Book Review/Giveaway - In An Instant by Suzanne Redfearn

In an Instant
by Suzanne Redfearn

About In An Instant

In An Instant
Thriller/Women's Fiction
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing (March 1, 2020)
Paperback: 331 pages
ISBN-10: 1542006589
ISBN-13: 978-1542006583
Digital ASIN: B07NVD1276

A deeply moving story of carrying on even when it seems impossible.

Life is over in an instant for sixteen-year-old Finn Miller when a devastating car accident tumbles her and ten others over the side of a mountain. Suspended between worlds, she watches helplessly as those she loves struggle to survive.

Impossible choices are made, decisions that leave the survivors tormented with grief and regret. Unable to let go, Finn keeps vigil as they struggle to reclaim their shattered lives. Jack, her father, who seeks vengeance against the one person he can blame other than himself; her best friend, Mo, who bravely searches for the truth as the story of their survival is rewritten; her sister Chloe, who knows Finn lingers and yearns to join her; and her mother, Ann, who saved them all but is haunted by her decisions. Finn needs to move on, but how can she with her family still in pieces?

Heartrending yet ultimately redemptive, In an Instant is a story about the power of love, the meaning of family, and carrying on…even when it seems impossible.

My Thoughts: This story begins with one of the craziest families ever. Well maybe it could be any of our families at one point or another but anyhow it  just seemed so dysfunctional but all things were supposed to be put aside for a 3 day mountain trip.

"In an Instant" there's a horrible accident leaving our main character Finn dead but she lingers and watches over the remaining family.

This story was heartbreaking and I had to have tissues to get thru it. I enjoyed how the author was able to express the different personalities of each family member.

About Suzanne Redfearn

Suzanne Redfearn is the award-winning author of three novels: Hush Little Baby, No Ordinary Life, and In an Instant. In addition to being an author, she’s also an architect specializing in residential and commercial design. She lives in Laguna Beach, California, where she and her husband own two restaurants: Lumberyard and Slice Pizza and Beer. You can find her at her website, SuzanneRedfearn.com, on Facebook at SuzanneRedfearnAuthor, or on Twitter @SuzanneRedfearn.

Purchase Links - Amazon B&N

a Rafflecopter giveaway


TOUR PARTICIPANTS

February 26 – Laura`s interests – SPOTLIGHT

February 27 – Escape With Dollycas Into A Good Book – REVIEW

February 28 – I'm All About Books – SPOTLIGHT

February 29 - Gimme The Scoop Reviews – REVIEW

March 1 – A Wytch's Book Review Blog – SPOTLIGHT

March 2 – eBook addicts – REVIEW

March 3 – This Is My Truth Now – AUTHOR INTERVIEW

March 4 – A Chick Who Reads REVIEW

March 5 – Ruff Drafts – SPOTLIGHT

March 6 – Hearts & Scribbles – SPOTLIGHT

March 6 – MJB Reviewers – REVIEW, AUTHOR INTERVIEW

March 7 – The Book Diva's Reads – SPOTLIGHT

March 7 – StoreyBook Reviews - SPOTLIGHT

March 8 – Brooke Blogs – REVIEW

March 9 – That's What She's Reading – REVIEW

March 10 – Christy's Cozy Corners – SPOTLIGHT

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Book Review - Pokergeist by Michael Phillip Cash

POKERGEIST

By Michael Phillip Cash

Humorous Fantasy

Sometimes life, as well as death, is about second chances. Luckless
Telly Martin doesn’t have a clue. An awful gambler trying to scrape by
as a professional poker player, he becomes the protégé of world famous
poker champion Clutch Henderson. The only catch…Clutch is a ghost. Telly
and Clutch must navigate the seedy gambling underbelly of Las Vegas
learning to trust each other in order to win the elusive International
Series of Poker, repair their shattered personal relationships and find
redemption in this life and the hereafter.



My Thoughts: If you enjoy ghosts and poker then this a book for you! Quick fun read about love and the love of the game with some ghosty help that is! I have had the opportunity to read several of Mr Cash's books and enjoyed them all. He's just a remarkable storyteller!

I was given a copy free for an honest review.

