A detective with no way out

Musa Publishing is proud to announce the release of Milo James Fowler's most recent science fiction novella Yakuza Territory.

Take a moment to discover what happens when a hardboiled detective story is set in a science fiction world:

A detective with no way out.

A telepath with something to prove...

World-weary detective Charlie Madison has seen more than his share of war. When he stops by the 37th precinct late one night to check on his old friend Sergeant Douglass, the place is as quiet as a morgue. The last thing he expects to find: half a dozen Russian gunmen with a score to settle.

What starts out as a vicious Alamo-style battle soon evolves into something more sinister as Madison's past comes into play. Will his ties to a branch of the Japanese mafia be a help or a hindrance? And who is the strange man in holding? Why are the Russians determined to break him out?

Struggling to survive the night, one private eye must rely on his wits to solve a mystery where he's outnumbered, outgunned, and trapped inside a police station with a soulless killing machine.

Available from Musa Publishing

Add Yakuza Territory to your Goodreads bookshelf

Get to know the man behind the book:

1. When did you start seriously pursuing writing as a career?

I've been writing since I was a kid, but I started submitting my work for publication in the summer of 2009. I'd always thought I would pursue publication at some point—probably after I retired from teaching or turned 40. My first story was published in January 2010, and I've had another 96 accepted for publication since then. I won't turn 40 for a couple more years, and I'm still teaching full-time. Doesn't look like I'll be retiring anytime soon!

2. How did you create the character Charlie Madison?

When I was a kid, I learned to type on an old-school manual typewriter. That's where I learned to write, too. My first novels were messy, full of typos and plot holes. But they were fun. And at age 15, that's what it was all about for me. Private eye Charlie Madison was one of the first characters I created, based on Box 13 and Dixon Hill, and The Double Murder was his big debut. By the end of it, I had over a hundred pages of snappy banter, mob hits, double-crossing dames, car chases, and even some alligators on leashes. It was a horrible parody, and I knew it.
 

Halfway through Write1Sub1 2011, I came up with the first Charlie Madison story I'd written in decades: Girl of Great Price. It wasn't anything like his original case, but he was the same quick-witted, intrepid detective I'd known before. I transplanted him into a more serious and gritty "future noir" sci-fi setting, and once I'd envisioned that world, I knew I'd be back. Immaterial Evidence soon followed, and Yakuza Territory will be available from Musa Publishing on November 7th.

3. Are you working on more Charlie Madison stories?

I'm outlining the follow-up to Yakuza Territory, and it's going to be full of assassinations, kidnappings, killer robots, and maybe even a mad scientist. The working title is The Gifted Ones, and it follows the origins of the mysterious suprahumans who have appeared in all three Charlie Madison detective stories so far.

Author Bio:

Milo James Fowler is a teacher by day and a speculative fictioneer by night. When he's not grading papers, he's imagining what the world might be like in a dozen alternate realities. He is an active SFWA member, and his work has appeared in more than 90 publications, including AE SciFi, Cosmos, Daily Science Fiction, Nature, Shimmer, and the Wastelands 2 anthology.

Visit www.milojamesfowler.com and join The Crew for updates about new releases as well as exclusive promotions.

Review for Murder, Madness & Love

Blurb:
Sunlight blazes on an empty canvas.

Arctic winds gather snowflakes on a frosty window ledge as a statuesqueform appears. She moves past a table littered with papers. Headlines splash news of murder, but it’s the photo of another young woman with features mirroring her own that draws her attention.

A different headline peeks from underneath the Anchorage Times.

Wealthy Businessman Dies in Car Crash … BLACK WIDOW SUSPECTED!

Graphic images swirl through her head and a tear rolls down her cheek. She drifts toward an easel and a trembling hand dips a sable brush into a palette of paint.

The Westminster doorbell chimes. The brush slips and blood-red paint stains the floor.

Detective Steven Quaid waits. His Tlingit, Indian features carved from granite, mask his Irish passion …

Will he arrest her this time?

All fingers point to her guilt.

But, is she guilty of this cunning plot? Or, just a victim of circumstantial evidence?

The door opens …

My review:
Having been branded a black widow, Sarah Palmer moves to Alaska where she grew up and hopes she can find the peace she's been seeking. Yet the shadow of her husband's death follows her and darkens are murders of women who look similar to her begin to happen. Detective Steven Quaid always trusts his gut. It has never let him down. At first he distrusts Sarah, but then his feelings for her grow and he finds himself caught in her spell. Maybe his gut was wrong this time. Or could he be the black widow's next victim?

A skillfully crafted crime thriller that has you on the edge of your seat through to the end. Just when you think you might have it figured out, the plot twists again and you're left with new questions. It's difficult to trick me and I don't fall easily for red herrings, but I had no idea how this story would turn out. It was wonderful how all the pieces fit together at the end.

