Tag: Excerpt

Blog Tour/Extract: Her Hidden Life by V. S. Alexander

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Her Hidden Life Blog Tour Banner

I’m delighted to be hosting today’s stop on the blog tour for Her Hidden Life by V.S. Alexander. Unfortunately, the book hasn’t yet reached the top of my TBR pile, although I’m eager to read it based on some of the glowing reviews from other book bloggers.  For instance, Beverley Has Read called it ‘a well-written, well-plotted and…well-researched historical novel which ticked lots of boxes’.  Ginger Book Geek was ‘hooked from the moment I read the first sentence.’

Based on a true story, Her Hidden Life is described as a sweeping, heroic love story perfect for fans of Dinah Jeffries and Gill Paul.  I have an extract from Her Hidden Life to whet your appetite.  Incidentally, you can read a fascinating article by the author about the writing of Her Hidden Life here.

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Her Hidden LifeAbout the Book

It’s 1943 and Hitler’s Germany is a terrifying place to be.  But Magda Ritter’s duty is the most dangerous of all…

Assigned to The Berghof, Hitler’s mountain retreat, she must serve the Reich by becoming the Führer’s ‘Taster’ – a woman who checks his food for poison. Magda can see no way out of this hellish existence until she meets Karl, an SS officer who has formed an underground resistance group within Hitler’s inner circle.

As their forbidden love grows, Magda and Karl see an opportunity to stop the atrocities of the madman leading their country. But in doing so, they risk their lives, their families and, above all, a love unlike either of them have ever known…

(Her Hidden Life was published under the title The Taster in the US)

Format: ebook, paperback (400 pp.)    Publisher: Avon Books
Published: 3rd May 2018                         Genre: Historical Fiction, Romance

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk  ǀ  Amazon.com  ǀ Hive.co.uk (supporting UK bookshops)
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find Her Hidden Life on Goodreads

 

Extract: Her Hidden Life by V. S. Alexander

In the first years of the war, Berlin had been spared. When the attacks began, the city strode like a dreamer, alive but unconscious of its motions. People walked about without feeling. Babies were born and relatives looked into their eyes and told them how beautiful they were. Touching a silky lock of hair or pinching a cheek did not guarantee a future. Young men were shipped off to the fronts – to the East and to the West. Talk on the streets centered on Germany’s slow slide into hell, always ending with ‘it will get better.’ Conversations about food and cigarettes were common, but paled in comparison to the trumpeted broadcasts of the latest victories earned through the ceaseless struggles of the Wehrmacht.

My parents were the latest in a line of Ritters to live in our building. My grandparents had lived here until they each died in the bed where I slept. My bedroom, the first off the hall in the front of the building, was my own, a place I could breathe. No ghosts frightened me here. My room didn’t hold much: the bed, a small oak dresser, a rickety bookshelf and a few items I collected over the years, including the stuffed toy monkey my father had won at a carnival in Munich when I was a child. When the bombings began, I looked at my room in a different way. My sanctuary took on a sacred, extraordinary quality and each day I wondered whether its tranquility would be shattered like a bombed temple.

The next major air raid came on Hitler’s birthday on April 20, 1943. The Nazi banners, flags and standards that decorated Berlin waved in the breeze. The bombs caused some damage, but most of the city escaped unscathed. That attack also had a way of bringing back every fear I suffered as a young girl. I was never fond of storms, especially the lightning and thunder. The increasing severity of the bombings set my nerves on edge. My father was adamant that I leave, and, for the first time, I felt he might be right. That night he watched as I packed my bag.

About the Author

V. S. Alexander is an ardent student of history and the arts and loves writing historical fiction with strong women protagonists. The author of several novels and short stories, Alexander’s first novel for Kensington Publishing was The Magdalen Girls, an Amazon best seller, set in 1962 Dublin. The author lives in South Florida where summer is never far away.

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Extract: In The Cage Where Your Saviours Hide by Malcolm Mackay

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Mackay_In the Cage

In The Cage Where Your Saviours Hide by Malcolm McKay has been described as ‘a remarkable novel of crime and corruption…set in a brooding, rain-swept Scottish city burdened by a history that is compellingly different from the one we think we know.’

Intrigued?  Good because I have an extract from the book for you below.

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In the Cage where Your Saviours HideAbout the Book

The independent kingdom of Scotland flourished until the beginning of the last century. Its great trading port of Challaid, in the north west of the country, sent ships around the world and its merchants and bankers grew rich on their empire in Central America.

