If your a regular reader or frequent visitor of Jorie Loves A Story, you know I’ve been smitten with the novelists who publish their relationship-based Romances with ChocLitUK for a good two years now! I love being on the cusp of learning about a ‘new release’ whilst I remain patient to see if the Digital First new ChocLit novel will make it to a print release further down the road of it’s lifetime. I don’t mind the gaps between the ebooks and the print editions – as it’s always given me the pleasure of balancing my ‘next ChocLit reads’ to include both Front List and Back List offerings. Thus, I am enjoying being a member of the Reveal Team at ChocLit whilst it gives me a chance to introduce my readers to a variety of sub-genres within Romance I appreciate picking up to read!
On my new position as a ChocLit Star member: Whilst I am part of the ChocLit Reviewers having brought reviews & guest author features to Jorie Loves A Story for the past two years, I have recently become a part of the Cover Reveal Team, as disclosed when I hosted the first Reveal on behalf of Sheryl Browne’s ‘Learning to Love’. This new team works with ChocLit providing honest feedback on ‘projects’ such as title & book cover design choices as well projects in development on behalf of the publisher. I accepted being a ChocLit Star as I felt my love of the stories would be a good fit to give in-depth responses to the projects pitched to the Stars. Therefore, when I blogged about the cover for “Revenge is Sweet” it was the first reveal where my input as a ChocLit Star helped the reveal become possible!
On 18 June #ChocLitSaturday celebrated ChocLitUK’s 7th Birthday with an open topic of delightful joy wherein ChocLitSaturdayers joined the ChocLiteers for a lively celebratory bash where the convo happily alighted a spirit of joy in our hearts! Ms Stacey dropped in on the chat, too! She was quite keenly excited about her upcoming Reveal for this novel, and I was quite delighted for her in that regard! Seeing your debut go live must be a wicked stellar #awesomesauce moment!
House of Secrets Cover Reveal
A woman on the run, a broken man and a house with a shocking secret…
Madeleine Frost has to get away. Her partner Liam has become increasingly controlling to the point that Maddie fears for her safety, and that of her young daughter Poppy…
Desperation leads Maddie to the hotel owned by her estranged father – the extraordinarily beautiful Wrea Head Hall in Yorkshire. There, she meets Christopher ‘Bandit’ Lawless, an ex-marine and the gamekeeper of the hall, whose brusque manner conceals a painful past.
After discovering a diary belonging to a previous owner, Maddie and Bandit find themselves immersed in the history of the old house, uncovering its secrets, scandals, tragedies – and, all the while, becoming closer.
But Liam still won’t let go, he wants Maddie back, and when Liam wants something he gets it, no matter who he hurts...
Places to find the book:
Book Page on World Weaver Press
Published by: ChocLitUK (@ChocLitUK)
RELEASE DATE: 19th July, 2016 – ebook version
Formats Available: this is a Digital First release! print and audio should follow next!
Converse via: #ChocLit & #RomSusp + #AlternativeHistory
About Lynda Stacey
Lynda, is a wife, step-mother and grandmother, she grew up in the mining village of Bentley, Doncaster, in South Yorkshire.
She is currently the Sales Director of a stationery, office supplies and office furniture company in Doncaster, where she has worked for the past 25 years. Prior to this she’d also been a nurse, a model, an emergency first response instructor and a PADI Scuba Diving Instructor … and yes, she was crazy enough to dive in the sea with sharks, without a cage.
Following a car accident in 2008, Lynda was left with limited mobility in her right arm. Unable to dive or teach anymore, she turned to her love of writing, a hobby she’d followed avidly since being a teenager.
Her own life story, along with varied career choices helps Lynda to create stories of romantic suspense, with challenging and unpredictable plots, along with (as in all romances) very happy endings.
Lynda joined the Romantic Novelist Association in 2014 under the umbrella of the New Writers Scheme and in 2015, her debut novel House of Secrets won the Choc Lit & Whole Story Audiobooks Search for a Star competition.
She lives in a small rural hamlet near Doncaster, with her ‘hero at home husband’, Haydn, whom she’s been happily married to for over 20 years.
As soon as I learnt this was a brilliantly conceptionalised genre-bender evoking out a Contemporary Romantic Suspense novel with elements of an Alternative Historical Fiction story, I knew it was a novel I would be reading in the future! I had a bit of a proper sense I might fancy reading this lovely debut, as foresaid I have interacted with Ms Stacey via Twitter; not too often unfortunately but from what I’ve gleaned I gathered a sense about her writing style and I must say I was very compelled to learn more about her debut with ChocLitUK!
The blurb for this novel is quite apt for those of us who are Ancestry Sleuths on behalf of our families – I, in particular, believe in ‘ancestral or genealogical imprinting’ – how our past relatives have imported pieces of themselves down through the centuries through our very DNA coding and the heartprints of who they were as they lived their lives; not only stored in these cells of our being, but threaded through living histories wherein one relative restores the past by honouring their legacies to a new generation. We’re all interconnected in one harmonious thread – how far of a leap of faith would it be then for us to entertain the notion the ‘past can heal the future’ if only we could believe in how insightful such a revelation could be for the person in question?
Secrets have a funny way of purporting themselves through time’s arrow and alighting back through our compass point at such an hour as to effectively cause the change that was always meant to be – it was written in other words to happen!
As previously revealled on my reviews for The Untied Kingdom (review) + The Silver Tongue (review) I have a newfound respect for ‘Alternative Historical Fiction’ and timelines that work countercurrent to our own living historical past! There is a measure of suspense emitting itself out of the proposition of the theory behind such stories – as who is to say what is plausible and improbable after all? Time is temporal and nothing is every permanently a fixed point on a line you can visibly see! Moreso to the point, if you are curious about which of these lovelies (as The Untied Kingdom is a ChocLit novel!) won over my heart & enchanted my mind to such a stellar level of brilliance – you’ll simply have to visit my *End of the Year Survey, 2015* to see who championed the genre-bent category and took home a Jorie Loves A Story Cuppa Book Love Award!
I am wickedly excited for this novel to be released into print – if only to duck into the folds of the story, and see how Ms Stacey illuminated her theory built on this hypothesis! It might even become one of my future ‘unputdownable’ reads – and to me, that is surely something to jump to the moon over!
This Cover Reveal is courtesy of: ChocLitUK
My ChocLit readings this May & June 2016:
You Think You Know Me | No. 1 of the London & Cambridge Mysteries | by Claire Chase (review)
The Golden Chain | No. 2 of Charton Minster series (see No.1) | by Margaret James
Some Veil Did Fall | No.1 of the Rossetti Mysteries | by Kirsty Ferry
Similar to blog tours where I feature book reviews, as I choose to highlight an author via a Guest Post, Q&A, Interview, etc., I do not receive compensation for featuring supplemental content on my blog. I provide the questions for interviews and topics for the guest posts; wherein I receive the responses back from publicists and authors directly. I am naturally curious about the ‘behind-the-scenes’ of stories and the writers who pen them; I have a heap of joy bringing this content to my readers.
Reader Interactive Question:
What inspires you to pick up a Rom Suspense novel?
What do you love about Alternative Historical Fiction?
{SOURCES: Book cover for “House of Secrets” as well as the book synopsis, author photograph of Lynda Stacey, author biography and Choc Lit Star Badge were provided by ChocLitUK and used with permission. Stories Sailing into View banner created by Jorie in Canva. Post dividers and My Thoughts badge by Fun Stuff for Your Blog via Pure Imagination. Comment Box Banner made by Jorie in Canva. Tweets embedded due to codes provided by Twitter.}
Copyright © Jorie Loves A Story, 2016.
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