A hearty thanks goes out to Katy Sozaeva for getting enthusiastically involved after reading Invisible Dawn and A Life of Death in my recent ebook giveaway. She loved the books and wanted them to become as perfect as I would like. She is a copy-editor and helped put the finishing touches on both books. They are now being reviewed by the various distributers and will then be available in print and ebook form in their perfected state. I don't claim that there will be no errors, but that we worked to eliminate any that came to our attention. Even after so many revisions and edits, grammar errors slip through.
Here is what she had to say about the books in her reviews. The reviews can be found on Safari, Smashwords, B&N, Amazon, and even Authonomy.
Invisible Dawn:
Weston Kincaid's debut novel blurs genre lines - trying to describe it is going to be a challenge! It starts off as science fiction, adds some fantasy elements and then makes a sharp turn into horror.
Jedd has spent 12 years searching for his goddaughter Madelin, who was taken by agents of PASTOR (Phantom Assassin Shifting Technology & Organized Reconnaissance) when she was just a child, because she had the ability to shift - that is, open rifts into one of the other infinite planes of reality. Daniel, who lives in a different plane, lives tormented by his past and running from members of Black Force, a mercenary company with whom he used to work. Roger, in the same plane, is a gambler who is down on his luck when Daniel finds him beaten half to death in an alley. Juno, from yet another plane, is a member of the Traditor family, who are extremely long-lived, strong and agile, but have trouble dealing with the sun and some ... unusual dietary needs. These are the main protagonists in the book. Chasing after Madelin is "Father" Leodenin, a very strong shifter with PASTOR, and a company of soldiers led by Marlin. Once on Juno's plane, Leodenin teams up with Juno's brother, Lord Alain.
The book focuses on keeping Madelin safe, getting her away from PASTOR and coming up with a plan to try to save the rest of the unwilling "volunteers" taken by PASTOR. Along the way there are many battles, from bullets to hand-to-hand, and twists and turns galore to keep the reader on her or his toes.
I found the story exciting and engaging - I enjoyed it from start to finish. For a debut novel, this one is remarkably well-done, carefully plotted and the characters well-developed. There were some issues with abrupt transitions and changes in POV, but once you fell into the rhythm it was fairly easy to keep up with them. Fans of cross-genre thrillers, suspense, science fiction, fantasy and horror should all find something to love in this book.
A Life of Death:
Alex Drummond has enough to deal with, really. His father was killed by a drunk driver a few years ago; his mother got remarried and moved them in with her new husband, who is a vicious alcoholic and beats Alex frequently to within an inch of his life; Alex's step-brother, Frank, is a layabout who also beats on him, and his two step-sisters are an annoyance to him; and he's an outsider at school, small and picked on by the larger kids. Now he's developed an alarming tendency - when he touches things that were somehow touching a person when they were murdered, he falls into a vision and relives their death. And the people whose deaths he is reliving expect him to do something about it.
Partly a paranormal suspense book, partly a coming-of-age story, and even including a little bit of romance, "A Life of Death" is a completely amazing story! I won't lie to you, it is often very intense - the tension evinced by this book is amazingly well-done and I often felt my heart racing from the extremity of emotions that it raised. It is tightly plotted and suspenseful; the characters are well-developed and realistic - the whole thing just came to life in my mind while I was reading it, and the sudden silence whenever I would look up showed me just how much it filled my mind while I was reading it.
The story is bracketed interestingly - the very beginning and very end are Alex as an older man, a police detective, helping his son with a project for school. The story itself is the tale he tells the boy. I thought this was a neat way to open and close the story and it left me with hopes that we might expect a series of Alex Drummond mystery novels in the future. I would certainly buy them!
Fans of paranormal mystery and suspense stories should enjoy this book. Definitely give it a read as soon as you can!