Fantastic Fiction Audiobook Giveaway!

One of the highlights of BEA for me was meeting the wonderful publicists at Hachette Book Group. They are all so fun and it was great to be able to thank them in person for so generously providing fantastic books and audios for giveaways! Here's the latest group of fiction audios, I have three copies of each one:

William Smithback, a NY Times reporter, and his wife Nora Kelly, a Museum of Natural History archaeologist, are brutally attacked in their apartment on the Upper West side of Manhattan. Eyewitnesses claim and the security camera confirms the killer seen leaving the building was their strange, sinister neighbor--a man who, by all reports, was already dead.

Captain Hayward leads the official homicide investigation, while Pendergast, D'Agosta, and Nora undertake a private quest for the truth. Their serpentine journey takes them into a part of Manhattan they never imagined could exist: a secretive and deadly hotbed of Obeah, the West Indian Zombii cult of sorcery and magic. And it is here they find their true peril is just beginning.

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Forced out of the Los Angeles Times amid the latest budget cuts, newspaperman Jack McEvoy decides to go out with a bang, using his final days at the paper to write the definitive murder story of his career.

He focuses on Alonzo Winslow, a 16-year-old drug dealer in jail after confessing to a brutal murder. But as he delves into the story, Jack realizes that Winslow's so-called confession is bogus. The kid might actually be innocent.

Jack is soon running with his biggest story since The Poet made his career years ago. He is tracking a killer who operates completely below police radar--and with perfect knowledge of any move against him. Including Jack's.

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Christopher Flynn is trying to get it right. After years of trouble and rebellion that enraged his father and nearly cost him his life, he has a steady job in his father's company, he's seriously dating a woman he respects, and, aside from the distrust that lingers in his father's eyes, his mistakes are firmly in the past.

One day on the job, Chris and his partner come across a temptation almost too big to resist. Chris does the right thing, but old habits and instincts rise to the surface, threatening this new-found stability with sudden treachery and violence. With his father and his most trusted friends, he takes one last chance to blast past the demons trying to pull him back.

Like Richard Price or William Kennedy, Pelecanos pushes his characters to the extremes, their redemption that much sweeter because it is so hard fought. Pelecanos has long been celebrated for his unerring ability to portray the conflicts men feel as they search and struggle for power and love in a world that is often harsh and unforgiving but can ultimately be filled with beauty.

You may enter for any or all of these great audios, just leave a comment here with the titles of the ones you would like to win. I will give an extra entry to anyone who becomes a follower (or follows already), tweets the giveaway on twitter or blogs about it. If you do any of these, please leave me ONE extra comment to let me know. Winners will be drawn at random and must have a US or Canada mailing address (no PO Boxes). Contest will end at midnight eastern on June16th, so get those comments in! Good luck, thanks for entering and thanks again to Anna at Hachette for providing the audios!

Review: Frenchman's Creek by Daphne du Maurier

Weary of the endless social whirl of London, with its inane amusements and harsh adventures, Dona St. Columb takes her children and escapes to their Cornwall estate of Navron. She leaves behind her tolerable but frequently drunk husband Harry and flees to the quiet countryside.

Once at Navron she finds William, the butler, is the sole servant and the house is largely musty and unused. All but her own bedroom, which is freshly aired and has a curious jar of tobacco in the bedside table.

As Dona begins to relax into the rhythms of country life, she hears rumors of a French pirate plaguing the area. Soon William will prove to be Dona's link to the handsome villain and his ship, La Mouette. She will be drawn to this unlikely pirate and experience the adventure, and the heartbreak, of a lifetime.

There is a reason that Daphne du Maurier's books are classics today and that reason is her haunting use of language. Her books, including this one, are so beautifully written and so perfectly evoke the timeless, lonely quality of Cornwall that the reader feels transported.

I love the way she opens Frenchman's Creek , through the eyes of a modern visitor (well, modern as of 1941 when the book was written) who feels the brush of the ghost of a long ago tale, a tale so deep with feeling that it echos even still:

"He is alone, and yet - can that be a whisper, in the shallows, close to the bank, and does a figure stand there, the moonlight glinting upon his buckled shoes and the cutlass in his hand, and is that a woman by his side, a cloak around her shoulders, her dark ringlets drawn back behind her ears? He is wrong, of course, those are only the shadows of the trees, and the whispers are no more than the rustle of the leaves and the stir of a sleeping bird, but he is baffled suddenly, and a little scared, he feels he must go no farther, and that the head of the creek beyond the farther bank is barred to him and must remain unvisited. And so he turns to go, heading the dinghy's nose for the roadstead, and as he pulls away the sounds and the whispers become more insistent to his ears, there comes the patter of footsteps, a call, and a cry in the night, a far faint whistle, and a curious lilting song. He strains his eyes in the darkness, and the massed shadows before him loom hard and clear like the outline of a ship. A thing of grace and beauty, born in another time, a painted phantom ship. And now his heart begins to beat, and he strains at his paddles, and the little dinghy shoots swiftly over the dark water away from enchantment, for what he has seen is not of his world, and what he has heard is beyond his understanding."

This is excellent and intense storytelling, many thanks to Sourcebooks for re-releasing the novels of this classic author. All the popular pirate romances these days (Jack Sparrow included) owe a debt of gratitude to Daphne du Maurier for paving the way with Frenchman's Creek.

If you would like to enter my giveaway to win a copy of Frenchman's Creek or My Cousin Rachel, click here. You can enter until midnight eastern on May 31 and must have a US or Canada mailing address.

Frenchman's Creek is published by Sourcebooks. ISBN 978-1-4022-1710-4