But Scotland is not what it was, and the docks of Challaid are almost silent. The huge infrastructure projects collapsed, like the dangerous railway tunnels under the city. And above ground the networks of power and corruption are all that survive of Challaid’s glorious past.

Darian Ross is a young private investigator whose father, an ex cop, is in prison for murder. He takes on a case brought to him by a charismatic woman, Maeve Campbell. Her partner has been stabbed; the police are not very curious about the death of a man who laundered money for the city’s criminals. Ross is drawn by his innate sense of justice and his fascination with Campbell into a world in which no-one can be trusted.

Praise for Malcolm Mackay and In The Cage Where Your Saviours Hide

‘Fascinating speculative fiction.’ The Bookseller
‘Mackay’s writing is clean and spare, with flashes of dark humour.’ The Herald
‘A real revelation, a real find for me.’ Kate Mosse
‘A really unique voice.’ Mark Billingham

Format: ebook, hardcover (276 pp.) Publisher: Apollo
Published: 5th April 2018                    Genre: Crime

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk  ǀ  Amazon.com ǀ Hive.co.uk (supporting UK bookshops)
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find In The Cage Where Your Saviours Hide on Goodreads

Extract from In The Cage Where Your Saviours Hide by Malcolm Mackay

Darian Ross might have been the only person who enjoyed the commute to work in Challaid, or at least admitted it. A short walk down to the crowded Bank Station, making his way through the bustle of bleary-eyed miserablists at half-eight. Onto the train and east through the tunnel, off at the next stop, which was Glendan Station. That was the closest stop to the tunnel where all those people were killed digging it, so they claimed they would name the station in honour of those lost. Their choice? The title of the company the dead men worked for, that had sent them to excavate in treacherous conditions with no thought for their safety. Apparently the people of influence who picked the name couldn’t understand why none of the families accepted their invitations to the opening. Anyway, that was also the closest stop to Darian’s work, and it was a twelve-minute walk through the morning to Cage Street. On a nice day, admittedly rare, the stroll through busy streets could be pleasant.

Here we’ll talk a little about what Darian did for a living. He was, in truth, a sort of private detective, but if you asked him about his job those would be the last two words that would fight their way through his lips. He worked for a man called Sholto Douglas, a former detective now running Douglas Independent Research. How Sholto had managed to last fifteen years as a detective was one of the great many mysteries he never solved, and he was relieved to get out of it. Now he was in a single-room office on the second floor of a building in need of repair on a narrow old street in the city centre, pretending his company limited itself to market research and credit checks.

When he started Darian asked Sholto about the fact he was a private detective dressed up as something else and nearly provoked an aneurysm. Sholto growled and said, ‘It is research, really, when you think about it. That’s what all of police work is, or detective work, or whatever you want to call it.’

Then the conversation would switch to who was to blame, and while Scotland hadn’t had a proper war with England since the Trade Wars of the eighteenth century, Sholto was all for kicking off another.

‘And the licences, and the restrictions, they’re all nonsense anyway, just there to stop you doing the work. They only did it because the English put the same stuff into law so they thought they had to copy it. Just copying another country because they couldn’t think of anything better to do with their time, that’s all it was. Bloody English. Bloody Scottish government. You look at the two laws; they’re almost identical except ours are harsher. Also, it’s Raven’s fault… Don’t get me started on Raven…’

Raven Investigators was a large firm of private detectives based in Edinburgh and with offices in our own fair city who were raking up more muck than a landscape gardener. Their respect for the law was considered inadequate, so the law was tightened hard and Raven Investigators shrank accordingly. Companies like Douglas Independent Research existed so that people who couldn’t afford the shiny corporate professionalism of Raven had someone to pester small-scale criminals for them, or that’s how Sholto liked to present it, anyway. So that was the not exactly noble world of half-truths and delusions that Darian walked into each morning, including this Saturday.

Malcolm MackayAbout the Author

Malcolm Mackay was born in Stornoway on Scotland’s Isle of Lewis. His Glasgow Trilogy has been nominated and shortlisted for several international prizes, including the Edgar Awards’ Best Paperback Original and the CWA John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger award. His second novel, How a Gunman Says Goodbye, won the Deanston Scottish Crime Book of the Year Award. Mackay still lives in Stornoway.

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