Violent Ascension by @authorgiorgiablake Release Blitz! @IndiePenPR @indie_pen_pr Violent Ascension is #NowLive

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Taken, I’m bound inside the home of a dangerous man. He may have saved me from his sadistic cousin, but it seems I’ve only traded one monster for another. Fans of The Five Families series by Jill Ramsower will love Violent Ascension by Giorgia Blake, a steamy, enemies-to-lovers, forced marriage, mafia romance.

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I’m a Rising Star. A boss. A Real One.

Yet I’m here. Taken and bound inside the home of Alessandro Parisi.

A dangerous man who holds my life and my secrets close to the chest.

He has all the answers but refuses to answer any of my questions.

All he’s told me is that I’m his and the key to his ascension.

He saved me from his sadistic cousin; but it seems I just traded one monster for another.

The first one stalked and taunted me until I was convinced death was around every corner.

This one orders me to cooperate, bend to his touch, and obey.

Too bad obedience isn’t in my nature and sacrifice is my birthright.

We probably won’t make it out of this blood war alive…The likelihood of my heart surviving Alessandro is even less.

Violent Ascension is the first book in the Made Men of Chicago Collection, and can be read as a standalone.It is a forced marriage mafia romance with themes of organized crime, violence, and BDSM. If this is your type of romance, the happily ever after will knock your socks off!

Please read responsibly!

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Copyright 2023 Giorgia Blake

“Why would your sick cousin, if he does indeed exist, want anything to do with me? He doesn’t even know me but I’m supposed to believe  he had some plot to kidnap and torture me? Why would he do that? WHY THE FUCK AM I HERE?!”

 I scream the latter with as much effort as my weakened voice can carry and tears stream uncontrollably down my face.

I’m making a spectacle of myself. Something my proud Creole mother taught me never to do.  I can imagine her strong posture and head held high while reading the letter my father left for her. She was pregnant and alone. Then she found out she was tied to the mafia and its dangerous liaisons. I know she never cowered. Chrisette Augustin never cowered. But my response to Parisi can’t be helped. I’m not as strong as my mother. I never was.

I’m scared shitless.

Parisi leans back on his haunches to examine me. Yet again, I’m the specimen under his microscope. I feel naked inside and out when he fixes his eyes on me and I hate it. He’s digging out all the parts of myself that I hide away from the world. He ogles them to feed a sick fetish. Refusing to be his meal. I turn away and look at the wall, but he simply reaches out and draws my face back to him.

“Look at me Isabella.” His voice is quiet and surprisingly tender; like he’s coaxing a wild and wounded animal out of a trap. Chained to his floor, that’s exactly how I feel. He strokes an errant strand of my curly hair behind my ear and levels me with his attention. 

“You will marry me, because that’s the only way to save your life and the lives of many others. You will sacrifice your freedom, to ensure blood doesn’t run down Chicago’s streets. I know you don't understand any of that now, but you will as you begin to understand Cosa Nostra and your father’s place inside it. You are the key to everything, because he who has you, has your father in the palm of his hand. I can’t let Leonardo have that kind of power.  You are just going to have to trust me from this moment on because life as you knew it is over. As a matter of fact, the life you were living was always temporary. At some point, your debt as Matteo’s daughter had to  come due. The sooner you accept that; the happier you will be.”

Something inside of me registers what he's saying as fact. It doesn’t make any logical sense, but I know whether it’s his fault or not, my life as I knew it really is over and I need a release.

So, I slap him. 

I slap him like my Creole mother used to slap me whenever my mouth wrote a check my butt couldn’t cash. Parisi’s head jerks to the side and I immediately regret my action. I contract my body to make myself smaller, but I don't take my eyes off of him. 

He’s eerily calm and that scares me more than the rage I thought was sure to come. He reaches into his pocket and takes out a key to unshackle my ankles. I dart my eyes to the cell door, trying to estimate how far I can go before he catches me and his eyes arrest me. 

I’m not going anywhere.

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About Giorgia Blake

I'm a contemporary romance author dedicated to the dangerously delicious world of Mafia Romance. Every story will dare you to believe in the power of love, even when there doesn't seem to be one sane reason to do so!

My stories feature sexy alphas and smart heroines finding love in the most breath stealing of circumstances. If someone can't die at any moment–it's not a Giorgia Blake Romance!

Every plot is full of heat, suspense, and steamy passion that would make the Karma Sutra blush.

So come join me on this wild ride...you won't regret it!

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Star Tangled Murder (Bad Hair Day Mysteries) by Nancy J Cohen Blog Tour!