Sarah is a strong protagonist. A woman who you can sympathize with and yet get suspicious of at the same time! I particularly liked Steven Quaid. He played it smart even when his emotions were involved. I can't wait to read more with him in Yolanda Renee's next novel.

Buy Murder, Madness & Love here: 

Amazon * Amazon UK * B&N

Stalk Yolanda Renee on these sites:

Blog * Twitter * Goodreads 

Pop Travel with Tara Tyler - Lazy Housewife

Thank you for having me, Christine! We've been blog friends forever. And we live geographically close enough to visit someday… gotta make that happen!

But there's this thing called time. No one seems to have enough of it. I noticed several writers agreed with that statement in this month's IWSG.

I, the Lazy Housewife (ie – Queen of Efficiency), identify and eradicate time wasters. Things like driving, dusting, and showering. Sure driving gets you there, dusting makes your house appear clean, and showering makes you not smell bad. But those futile, mindless chores must be done over and over again, wasting the precious minutes I wish I could be doing other things, like writing! So, here are my wishful thinking future household gadgets:

• Cars that drive themselves – we're already almost there. But I wonder, would you trust a highway full of computer driven cars? And if we let cars drive for us, why don't we just all use mass transit? It just seems silly, doesn't it? (teleportation, baby!)
• A robot maid/self-cleaning house – especially for the bathroom. I have three, well, four, boys. Eww!
• Speed-shower – be blasted with a cleanser, rinse, and be done! Like a car wash or decontamination stall.
• Remember Andromeda Strain? I liked the biodegradable, disposable clothes – no laundry! Can I have an incinerator installed, please? Poof goes the garbage!

In Pop Travel, they use a lot of cool spy gadgets, and even more in Simulation, the next Reluctant Detective novel (I'm still looking for a good name for Cooper's series…). The gadgets I can see popping into stores the soonest are the QV and CC. They both combine web surfing, smartphone technology, and more, into a holographic, 3D imager. QV stands for quarknet viewer that goes on your wrist, and CC is a compucenter that also includes TV/satellite.

And developers are working on new innovations all the time. In my research, I found this article at the Business Insider: In the future, says Winkless, a range of energy-grubbing technologies will increasingly appear in the home: “Energy harvesting pots could mean that boiling your pasta charges your mobile phone. The vibrations of your washing machine could power wireless sensors – or your TV remote could be powered just by you pressing the buttons." (Source)

What household gadgets would you like to see in the future?

This Lazy Housewife glimpse of the future brought to you by Pop Travel.

Cooper thought he could get through
life without having to pop...

Pop Travel by Tara Tyler
A tale of deception and teleportation.

When a distraught client enters J.L. Cooper's small town detective agency ranting about a pop travel teleportation cover up, Cooper takes the case. He blames pop travel indirectly for his wife's death and would love to expose a glitch in it.

But the glitch turns out to be disintegrating travelers. And now, his client is dead, his secretary is missing, and a hitman is stalking him. Plus there's all the webcams watching his every move. So, Cooper has to find a way to expose the deadly flaw, while using pop travel to escape the maniacs covering it up, not to mention save a couple of tag-alongs he's not sure he can trust. No problem.

Available now on Amazon</ a> and Barnes & Noble

Goodreads</ a>  <==>  Trailer  <==>  FB Author Page

Polar Night cover reveal

Book Blurb: When Detective Danny Fitzpatrick leaves his hometown of Chicago and moves to Fairbanks, Alaska he wants nothing more than to escape the violence and heartbreak that left his life in pieces. Numbed by alcohol and the frozen temperatures of an Alaskan winter, Danny is content with a dead-end job investigating Fairbanks' cold cases. That all changes when a pretty blond woman goes missing on the winter solstice, and Danny stumbles upon some surprising connections between her disappearance and that of another Fairbanks woman three years earlier. Forced out of his lethargy, Danny sets out to both find the missing woman and solve his own cold case.

The investigation points Danny towards Aleksei Nechayev, the handsome and charming proprietor of an old asylum turned haunted tourist attraction in the Arctic town of Coldfoot. As he tries to find a link between Nechayev and his case, Danny's instinct tells him that Nechayev is much more than what he seems.

Danny has no idea that Nechayev is hiding a secret that is much more horrifying than anything he could ever have imagined. As his obsession with finding the missing women grows, Danny finds his own life in danger. And when the truth is finally revealed, the world as he knows it will never be the same.

Bio: Julie Flanders is a librarian and a freelance writer who has written for both online and print publications. She is an avid animal lover and shares her home in Cincinnati, Ohio with her dog and cat. Polar Night, a suspense thriller with a supernatural twist, is her first novel. It will be published by Ink Smith Publishing on February 7, 2013. Find Julie online at her blog, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

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Don't forget to enter The Alpha blog tour giveaway still going on over at Cherie Reich's blog. You can win the first two ebooks in the 13th Floor series and an ARC of The Dragonslayer.