 

Amazon → https://amzn.to/35QJFn4

 Barnes & Noble → https://bit.ly/36LeX02

 

Prologue

Like taking candy from a baby, Clutch Henderson thought. He took a deep pull on his whiskey, allowing the burn to numb him from gullet to stomach. The room reeked of smoke, even though it was not allowed in the main ballroom during the tournament. Overhead, giant television screens focused on two players. Clutch looked up, winked, and watched the camera close in on his craggy face. I still got it. He smirked at his image. He was tall, lanky, and deeply tanned, which accentuated his silver hair and light eyes. Even though he was pushing seventy, he knew the ladies still found him attractive. They didn’t call him the Silver Fox for nothing. Clutch patted the blister pack of Viagra in the pocket of the polyester bowling shirt that he wore in homage to the Big Lebowski, the fictional kingpin legend. Gineva would be picking up a celebratory bottle of champagne right now, as soon as she clocked out at the Nugget. They wouldn’t give her the day off today—the bastards. There was a good chance he was going to make an honest woman out of her tonight…a rich, honest woman.

Clutch shifted in his seat, his hemorrhoids making their presence known. They burned his ass more than the cocky kid sitting opposite him. He looked over to his opponent who was sunk low in his seat, his face swallowed by the gray hoodie he wore. Adam “the Ant” Antonowski, boy wonder, who rose from the ranks of online card games, had beaten out a seemingly impossible one hundred sixty-five thousand players to earn a coveted seat at the International Series of Poker. His pimply face peeked out from under oversized sunglasses. Clutch sneered contemptuously at him. They let everybody play today. The kid did look bug-eyed with those enormous glasses. Adam curled his hands protectively over his cards, his bitten-down fingernails repulsive.

“Rookie,” Clutch muttered under his breath, his lips barely moving.

“Looks like Clutch Henderson is praying, folks,” Kevin Franklyn said into his mike from where he sat in a small room watching the game. He was a former champion turned seasoned sportscaster on the poker circuit, well respected, and the senior of the two anchormen. He was completely bald, his fleshy nose slightly off center on his craggy face, a victim of his youthful and unsuccessful boxing career. He’d made a mint once he turned to poker and had never looked back.

Stu James shook his head. “Clutch could be at his last prayers; this kid is the terminator.” Stu was a tall cowboy with wavy blond hair and mustache left over from his 1970s poker-playing heyday. He looked like a country singer.

“Let’s see if Clutch can exterminate the Ant,” Kevin replied.

They shared a laugh. The sportscasters wore matching light blue jackets with the Poker Channel logo on the chest.

Kevin nodded, placing his hand on his earbud, and said, “Yes, this is it, folks, in case you’ve just tuned in. A record fourteen thousand entrants, and it all comes down to this—the final moments. The rookie versus the pro: it could have been scripted by a screenwriter. David versus Goliath. Adam ‘the Ant’ Antonowski going up against the legendary Clutch Henderson.”

Michael Phillip Cash is an award winning screenwriter and novelist.
He’s written many books and screenplays in the horror, suspense,
thriller and fantasy genres. He resides on the North Shore of Long
Island with his wife and children.

WEBSITE & SOCIAL LINKS:

Website: http://www.michaelphillipcash.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/michaelpcash

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MichaelPhillipCash

 

Book Tour/Review - We Of The Forsaken World by Kiran Bhat

WE OF THE FORSAKEN WORLD
By Kiran Bhat
Literary Fiction/Metaphysical Fiction

Synopsis: The Internet has connected – and continues to connect – billions of people around the world, sometimes in surprising ways. In his sprawling new novel, we of the forsaken world, author Kiran Bhat has turned the fact of that once-unimaginable connectivity into a metaphor for life itself.

In we of the forsaken world, Bhat follows the fortunes
of 16 people who live in four distinct places on the planet. The gripping stories include those of a man’s journey to the birthplace of his mother, a tourist town destroyed by an industrial spill; a chief’s second son born in a nameless remote tribe, creating a scramble for succession as their jungles are destroyed by loggers; a homeless, one-armed woman living in a sprawling metropolis who sets out to take revenge on the men who trafficked her; and a milkmaid in a small village of shanty shacks connected only by a mud and concrete road who watches the girls she calls friends destroy her reputation.

Like modern communication networks, the stories in, we of the forsaken world connect along subtle lines, dispersing at the moments where another story is about to take place. Each story is a parable unto itself, but the tales also expand to engulf the lives of everyone who lives on planet Earth, at every second, everywhere.

As Bhat notes, his characters “largely live their own lives, deal with their own problems, and exist independently of the fact that they inhabit the same space. This becomes a parable of globalization, but in a literary text.”

Bhat continues:  “I wanted to imagine a globalism, but one that was bottom-to-top, and using globalism to imagine new terrains, for the sake of fiction, for the sake of humanity’s intellectual growth.”