Star Tangled Murder (Bad Hair Day Mysteries)
Cozy Mystery
18th in Series
Setting – Florida
Orange Grove Press (March 14, 2023)
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 284 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1952886252
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1952886256
Digital ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0BQS68WS7

Hairstylist Marla Vail and her husband get tangled up in murder when their Fourth of July visit to a living history village ends with a bang—and a body. 

Salon owner Marla Vail and her detective husband Dalton are having a blast visiting a Florida living history village over Fourth of July weekend. But when a Seminole battle reenactment turns up a real dead body, it sets off fireworks among the villagers. One of the cast members has gone off script to murder the town marshal with a tomahawk in his head. 

As Dalton gets involved in the investigation, Marla determines to help him solve the case. Her flare for uncovering secrets reveals that everyone in the village is a suspect. Instead of celebrating the holiday with red, white, and barbecues, she discovers secrets, lies, and false avenues. Did the marshal’s murder have anything to do with a lost Confederate payroll, or did his plans to renovate the park light a fuse that he couldn’t snuff out? 

In a place where history comes alive, the dead bodies are piling up. Marla would rather be chilling and grilling, but somebody’s mind is on killing. If she’s not careful, her sleuthing might blow up in her face like a faulty firecracker and she’ll become the next victim. Recipes Included!

“What about your herb garden?” Marla asked. “Aside from their use in cooking, your plants could be valuable for herbal remedies. Where is this patch of land, anyway? My husband is into gardening. Maybe I can get him interested in growing herbs for my kitchen.”

A muscle twitched in Simon’s jaw. “Our herb garden is private. Nobody goes there.”

His tone had turned hostile, same as the gleam in his eyes. Why would he work at a living history museum as part of the attraction if he didn’t want visitors?

“What’s over that way?” she asked, gesturing toward the woods by the far border. She remembered Uriah mentioning private property. That’s where the man had gone whom she’d seen talking to Lizzy.

“Belongs to a neighbor. Now if you’ll run along, I have chores to do.”

Marla glanced at Susan. Her friend’s shoulders sagged, and she looked as tired and wilted as Marla felt. Since she’d packed away her notebook, Marla surmised Susan had no further questions. They thanked Simon for his time and hurried off.

“Did you get the feeling Simon was hiding something?” Marla asked as they headed toward the exit. “He wasn’t happy about Phil’s plan and clearly doesn’t like people visiting his farm. Yet it’s his job to explain the site to guests.”

“I know. There are too many things to consider right now, and my brain is fried. It’s too hot to think clearly.”

Marla agreed. Watching her steps on a square of uneven pavement, she barely registered the whoosh of air rushing past her ear. She heard a twang and glanced up.

Susan pointed to a nearby tree where an arrow pierced the bark. “Look out! Someone is shooting at us.”

“What?” Disbelief slowed Marla’s steps. Her veins turned to ice as another arrow whizzed past and landed with a thunk on the ground.

“Let’s move!” Her feet took flight, and she dashed toward the park exit with her heart thumping in her ears.

Nancy J. Cohen writes the Bad Hair Day Mysteries featuring South Florida hairstylist Marla Vail. Titles in this series have been named Best Cozy Mystery by Suspense Magazine, won the Readers’ Favorite Book Awards and the RONE Award, placed first in the Chanticleer International Book Awards and third in the Arizona Literary Awards. Her nonfiction titles, Writing the Cozy Mystery and A Bad Hair Day Cookbook, have won the FAPA President’s Book Award, the Royal Palm Literary Award, and IAN Book of the Year. When not busy writing, Nancy enjoys reading, fine dining, cruising, and visiting Disney World.

Author Links

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How I'll Kill You by Ren DeStefano Book Spotlight!

 Release Day today 3/21!!

Your next stay-up-all-night thriller, about identical triplets who have a nasty habit of killing their boyfriends, and what happens when the youngest commits their worst crime yet: falling in love with her mark.

Make him want you.
Make him love you.
Make him dead.

Sissy has an...interesting family. Always the careful one, always the cautious one, she has handled the cleanup while her serial killer sisters have carved a path of carnage across the U.S. Now, as they arrive in the Arizona heat, Sissy must step up and embrace the family pastime of making a man fall in love and then murdering him. Her first target? A young widower named Edison--and their mutual attraction is instant. While their relationship progresses, and most couples would be thinking about picking out china patterns and moving in together, Sissy's family is reminding her to think about picking out burial sites and moving on.

But then something happens that Sissy never anticipated: She begins to feel protective of Edison, and then, before she can help it, she's fallen in love. But the clock is ticking, and her sisters are growing restless. It becomes clear that the gravesite she chooses will hide a body no matter what happens; but if she betrays her family, will it be hers?

