I’m thrilled to announce that Laurel & Croton has released a brand new edition of AWAKENING MACBETH, a suspenseful, page-turning paranormal romance novel. It’s available now in Kindle and paperback formats, with audiobook coming soon.
?? Paranormal romance ??
Yep, you read that right.
AWAKENING MACBETH stands alone among my contemporary mystery and historical fiction thriller books but it was inspired by my grandmother, the Claudette Colbert lookalike married to the deputy sheriff whose stories inspired the Galliano Club historical fiction thrillers. (Yes, I have a very inspirational family!)
When we granddaughters had children of our own, my grandmother cautioned us to always wake a child gently, never abruptly.
“The soul wanders while we sleep,” she said. “It needs time to come back to us before we’re fully awake.”
My older sisters dismissed her caution as a silly superstition. But for years I woke my children gently, even as I wondered why a soul would wander while we slept.
What are our souls looking for?
The obvious answer
I was walking through Edinburgh, that city of narrow streets and a thousand ghosts and a fabulous place to set a scene or two, when I finally answered my own question.
It’s love. Our souls are always searching for love.
But there’s a dangerous side to love. Lost love, unrequited love, and grief at the loss of a loved one all demand a reason why love–so ardently desired–has slipped out of our grasp. As a result, brokenhearted and grief-stricken souls wander in search of answers.
That restlessness takes place in dreams–limbo, really–where evil stalks in an unending quest for souls to steal.
That evil is revealed in the eyes, of course. We all know that the eyes are the windows of the soul.
But if evil steals a soul, what happens next?
Now for the paranormal romance trope
Here’s the recipe to answer that question:
Take one brilliant history professor recovering from her father’s shocking death.
Add an Iraq War vet who recognizes another survivor when he sees one.
Mix in a baffling inheritance.
Sprinkle with scenes from British history, which play out in terrifying nightmares.
Oh, and there’s a dog. Mouse has instincts which shouldn’t be ignored. (She’s based on our first German Shepherd, Rudi the Wonder Dog who lived with us in 5 different countries.)
The result? From Virginia’s most famous university to the Scottish highlands to a dusty road in Iraq, not even Shakespeare could have predicted the secret that AWAKENING MACBETH will reveal.
