‘A Man to Die For’ by Eileen Dreyer

BOOK BLURB: St. Louis Trauma nurse Casey McDonough thinks her life is interesting enough. Her best friend still drops acid, her ex-husband is a cross-dressing psychiatrist, and her mother has turned the third floor of the family home into the Chapel of Eternal Vigilance.

Then, things begin to really go wrong when OB/Gyn Dr. Dale Hunsacker arrives. Handsome, wealthy and charismatic, the good doctor is enchanting the patients of the St. Louis hospital. But, Cassy believes he is a serial killer. And the only person who takes her seriously, is Hunsacker himself.

Caught in a spiral of suspicion and intimidation, Casey approaches ex-Marine, ex-Jesuit homicide sergeant Jack Scanlan for help. All she has are hunches for proof, but she’ll do anything to stop the monster walking the halls of her hospital.

EXCERPT:

“Control your impulses, her mother had always said. Stifle your urges, the church agreed. She should have listened. The next time she had an urge like this one, she was going to lock herself in a closet until it went away.

“Honey, why are we here?”

“I have to make a stop before I take you home, Mom.”

A stop. She had to report a crime. Several crimes. That wasn’t exactly a run to the local Safeway for deodorant.

Gripping her purse in one hand and her mother in the other, Casey McDonough approached the St. Louis City Police Headquarters like a penitent approaching the gates of purgatory. It seemed amazing, really. Casey had been born no more than fifteen miles away, but she’d never visited this place before. She’d never even known precisely where it was.

A stark block of granite that took up the corner of Clark and Tucker, the headquarters did nothing to inspire comfort. Brass grillwork protected massive front doors and encased  the traditional globe lamps that flanked it. Unmarked police cars and crime scene vans hugged the curb. Police in uniform or windbreakers and walkie-talkies hovered near the front door, chatting among themselves. Civilians edged by, sensing their own intrusion, much the way they would enter her hospital.

Casey didn’t want to be here. If she could have, she would have approached her friends on the county police force instead. She would have pulled one of them aside when they’d come into her emergency room and proposed her theory in a way that could be considered an inside joke instead of an accusation.

“Say, Bert, what would you think if I said there’s something just a little more sinister than fee-splitting going on around here? What if I told you that some of the bad luck around this place is actually connected? And not just because I know all the people involved, either.”

Bert would laugh and deflect her fears with common sense, and the issue would have gone no further.

Only none of the crimes Casey suspected had actually happened in the county. Bert wouldn’t know anything about them. He couldn’t do her any good. If she wanted any relief from the suspicions that had been building over the last few weeks like a bad case of indigestion, she was going to have to find it with the city cops. Cops she didn’t know. Cops who didn’t know her.

Casey pulled on the heavy glass-and-brass door and winced at its screech of protest. It sounded as if it resented her intrusion. The way everybody else ignored the noise, the door must have been objecting for years.

Inside, the foyer was a high square of marble, cool and hushed. Casey held the heavy door open for her mother to follow inside. Sketching a quick sign of the cross, the little woman instinctively reached for a holy water font.

“It’s not a church,” Casey reminded her.

It was hell.”

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When It’s Not Okay to Say ‘Okay’ by Eileen Dreyer

I was never that interested in history. Literature, sure. Theater, movies, baseball, geography. I adored geography, because I wanted to go to all those places on the map.  But I didn’t particularly care about who’d gone there before me, because, frankly, history was a bore. I mean, come on. 1066 The Battle of Hastings. 1215 The Magna Carta. Joan of Arc was somewhere after that, and later was the French Revolution, and a king and queen lost their heads. Interesting, I’m sure to them and the French, but I was in St. Louis (yeah, okay, named after a French king. But by the time I lived there, the only thing that was still French was Mardi Gras, and that was just an excuse to drink). As far as I was concerned, none of that made any difference in my life.

Two things radically changed my outlook. When I was a senior in high school, we took a class trip to New York, where I saw a musical that turned my disdain for history on its head. 1776. Suddenly the Revolution wasn’t just dates and catch phrases (Really? The most important thing about the first successful revolution against a king was “Give me liberty or give me death?” Yawn). But suddenly in the course of two hours, it was  like Wizard of Oz. I went from black-and-white Kansas to…well, Oz. Suddenly history wasn’t dry numbers and factoids, it was people. People who had lives, wishes, dreams, demons. They had a lot at stake, and staked it all for an ideal. They didn’t simply hand out the Declaration of Independence like a class test. The squabbled and fought and negotiated and compromised. They dreamed and they despaired. And sitting in that darkened theater as John Adams sang “Is anybody there? Does anybody care? Does anybody see what I see?” I wanted to shout, “Yes!” Because he wasn’t just a marble head anymore. He was a loving, brilliant, irascible, irritating, pedant of a man who helped chivvy independence along like a child learning to ride a bike. He went from a mostly forgotten ex-president to one of my real heroes.

