Blog Tour: Vice Enforcer by S. A. Stovall

What’s it about?

Holding on to a life worth living can be hard when the nightmares of the past come knocking. Eight months ago, Nicholas Pierce, ex-mob enforcer, faked his death and assumed a new identity to escape sadistic mob boss Jeremy Vice. With no contacts outside the underworld, Pierce finds work with a washed-up PI. It’s an easy enough gig—until investigating a human trafficking ring drags him back to his old stomping grounds.

Miles Devonport, Pierce’s partner, is top of his class at the police academy while single-handedly holding his family together. But when one lieutenant questions Pierce’s past and his involvement in the investigation, Miles must put his future on the line to keep Pierce’s secrets.

The situation becomes dire when it’s discovered the traffickers have connections to the Vice family. The lives of everyone Pierce cares about are in danger—not least of all his own, if Jeremy Vice learns he’s back from the dead. Pierce and Miles face a conspiracy that reaches the highest levels—one that will gladly destroy them to keep operating. As Pierce uses every dirty trick he learned from organized crime to protect the new life he’s building, he realizes that no matter how hard he tries, he might never escape his past.

But he’s not going down without a fight.

Continue reading “Blog Tour: Vice Enforcer by S. A. Stovall”

Blog Tour: The My Dead-End Job Series by Elaine Viets

What’s it about?

Elaine Viets’ My Dead-End Job mysteries have become classics.  But even classics need a little reboot. The first thirteen novels have been re-released by JABberwocky Literary on March 6 as e-books. All books have new covers by the award-winning Jenn Reese at Tiger Bright Studios.

Inside, you’ll find your favorite adventures of Helen Hawthorne, the St. Louis woman who had a high-finance job, a beautiful home— and a good-for-nothing husband she caught in the act with their neighbor. When she divorces the bum, the judge saddles Helen with alimony. Helen refuses to pay her ex, tosses her wedding ring in the Mississippi River and goes on the run.

She winds up in Fort Lauderdale, working dead-end jobs for cash under the table. Follow Helen as she learns to thrive in subtropical South Florida. Along the way Helen changes. She goes from a bitter woman who distrusts men to a happily married bride. She becomes a private eye. She still works those low-paying jobs, but now she’s undercover.

Continue reading “Blog Tour: The My Dead-End Job Series by Elaine Viets”

Literary Ashland with Pepper Trail

Pepper Trail is a naturalist, photographer, writer, and world traveler who has lived in Ashland since 1994. He works as a biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and in his spare time leads natural history trips to every corner of the world, including Jackson County.

Pepper is a regular essayist for the Jefferson Journal and for High Country News, and his writing has been included in several anthologies, including Intricate Homeland and What the River Brings: Oregon River Poems.

In 2009, he published Shifting Patterns: Meditations on Climate Change in Oregon’s Rogue Valley, a collection of essays and poems, with photographs by Jim Chamberlain and himself. Pepper’s poetry has appeared in the Jefferson Monthly, Windfall, Kyoto Journal, Borderlands, Comstock Review and many other publications. His writing combines a scientist’s insights with deeply personal meditations on memory, mortality, and the human place in the natural world.

Blog Tour: Rainbirds by Clarissa Goenawan

What’s it about?

Ren Ishida has nearly completed his graduate degree at Keio University when he receives news of his sister’s violent death. Keiko was stabbed one rainy night on her way home, and there are no leads. Ren heads to Akakawa to conclude his sister’s affairs, failing to understand why she chose to turn her back on the family and Tokyo for this desolate place years ago.

But then Ren is offered Keiko’s newly vacant teaching position at a prestigious local cram school and her bizarre former arrangement of free lodging at a wealthy politician’s mansion in exchange for reading to the man’s ailing wife. He accepts both, abandoning Tokyo and his crumbling relationship there in order to better understand his sister’s life and what took place the night of her death.

As Ren comes to know the eccentric local figures, from the enigmatic politician who’s boarding him to his fellow teachers and a rebellious, captivating young female student, he delves into his shared childhood with Keiko and what followed. Haunted in his dreams by a young girl who is desperately trying to tell him something, Ren realizes that Keiko Ishida kept many secrets, even from him. Continue reading “Blog Tour: Rainbirds by Clarissa Goenawan”

Literary Ashland with James Anderson

Our February guest on Literary Ashland radio was James Anderson, author of most recently Lullaby Road and The Never Open Desert Diner.

James was born in Seattle and raised in Oregon and the Pacific Northwest. He is a graduate of Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and received his Master’s Degree in Creative Writing from Pine Manor College in Boston. For many years he worked in book publishing. Other jobs have included logging, commercial fishing and, briefly, truck driver. He currently divides his time between Ashland, Oregon, and the Four Corners region of the American Southwest.