Stilettos & Gunpowder by Gail Koger (VBB, excerpt, and GIVEAWAY) GFT

STILETTOS & GUNPOWDER

Gail Koger

 

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GENRE:  Action/adventure Romantic Comedy

 

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BLURB:

 

My name is Gemma Stone. I’m a Maricopa County Sheriff’s Deputy and not only must I deal with the sweat-soaked misery of the Arizona desert, I get to respond to a bunch of crazy 9-1-1 calls all day long. Like a parakeet up a tree, or a car accident where a tractor trailer full of fireworks is hit and the 4th of July comes a bit early.

 

But some days crime takes a deadly turn. Police cars are suddenly blowing up. Detective Sergeant Dante Delgado, the love of my life, was assigned to track down and stop the bomber. Am I worried? You betcha. There’s a madman on the loose and he is very, very good at making bombs.

 

Just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse, the Feds think I’m in cahoots with an Iraqi warlord who deals in stolen antiquities, Ichabod, my murderous ex-dance partner, escapes from prison and I’m suddenly in everyone’s crosshairs.

 

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EXCERPT

“Damn!” Frank spat and slammed on the brakes. 

The seatbelt abruptly clamped around my chest. “Holy crap!” The skinny, white male with the feathered headdress and loincloth was doing his war dance in the middle of the road. I keyed my mic, “Charlie-23 show us out at 85th Avenue and Bell Road with a male dancing in the middle of the street.”

“Copy, Charlie-23,” the dispatcher responded.

A truck narrowly missed the demented dancer. Did he notice? Nope. With his loin cloth flapping in the wind, he shook his hips in what looked like a weird belly-dance. Then he switched to the Texas two-step.

“Ugh. I really don’t want to make another arrest today,” I grumbled.

Frank nodded. “Me, either.”

“Stay with our prisoner. I’ll handle the boogie man.” I got out of the car before Frank could protest and approached the moron. “Sir, if you feel the need to dance, could you do it on the sidewalk?”

He took one look at me, shrieked and bolted down the roadway, yelling, “It wasn’t me. It wasn’t me.” Horns honking, cars swerved around him.

“Aw, c’mon! It’s too dang hot to be running.” Did he listen? Hell, no. I trotted after him. It wasn’t like he could run very fast in flip-flops. “Stop! Now! You’re gonna get hit!”

The overhead lights flashing on the patrol car, Frank followed behind us.

The fool lost his flip-flops and did a crazy hippity-hoppity dance over to a circle of grass on the highway median.

I picked up his flip-flops. The pavement was about 180 degrees, and he wasn’t going anywhere without his shoes. “Why are you running?”

“I don’t want to go to jail,” he wheezed.

“And I don’t want to arrest you.”

“You don’t?”

“Nope. What’s your name?”

“Tim White.”

“Okay, Tim, what’s up with the dancing?”

He shrugged. “I’m just trying to spread a little joy.”

“Un-huh. Does it look like it’s working?”

 

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AUTHOR Bio and Links:

I was a 9-1-1 dispatcher for the Glendale Police Department and to keep from going totally bonkers – I mean people have no idea what a real emergency is. Take this for example: I answered, “9-1-1 emergency, what’s your emergency?” And this hysterical woman yelled, “My bird is in a tree.” Sometimes I really couldn’t help myself, so I said, “Birds have a tendency to do that, ma’am.” The woman screeched, “No! You don’t understand. My pet parakeet is in the tree. I’ve just got to get him down.” Like I said, not a clue. “I’m sorry ma’am but we don’t get birds out of trees.” The woman then cried, “But… What about my husband? He’s up there, too.” See what I had to deal with? To keep from hitting myself repeatedly in the head with my phone I took up writing.

 

 

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Playing Army by Nancy Stroer (VNBtM, excerpt, and GIVEAWAY)

Playing Army

by

Nancy Stroer

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GENRE:  UpLit / domestic war

 

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BLURB:

 

It’s 1995 and the Army units of Fort Stewart, Georgia are gearing up to deploy to Bosnia, but Lieutenant Minerva Mills has no intention of going to war-torn eastern Europe. Her father disappeared in Vietnam and, desperate for some kind of connection to him, she’s determined to go on a long-promised tour to Asia. But the Colonel will only release her on two conditions—that she reform the rag-tag Headquarters Company so they’re ready for the peacekeeping mission, and that she get her weight within Army regs, whichever comes second. Min only has one summer to kick everyone’s butts into shape but the harder she plays Army, the more the soldiers—and her body—rebel. If she can’t even get the other women on her side, much less lose those eight lousy pounds, she’ll never have another chance to stand where her father once stood in Vietnam, feeling what he felt. The Colonel may sweep her along to Bosnia or throw her out of the Army altogether. Can you fake it until you make it? Min is about to find out.

 

 

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EXCERPT

 

I sucked in my gut and forced the top button of my BDU trousers through the hole. Pounds never melted off me like they did in the diet pill commercials. As I wrestled with my body’s ill-fitting container the latrine door opened and two pairs of boots tromped in. Specialist Pettit’s voice floated over the sound of running water. “Not to be mean or anything, but female commanders are the worst. And Lieutenant Mills is the absolute worst. I worked for her for two years in Personnel and she ragged on me the whole time.”

 

Whoa, shit. Enemy inside the wire. I stopped breathing altogether and leaned so close to the stall door my eyes crossed.

 

“Hey, now.” That was Lieutenant Logan, my replacement at my old job. Female soldiers carved their hierarchies along different lines, never straight down the military ranks, and new alliances were being tested. Would Logan stick up for me, officer to officer? “It’s a short-term thing. She won’t be here long.” Instead of reproach, Logan’s voice was edged with mirth. “The colonel needs a body in that chair until a real commander comes in, and now that I’m here, Lieutenant Mills is over strength. She’s the body.”

 

My face grew hot. Real commander? Body? I clamped my lips shut against the urge to burst out of the stall, roaring. I imagined inhaling the entire room then blowing them away with the release of my torso, all tightly packed plastic explosives and buckshot. These two, Logan especially, had no freaking clue.

 

 Amazon link

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AUTHOR Bio and Links:

 

Nancy Stroer grew up in a very big family in a very small house in Athens, Georgia and served in the beer-soaked trenches of post-Cold War Germany. She holds degrees from Cornell and Boston University, and her work has appeared in the Stars and Stripes, Soldiers magazine, Hallaren Lit Mag, Wrath-Bearing Tree, and Things We Carry Still, an anthology of military writing from Middle West Press.

 

She’s a teacher and a trainer, and an adjunct faculty member of the Ellyn Satter Institute, a 503(c) not-for-profit that helps individuals and families develop a more joyful relationship to food and their bodies. Playing Army is her first novel.

 

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GIVEAWAY

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The tour dates can be found here