Ren DeStefano lives in Connecticut, where she was born and raised. When she’s not writing thrillers, she’s listening to true crime podcasts and crocheting way too many blankets.

If not for my sisters and the tragic circumstances of our upbringing, I would be living an empty life and bound for heartbreak. 

It started when we were nineteen. 

Iris called me, frantic, in the middle of the night. She had her own apartment above a laundromat in downtown Clovis. She was so proud of that place—all five hundred square feet of it. She kept it tidy and burned incense at all hours to hide the smell from the dumpster in the alley outside her bedroom window. At night, there was the persistent throb of the bar across the street, the music loud enough to rattle the porcelain angel figurines on the shelves. They’d come with the place, and Iris had decided they made her living room look homey—a word she’d never used before because we’d never had a home.

“Just come,” she’d sobbed and then hung up. All of my calls went straight to voicemail. I sped the whole way over there, sure that someone had just climbed up the fire escape to murder her. But what I found was a different sort of violence.

Blood, deep and dark, pooled on her oriental rug, and splattered across the angel figurines.

She’d been sleeping with her old high school guidance counselor—a fifty-one-year-old married father of two. He strung her along for months, promising to leave his wife. He broke her heart a hundred times, and then Iris plunged a kebab skewer through his.

“You watch all of those crime shows,” Moody said, emerging from the kitchen with a bottle of bleach she’d found under the sink. “Help us make this go away.”

We moved with a practical calm, the three of us, and when it was through, Iris’s ill-fated lover was resting in six garbage bags, wound tightly with duct tape. If it were only one of us, or even two, I’m sure we would have been caught. We would have missed a detail. But we were a perfect team, the three of us. 

After a lifetime of being torn apart, we were finally together, finally able to help one another in all the ways we never could when we were being jostled helplessly by the foster system. All those years of loneliness, of wanting, of being kept apart, had brought us to this desperate moment. Knee-deep in the water of the San Joaquin river in the velvet black night, we weighed the pieces of the man with rocks, and a promise started to form. In the coming days, it slowly became obvious what we needed to do.

We wouldn’t deprive ourselves of love, but our hearts would be weapons. We would love the men we found completely and without inhibition, put a lifetime into our brief time together. Live out every fantasy we desired. And then we would kill them.

There would never be another lover to break one of us. We would break all of them first.

“Excerpted from HOW I’LL KILL YOU by Ren DeStefano published by Berkley, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2023 by Ren DeStefano”

The Romanov Heiress by @jenlaam Book Blitz! #JenniferLaam #TheRomanovHeiress #XpressoTours⁣ @XpressoTours⁣

  #hisfic #historicalfiction #bookaholic #mustread #authorsofinstagram #bookblogger #amreading

The Romanov Heiress
Jennifer Laam

Publication date: March 20th 2023
Genres: Adult, Historical

Four sisters in hiding. A grand duchess in disguise. Dark family secrets revealed…an alternate future for the Romanov sisters from Jennifer Laam, author of The Secret Daughter of the Tsar and The Lost Season of Love and Snow.

With her parents and brother missing and presumed dead, Grand Duchess Olga Romanova must keep her younger sisters safe. The Bolsheviks are determined to eliminate any remaining holdovers from the tsarist regime, hunting down the last Romanovs and putting them to death. Now living in England, the Romanov sisters remain hidden to protect their identities, even as isolation strains their relationships.

But they can’t distance themselves from the world forever.

Olga learns that a peer of the realm has accused the late Empress Alexandra of betraying Russia and her allies during the Great War. Under the spell of the scheming Grigori Rasputin, Alexandra disclosed military secrets to the enemy and pursued a separate peace with Germany. If this rumor becomes history, it will destroy her mother’s legacy and her sisters’ futures.

Disguised as “Olivia,” a wartime nurse turned maid, Olga accepts a position in Lord Hammond’s household. There, she works to discover the truth about her mother. When Olga meets his lordship’s heir—an alluring, enigmatic war veteran—her situation grows even more precarious. Could she fall for the son of her new enemy? As she learns more about the tragedies of his past, Olga realizes the connection between their families is more complicated than it appears.

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August 1918

The fugitive lay on her back, bruised limbs pressed flat, hidden alongside her sisters underneath a mound of coarse blankets. As the ambulance rumbled to a halt, gasoline fumes flooded the rear compartment, masking the heavy odor of their unwashed bodies. Her breathing grew labored. She didn’t know where they were or who had stopped them. She only knew they must not make a sound.

