This is a hooded crow.  The voices-over are speaking Russian, I think.  I hesitate to say what I think this crow is using for a sled! What do you think it is?

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Check out my new vampire romance A Taste of You!

This vampire romance is the first “sequel” for The Brass Bed trilogy, also known as the Hinky Chicago series.  (It’s not really a sequel—more of an in-between book.  The next book, The Genie Lamp, due in early 2012, will be a true sequel, picking up where Jewel, Randy, and Clay left off.)  You will recognize a few characters, however—and you’ll definitely know those pesky smoking pigeons!

Hel Nagazy was one of my toughest heroines to write.  She was wallowing in teen misery when she became a vampire, decades ago, and she still tends to whine a lot.  Thank goodness her hero Nick came along to save her, and me, from existential vampire angst.  Honestly, the longer I write romance, the more I think the world’s problems can be solved by the correct and appropriate harnessing of men’s, uh, susceptibilities.

Nick has tremendous self-control in some ways.  In some ways, not so much.  Once I realized how, um, hard it was for him to fight his attraction to Hel, everything came together.

I also want to thank a cranky and inaccurate reviewer who complained that one of my books was written in first person. Hel’s story is my first try with an “I” story.  I had a ball with it.  Thank you, cranky reviewer!  Mwah!  I would never have thought of it without you!

Buying A Taste Of You at Bookviewcafe pays me the most—all formats, DRM-free.  You can also get it at Kindle and, soon, Kobo, Sony, Smashwords, BN.com, Diesel, and Apple.

Limit of Vision

Linda Nagata

September 13, 2011 $4.99

ISBN: 978 1 61138 108 5 

 ”LOVs” are a tiny artificial lifeform containing bioengineered human neurons. Three young scientists illegally use implanted LOVs to enhance their cognitive abilities–but when the experiment goes wrong, the consequences are bizarre and unforeseeable. A space station module containing the last remnants of the LOVs crashes to Earth in the Mekong Delta, and the sole surviving scientist, Virgil Copeland, finds himself in a race to recover them–and avoid arrest. He meets Ela Suvanatat, an independent journalist infected by LOVs when she arrived first at the crash site. Together, they will ride the whirlwind of a runaway biotechnology leading to the next phase of human evolution.

About Linda: Linda Nagata is the author of eight novels including The Bohr Maker, winner of the Locus Award for best first novel, and the novella “Goddesses,” the first online publication to receive a Nebula award. She lives with her husband in their long-time home on the island of Maui.

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Watch this space for news about my new paranormal novel, coming out on Halloween 2011!

Limit of Vision (science fiction

Linda Nagata

September 13, 2011     $4.99

ISBN:  978 1 61138 108 5

 Description:

“LOVs” are a tiny artificial lifeform containing bioengineered human neurons. Three young scientists illegally use implanted LOVs to enhance their cognitive abilities–but when the experiment goes wrong, the consequences are bizarre and unforeseeable. A space station module containing the last remnants of the LOVs crashes to Earth in the Mekong Delta, and the sole surviving scientist, Virgil Copeland, finds himself in a race to recover them–and avoid arrest. He meets Ela Suvanatat, an independent journalist infected by LOVs when she arrived first at the crash site. Together, they will ride the whirlwind of a runaway biotechnology leading to the next phase of human evolution.

About Linda Nagata:

Linda Nagata is the author of eight novels including The Bohr Maker, winner of the Locus Award for best first novel, and the novella “Goddesses,” the first online publication to receive a Nebula award. She lives with her husband in their long-time home on the island of Maui.

In this magical tale of love in a time of war, immortal Prince Aidan, whose tale was last told in ALAMUT, has finally won his beloved Assassin. But the world and the Church are determined to tear them apart. Bound by oaths and honor and sundered by their opposing faiths, they find themselves on opposite sides of a bitter war.

Available DRM-free in epub, mobi, and pdf formats. Just $4.99 at Book View Cafe.

Read a free sample here: http://www.bookviewcafe.com/index.php/The-Dagger-and-the-Cross-Sample-Chapter

Buy the book at Book View Cafe: http://www.bookviewcafe.com/

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You can also get my latest releases, two erotic all-dialogue short stories called “Value for O” and “Dezyrah’s Talk Dirty To Me”, at Kindle.

Well, nobody is a big word. And “too old” is fighting words.

Today I’ll tell you about Rochelle, who swims at my health club. I value the ladies at my health club: they’re all between twenty and forty years older than I am, and smarter, and very generous with their time. They taught me how to swim.

This story is about how Rochelle learned how to swim.

