‘Sometimes it pays to be tricky…’
I’d slipped out of my own writing and editing, and hadn’t read a book in ages, then Miranda sent me Dead Lake to beta read and I got lost in it! It reignited my own words and a desire to write again. Dead Lake has been out for a while now, and I’m still thinking about it.
From Monday Feb 14th Dead Lake will be on sale for 7 full days – up to and including the 20th of February. The price will be 99p/99c.
Seriously, if you like fantasy, crystals, forests, magic, and a heroine with bite and attitude, then you need to read this…
I really loved Tricky, the main character, and I knew I would, but I got caught up in her confidence and sass, and appreciated the times her vulnerability shone through. So, I asked Miranda what she loved about Tricky, and about writing her character:
Miranda said: I love her humour, her honesty, the way she flirts with any good looking man, and also her wily nature. She’s everything I want to be: confident, sure of herself, and lives her life on her terms.
She always makes me smile. She’s that inner part of yourself only you don’t dare let others see, because they might be offended. It’s like letting a part of me escape every time I write about her.
I agree, this is exactly how I saw her too!
Here’s my review:
‘Sometimes it pays to be tricky
Damn and blast! That rancid piece of excrement, Carter, has had her ransacked out of Clancy!
Tricky returns to her cottage to find it turned upside down. An action that means she’s got three days to leave the district or face punishment. Randolf Carter, head of the district, is spreading lies and suspicion about her kind, making life difficult. But it wasn’t just an ordinary ransacking – they were searching for something.
Using her gifts, Tricky traces the energy left by the men and spies another creature’s energy among it: a jackdaw. Swift and wily, it’s pinched her precious gemstone, a piece of black obsidian. But at whose bidding? Communicating with birds is a rare ability and she knows all who possess it.
Tricky wants her stone back, but coming up against people like Carter won’t be easy, especially when he’s got one of her kind in his employ. But she’ll handle it, oh yes she will. She’ll just have to be careful and a little bit tricky. Good thing she is then, isn’t it?
Adept at working with energy and time as well as communicating with trees, Tricky is lured into something bigger than ownership of a gemstone, and finds out that sometimes it pays to be a little bit tricky.
Dead Lake is a dark paranormal fantasy novel set a few hundred years from now in a post-apocalyptic world. After a massive shift of the tectonic plates decimated the world and its population, life on the remaining landmass has returned to simple living, with money, rulers and religion no longer tolerated.’
If you’re looking for a great book and a bargain,
you’ll not go wrong with Dead Lake and Tricky!
Stacy Bennett’s 
The second book I read was 
The horror in this book crept into me, just as its protagonists crept, or meandered, or hurried into the titular wood. Like I said I began the second book as soon as I’d finished the first, so my next book was: 
In August we went on a family holiday a real trek over 600 miles away to the north coast of Scotland. It was another effort to escape and I did and I loved it! While in the car we opened J Edward Neill’s book 
And Its companion book ‘101 Questions for Humanity’ was very much a flick through and discuss, this book needed more intense thinking and evaluation, and the questions posed are much longer and more intricate. We thought hard about some of our answers, and this book requires thought about science, the universe, and theories. It was indeed a real philosophical discussion starter. 
Later in the year I was able to read a book I had wanted to for a while. My mother died from cancer, pneumonia and Alzheimer’s at the end of 2016, a tough time indeed, and this book was off the reading list for this reason. But as the year progressed I needed to read it. Author S R Karfelt knew what I’d been through and I knew what she’d been through. It was time to read 
The last book I read on 2017 was 
I will be part of this lovely 
I will also be selling items from 
If you want a book with a story, with a beginning, middle and end – this is not the book for you. If you want to learn Auri’s back story, or any story, this is not where you’ll find it. But if you want a book that will make you feel, that will entrance you, that will make your emotions tingle with love, sadness, fear, anger, delight, beauty and so much more – this is your book. 
This story covers only a few days and leads you, twisting and turning, through Auri’s world. It is not a story, like I said, there really is no beginning or end, it just is.
My own shelves are homage to my treasures, from scattered acorn cups to lost crystals, and missing buttons to ancient bottles of scent that can’t yet be parted with. So like Auri…
The Last Krystallos 