The second thing that happened was Roberta Gellis. She was the first historical romance writer I read. She introduced me to the thrilling, compelling, delicious, myriad world of history. She colored in all the places 1776 hadn’t. She and all her compatriots who wrote that first generation of historical romance, when history was integral to the plot rather than the wallpaper on the room, helped incite my obsession with the real drama and delight of the people who came before me. I would read one of her books and then three others to fill in the bits and pieces she’d cast out like a trail of bread crumbs. I now know enough about Eleanor of Aquitaine to write my own book, and it wouldn’t have happened without romance. I know the Tudors and the Indian account of the Raj, and the spirituality of Native Americans

The problem is that I became so enamored of great historical romance, that I became impatient with badly researched history. Yes, I admit it. I am a member of the Anachronism Club. Nothing sets me off faster than seeing a heroine in 1815 whose father made his fortune in steamboats on the Mississippi, or a hero who speaks as if he’d been a cast member of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

I feel that as an author, I owe my best effort to my readers. I’m asking them to enter into my world, and that entails trust. If I then break out of that world, by word, deed, or design, I have just broken faith. I just showed a level of disdain for my readers that is unforgivable.

One of the reasons I enjoy historical settings is the challenge of working around the very different mores of the day to help my heroine triumph. Just blithely ignoring the very real social strictures of a time period is cheating. It’s lazy. And it’s annoying.

Now, I know that mistakes will inevitably be made. I know that not all research can be verified as well as we’d like. Sources argue on pertinent facts and the author has to take her best shot (some day sit in on a discussion on the Beau Monde loop. You’ll have a whole new respect for detail). But I don’t know any expert who would think that a 17th century heroine would say, “Get over it,” or an English hero spend his 1813 honeymoon in Paris going to see Michelangelo’s Mona Lisa at the Louvre (I actually read that very line). That is just an insult to me as a reader.

Do I go overboard at times? Probably. But it isn’t that hard to double check the facts. Cameras weren’t available in 1801, nor were scullery maids able to pass for princesses. And one of the most egregiously ignored facts, a man cannot marry his sister-n-law. Ever. Ever. Until the 1940s, it was considered incest under canon law.

And the historical rule that is broken most often, aristocrats did not speak like middle class Americans. I read a book where a duke and duchess keep saying, “Okay,” and it’s like a case of poison ivy. Just place that wording Maggie Smith’s mouth in Downton Abbey and you’ll realize how ridiculous it is. Especially in a formal situation.

I’m forever double-checking my dialogue. If nothing else, Merriam-Webster on line has a general date of usage. If the word comes from the 15th century, it’s a cinch it’s usable. But if the first recorded use of a word is the twentieth century, and in America, then chances are no starched up matron would be caught dead with it on her tongue (one I admit I’ve had to rigorously police myself is psychiatric terms. I have to keep reminding myself that until Freud, nobody was neurotic).

Yes, it’s nit picky. But nobody is going to do that job for us anymore. Especially with the advent of independent publishing, we authors must police our research. And even if we’re only using it as lovely wallpaper in a costume drama, the point is that the reader has picked up your book because it is set during another historical period. It actually has to read as if it were.

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Come July 20, 2012, Eileen will be releasing for the first time in ebook form, five of her suspense books, and first up will be ‘A Man To Die For’.

To connect to Eileen, please click on any bottom links or on her photo; to buy her books, click on their covers.

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Release Day Party!!

On July 3rd, Eileen’s publisher is throwing her a party on Twitter celebrating the ebook release of the latest book in the Drake’s Rakes series, IT BEGINS WITH A KISS!! From 11 am to 2 pm EST stop by Eileen’s twitter page to post a comment and ask questions. Be sure to use the hashtag #rakeskiss and be entered in drawings for tons of prizes. Make sure to follow Eileen on twitter @eileendreyer.

Then the Release Day Party will continue that night on the Drake’s Rakes Facebook page from 9 pm to 11 pm EST. Be sure to Like the Drake’s Rakes FB page before the party gets started. You don’t want to miss out on some of the great prizes and giveaways!!

‘It Begins with a Kiss’ by Eileen Dreyer

STORY: Fiona Ferguson wants nothing more than to flee Miss Lavinia Chase’s Finishing School. Rather than the safe haven the girls’ families presume it to be, the school is intent on making its charges conform to the rules-by any means necessary. For Fiona, the only thing worse than staying at the dreaded “Last Chance Academy” would be abandoning the friends she’s made there. But when she receives word from home that her sister is in trouble, Fiona plots her escape . . .

A devoted spy in service to the Crown, Alex Knight takes his duties very seriously. His latest assignment-to ensure that the incorrigible Fiona remain safely at school-turns out to be far more of a challenge than he expected. After matching wits with the fiery Scottish beauty, he learns that the greatest danger of all . . . begins with a kiss.

REVIEW: I’m not sure about you, but I love, LOVE Prologues, and this novelette fills this category to a tee in regards to the upcoming new series from Ms. Dreyer.

She cleverly introduces her next three heroines, and the hero of her upcoming full length novel here, and gives me a cliffhanger that made my mouth form an “OH” and “MY’ and “GOD”!

Let me back up a bit and tell you that the characters of all the girls introduced will peak your interest; the setup, of all of them having resided at the Last Chance Academy for some time, and the abuse they endured that bonded them for a life time, was a great teaser for me. No way will I pass up on finding out more about that bond; about that friendship which will be as much of a story as the HEA’s from each girl.

I loved where this story left off, and my imagination soared, which makes the anticipation of Alex’s and Fiona’s HEA that much sweeter.

Ms. Dreyer’s female characters are strong, witty and always too smart for their own good, so Fiona promises to be one of them; while Alex I expect will be Alpha, with shades of Beta and those are heroes to die for.

To tell you more would spoil this short, sweet and well written intro to this new series that I enjoyed a lot.

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* I received a copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review*