Over the past weeks, they moved slowly through land held by the Bolsheviks. Every evening at dusk, they ate carefully rationed portions of tinned meat and dry wafers while their two saviors—agents from England with forged papers identifying them as officers of the Red Guard—checked the radio transmitter for word of Allied progress toward the northern ports along the White Sea. Then, during the scant hours of darkness afforded by the short summer nights, they traveled a tortuous course to avoid military checkpoints.

Bundled in tattered sweaters, Olga and her three sisters were gaunt. Their neglected hair hung limp about their shoulders. But their faces once adorned postcards, calendars, and boxes of fancy chocolates. If detained, they would be recognized at once.

The missing daughters of the tsar.

Anastasia’s warm body pressed closer, trembling as she tensed her jaw and tried to stifle a cough.

A terrifying scenario unfolded in Olga’s mind. Thick boots pounded on the roadway before soldiers with red stars tacked to their lapels tossed the blankets aside and dragged Olga and her sisters back into the hellish world they’d been so desperate to escape. What if this journey had been for nothing? Worse than nothing because they had left their parents and sick little brother, Alexei, behind.

Olga was twenty-two years old and the eldest. It fell on her to get them through this nightmare, no matter the outcome.

She felt around until she located her youngest sister’s hand. She held it tight, flinching at the hard calluses and pus leaking from an erupted blister on the pad of Anastasia’s thumb.

Deep masculine voices, muddled and indistinct, rumbled outside. The fingers of Olga’s free hand balled into fists, rage displacing fear. The Bolsheviks may have stolen everything she held dear, but Olga would confront them as a true Romanov. Unbroken. When they raised their revolvers, she would hold her head high and ensure her face haunted these traitors for the rest of their lives.

The back door of the old field ambulance creaked open. Tentatively, Olga drew the blanket down. After hours of near-darkness, sunlight momentarily blurred her vision. When Olga released Anastasia’s hand and sat upright, a cool breeze caressed her forehead.

Before her stood a broad-shouldered gentleman of about fifty, with black brows, a full beard flecked with gray, and brown eyes behind wire-framed spectacles. The man wore a khaki tunic, as Papa had during the war. The coat’s golden buttons and belt buckle gleamed in the morning sun.

“Your imperial highness.” The gentleman removed his hat and bowed his head. He had spoken in English. She assumed he was the commanding officer. A half-dozen other men stood behind him, each dressed in the same khaki uniform. Some rose on tip-toe to get a closer look at Olga.

None bore a red star on his lapel.

Her sisters emerged from under the blankets. They pressed her shoulders, exhalations warm on the back of her neck.

“I think he’s in charge.” Tatiana, the second eldest, whispered in Olga’s ear. “And waiting for you to speak first.”

A spark of hope ignited in her heart, yet Olga didn’t trust these strangers. It had been far too long since anyone outside her family had shown her kindness or respect. For months, they had been kept under constant watch: shoved about, subjected to barking orders and humiliating whims, and made to feel they clung to life by the thinnest of threads. Olga remembered the defeated expression on her little brother’s face when she’d said goodbye for the last time. Even her once proud father bent under the weight of captivity.

Their saviors, the two men who had rescued them from that nightmare, rounded the vehicle and walked toward the soldiers, broad smiles brightening their ruddy faces.

And then the words fell from Olga’s tongue easily, as Mama had always preferred to speak English with her family. “We are here then? We’ve made it to British soil?”

“We have delivered you to Arkhangelsk. From here, you will be transported to your new home.”

“We are in your debt, sir.”

Olga waited because she knew he would say more. There had to be more. While they had been rescued, their parents and brother remained imprisoned in Ekaterinburg, along with a handful of loyal servants.

“You will return for the others, won’t you?” she said, heart thumping. “My family. Our doctor. My mother’s maid. You must promise.”

The officer held her gaze. “The Bolsheviks fortified their defenses around the city’s perimeter. We can’t send our agents back to the house.”

Faced with those terrible words, Olga couldn’t bring herself to ask anything else. Couldn’t bear to hear it was too late. Her stomach churned, but she must not break. Not here. Not yet. As the eldest, she needed to stay strong. For her sisters.

When Olga said nothing more, the officer turned back to his men. Three soldiers joined him, lining up before her sisters to help them out of the ambulance.

“I know you are in pain,” the officer told her. “Remember that you and your sisters are safe. You survived. And we have done everything in our power to find a secure place for you. I promise.”

An avid history nerd, Jennifer currently lives in California with a spoiled tabby cat named Jonesy. When not reading or writing, she enjoys planning cosplay for the next San Diego Comic-Con, experimenting with vegetarian recipes (to mixed results), and obsessing over House Targaryen or Baby Yoda.

 

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