What's on your nightstand?

We interrupt this regularly scheduled blogging for some book news! Check back on www.rileyshane.com on Monday for to see the cover and blurb for my upcoming Dreamspinner Press release, Chasing Alex!!!

Now, onto this week's reading. The audio book madness continues as I work on In the Penalty Box, and since it's Royal Wedding Week, what better choice is there than an audio book with a wedding-ish theme? Just omit what happens to the bride in this book (yikes). I have to say, the narrator is one of the best I've ever heard.

Veil of Night by Linda Howard
Ballantine Books/Random House Audio
Contemporary Romance
ISBN: 978-0345506894/978-0307577634
Description from Amazon.com:

Jaclyn Wilde is a wedding planner who loves her job—usually. But helping Carrie Edwards with her Big Day has been an unrelenting nightmare. Carrie is a bridezilla of mythic nastiness, a diva whose tantrums are just about as crazy as her demands. But the unpleasant task at hand turns seriously criminal when Carrie is brutally murdered and everyone involved with the ceremony is accusing one another of doing the deed.

The problem is, most everyone—from the cake maker and the florist to the wedding-gown retailer and the bridesmaids’ dressmaker—had his or her own reason for wanting the bride dead, including Jaclyn. And while those who felt Carrie’s wrath are now smiling at her demise, Jaclyn refuses to celebrate tragedy, especially since she finds herself in the shadow of suspicion.

Assigned to the case, Detective Eric Wilder finds that there’s too much evidence pointing toward too many suspects. Compounding his problems is Jaclyn, with whom he shared one deeply passionate night before Carrie’s death. Being a prime suspect means that Jaclyn is hands-off just when Eric would rather be hands-on. As the heat intensifies between Eric and Jaclyn, a cold-blooded murderer moves dangerously close. And this time the target is not a bride but one particularly irresistible wedding planner, unaware of a killer’s vow.

What's on your nightstand?

This week I finished going through the galley copy of Chasing Alex, my upcoming release (June 1st) from Dreamspinner Press. I'm really excited for Chase and Alex's story to be released. Within the next two weeks, I'll be posting the cover and blurb for Chasing Alex both here and on my website :)

I'm still hard at work on In the Penalty Box - Lord save me from heroes who change the plot of their book multiple times. I think Samson and Landon might be my biggest PITAs yet. Still, I'm enjoying writing their journey, detours and all.

Since I'm pounding away at the keyboard, I haven't had much time to read. Thank goodness for audio books:

Cruising by J.P. Bowie
Total-E-Bound
Contemporary Male/Male Romance
ISBN: 978-0-85715-198-8
Click here to buy from Total-E-Bound

Adam Brenner is looking for a life change when a long-time friend and associate, Tom Hathaway, offers him a position as casino manager aboard The Maid of the Seas, a luxury cruise ship out of Port Canaveral, Florida.

Trying to leave behind haunting memories of an alcoholic boyfriend on a path to destruction, Adam succumbs to the Latin charm of Vittorio Borghese, the ship’s architect. After a night of hot sex, Adam thinks he might have found the one to help him forget the misery of the past, but Adam soon discovers that life on board a floating resort has its drawbacks to go hand-in-hand with the perks.

Dismayed by the hostility shown toward him by the ship’s captain, and Vittorio’s seeming indifference, Adam finds comfort in the company of Brett Jarvis, a talented singer/guitarist who plays nightly in the ship’s lounge bar. The two men quickly form a warm and loving relationship, and Adam starts to look forward to ‘a life on the ocean wave’, thinking that it will now all be plain sailing.

However, he soon discovers that out on the vast regions of the Atlantic, sudden squalls, both natural and man-made, happen all too frequently—and some people are definitely not the great guys they appear to be.

What's on your nightstand?

I've been in a mood lately where I haven't wanted to read anything on my bookshelves (literal or virtual). Not because the books are uninteresting, merely that I haven't decided what I'm in the mood for. So, if you've read something lately that blew you away, I'm trolling for recs this week.

This week on my nightstand is Stranger, the fourth book in Zoë Archer's Blades of the Rose series:

Stranger by Zoë Archer
Blades of the Rose, Book 4
Zebra
Paranormal Historical Romance
ISBN: 978-1420106817
Description from Zoë Archer's website:

He protects the world’s magic—with his science. But even the best scientists can fall prey to the right chemistry...

LOOKING FOR TROUBLE

Gemma Murphy has a nose for a story—even if the boys in Chicago’s newsrooms would rather focus on her chest. So when she runs into a handsome man of mystery discussing how to save the world from fancy-pants Brit conspirators, she’s sensing a scoop. Especially when he mentions there’s magic involved. Of course, getting him on the record would be easier if he hadn’t caught her eavesdropping...

LIGHTING HIS FUSE

Catullus Graves knows what it’s like to be shut out: his ancestors were slaves. And he’s a genius inventor with appropriately eccentric habits, so even people who love him find him a little odd. But after meeting a certain red-headed scribbler, he’s thinking of other types of science. Inconvenient, given that he needs to focus on preventing the end of the world as we know it. But with Gemma’s insatiable curiosity sparking Catullus’s inventive impulses, they might set off something explosive anyway....

What's on your nightstand?

I've slightly switched gears in my reading this week and am enjoying Finding Deaglan by George Seaton. It's an engaging paranormal fiction novel and the author so seamlessly weaves together multiple plot threads that I'm in awe:

Finding Deaglan by George Seaton
MLR Press
Paranormal Fiction
ISBN: 978-1-60820-298-0 (e-book), 978-1-60820-297-3(print)
Click here to buy from MLR Press

A coterie of inheritors of Denver's old money, including twenty-four year old Stephen Thaxton, find themselves inextricably entwined in an imperative to close a hoary circle left open in the other world, the other side where retribution is sought for wrongs committed by their progenitors a century before; wrongs that eradicated wolves from Colorado, and saw the indigenous Indian tribes of Colorado robbed of their lands, all to enhance the wealth and privilege of those who now find themselves the last of their family lines.