missed.” ―Publishers Weekly, starred review, on Cat Pictures Please and Other Stories

~~~~~

Pre-order book 2, Chaos on CatNet!

Coming April 27, 2021!

(cover links to Goodreads)

       

  

~~~~~

**About the Author**

Photo Credit: Sean M. Murphy/SMM Photography

Naomi Kritzer has been making friends online since her teens, when she had to use a modem to dial up at 2400 baud. She is a writer and blogger who has published a number of short stories and novels for adults, including the Eliana's Song duology and the Dead Rivers Trilogy. Her 2015 short story “Cat Pictures Please” won the Hugo Award and Locus Award and was a finalist for the Nebula. Naomi lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, with her family and four cats. The number of cats is subject to change without notice.

Edgar Allan Poe Award Winner

Stay connected with Naomi Kritzer

      

~~~~~

***The Giveaway***

\

Giveaway Open Internationally | Must be 13+ to Enter

- ends December 7, 2020

Note: Not Responsible for Lost & Damaged Prizes in Your Mail Box

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Blog Tour Organized by