“These are stories that could be directly ripped from our headlines. I think each of these stories is very much its own vignette, and each of these vignettes gives a lot of insight into human nature, as a whole.”

we of the forsaken world takes pride of place next to such notable literary works as David Mitchell’s CLOUD ATLAS, a finalist for the prestigious Man Booker Prize for 2004, and Mohsin Hamid’s EXIT WEST, which was listed by the New York Times as one of its Best Books of 2017.

Bhat’s epic also stands comfortably with the works of contemporary visionaries such as Umberto Eco, Haruki Murakami, and Philip K. Dick.


My Thoughts:  This was a bit different from things I usually read and a bit hard for me to get into but I did enjoy it. Told using several different "voices" in a poetic way where everything kinda merges together somehow and doesn't seem like just a pile of short unrelated stories about living conditions from olden to the more modern ages and the availability of technology or the unavailability and how it affects the different areas.

I received a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

Amazon → https://amzn.to/2DQIclm

Barnes & Noble → https://bit.ly/2Lqe9Fi

_____________________

TEASER

______________________

EXCERPT

“My people. Now speaks the man destined to
make the great cats bow to feet, now speaks the man who will lock eyes with the
sun. I have found our new land. Take your canoes and follow me. A new time for
our tribe has come.”

Not a single man found it in himself to raise
a weapon, nor did a single wife open her mouth. The eyes of the eternal shone
not from the skull but from the eyes of our chief’s first son. We believed that
the spirits had bestowed him with our future. He had the eyes of life and death
and life once more.

(Bhat, we, of the forsaken world… p.
191)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kiran Bhat was born in Jonesboro, Georgia to parents from villages in
Dakshina Kannada, India. An avid world traveler, polyglot, and digital
nomad, he has currently traveled to more than 130 countries, lived in 18
different places, and speaks 12 languages. He currently lives in
Melbourne, Australia.

Website  → http://iguanabooks.ca/

Blurb Blitz/Giveaway - Finding Frances by Kelly Vincent

 

Finding Frances

by Kelly Vincent

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GENRE: Contemporary YA

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BLURB:

Retta Brooks thinks her life is on track after convincing her overprotective mom to stop home-schooling her and allow her go to Buckley High. She comes home from a night out with friends to find that her whole world has changed, and she has extremely hard decisions to make. Not to mention finding the answers to questions some people would rather she not know. Is she strong enough for what lies ahead?

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Excerpt One:

I Googled everything I knew about the crash. I had the rough date, so I searched for news records of wrecks then. But there were tons, and the old newspaper records required payment. I found a few sites that would let me search accident reports by state, which made me realize I didn’t even know for certain where the crash had happened.

I did know that right after it happened, Mom had moved us to Buckley and rented this house. I’d been born in Lincoln, Nebraska, so maybe it had happened in Nebraska. Yet I’d always assumed we had already been living somewhere in Iowa. Maybe it was Mom’s family who was from Nebraska. But where else in Iowa had we lived? Des Moines, since that was the newspaper I’d found?

Also, it occurred to me that it was weird we didn’t have much money. If all those people had died, surely Mom inherited money or got insurance money. It made no sense.

Googling everybody who had died brought up records of long-dead people with similar names and nothing more. What if it was all made up? What if those weren’t their names at all? What if I was adopted—or worse, kidnapped? That would be crazy. But it also would explain why Mom was so paranoid.

Could that really be it?

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

AUTHOR Bio and Links:

Kelly Vincent wrangles data weekdays and spends the rest of her time playing with words. She grew up in Oklahoma but has moved around quite a bit, with Glasgow, Scotland being her favorite stop. She now lives near Seattle with three cats who definitely help her write her stories. She’s also working toward the Red Earth Master of Fine Arts in creative writing at Oklahoma City University.

Website: kellyvincent.net

Blog: kellyvincent.net/blog

Twitter and Instagram: @kvbooks

Buy Links:

Amazon: https://smile.amazon.com/Finding-Frances-Kelly-Vincent/dp/1509229035/

B&N: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/finding-frances-kelly-vincent/1135861073?ean=9781509229031

Also available on Apple Books. Will be on Kobo and Google but not there yet.

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Kelly Vincent will be awarding a $40 Amazon or B/N GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.

I am sorry the rafflecopter code  link isnt working on this post but you can visit this link and join in.

Rafflecopter Tour Entries for Kelly Vincent ---  LINK