When Rochelle was six, her family took her to Touhy Avenue Beach in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago. Her cousin threw her off his shoulders into deep water, telling her to swim. She doesn’t remember what happened next because she blacked out. Ever since, she has been terrified of deep water.

Seventy-five years later, Rochelle’s husband of fifty-six years passed away after a long illness. She had done everything she should: had the babies, canned the crab apples, made wine, worked when she had to, stayed home and raised children when she didn’t have to work, gloried in the grandkids, nursed her husband through his slow, painful passing, kept her house spotless. At eighty-one and alone, Rochelle had done all that. She was ready for something different.

Rochelle decided that she was going to say Yes to every offer anyone made her.

She went to Hawaii with her kids. She went to roller derby bouts. She went to the movies and concerts, she went to Lake Geneva with family, she took Senior Learning classes. She got her knees replaced, joined my health club, and walked in the shallow end of the pool. And one day, she saw one pool member giving another swimming lessons. She left him a note. After a long conversation, he offered to teach her to swim. She was seventy-nine. She said Yes.

It took a lot of patience and an incredible amount of guts. Every time her teacher coaxed her out into the five-foot zone—Rochelle is barely five feet tall herself—the water closed over her head the way it did seventy-five years ago, and the terror came back. And she thrashed her way to the poolside, panting, red-faced, panicking, heart hammering, apologizing, her head shaking, her hands shaking.

But she kept trying.

Her teacher was patient. Little by little, she let go. Her progress was slow at first. Then she started to gain confidence.

Eventually she did it. After two years of lessons, at eight-one, Rochelle can now swim fifty feet, from the shallow end to the nine-foot-deep end, doing a proper crawl, with her face in the water and the pool bottom miles away, years away, decades of terror away.

Rochelle was afraid for seventy-five years. But she isn’t any more.

She got around to it.

(Regency romance)

Madeleine Robins

July 12, 2011 $3.99

ISBN: 978 1 61138 070 5

When she is stranded with an inn-full of travelers and finds herself embroiled in Emily Pellering’s reluctant elopement, Jenny finds it impossible not to interfere. With the help of her fellow travelers–enigmatic Peter Teverley and his nephew Dominic– Jenny foils a fortune-hunter’s plans.

That should be the end of it, but when they reach London matters grow more complex: the fortune-hunting Adrian Ratherscombe still has his eye on Emily. Dominic Teverley has a tendre for Emily, but she only has eyes for Peter. Jenny’s growing feelings for the intriguing, infuriating Peter Teverley are simply not to be borne. But she finds it isn’t easy to put such dreams aside…

Madeleine Robins is the author of eleven novels, including five Regency romances, and three alternate-Regency noir mysteries featuring Miss Sarah Tolerance, Agent of Inquiry. She lives in San Francisco.

Chris Dolley

July 5, 2011 $3.99

An Unsafe Pair of Hands is a quirky murder mystery set in rural England, charting the descent and rise of a detective on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Peter Shand is the ‘safe pair of hands’ – a high-flying police administrator seconded to a quiet rural CID team to gain the operational experience he needs for promotion. On his second day he’s thrust into a high-profile murder case. A woman’s body is discovered in an old stone circle – with another woman buried alive beneath her.

There appears to be no link between the two crimes. The media is clamouring for answers. And Shand’s convinced his wife is having an affair with someone called Gabriel. Which just happens to be the name of both chief suspects. Both are womanisers, and both produce a mystery woman – who sounds suspiciously like Shand’s wife – as their alibi.

Shand can’t sleep, a local journalist is out to discredit him, his wife is about to be dragged into the case and then, goaded at a press conference about lack of progress, he invents a lead. And keeps on lying – to the press, his boss, his team – telling himself that he’ll solve the case before anyone finds out.

And then a second murder occurs. And had there been a third?

Shand is desperate, increasingly unpredictable, pursued by an amorous psychic, and unjustly gaining a reputation for arresting livestock. What’s going to break first? The case, or Shand?

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Chris Dolley has been a computer consultant, a pioneer computer games designer, an amateur detective and once, as a teenager, freed a small country. Now he lives with his wife and a large collection of animals on a farm they renovated in the Normandy-Maine Regional Park.

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Gregory Frost is a writer of best-selling fantasy, science fiction, and thrillers.  He has been a finalist for every major sf, fantasy, and horror fiction award. His latest novel-length work is the duology Shadowbridge and Lord Tophet, which was voted “one of the four best fantasy novels of the year” by the American Library Association; it was also a finalist for the James Tiptree Jr. Award in 2009, receiving starred reviews from Booklist and Publishers Weekly. His previous novel, the historical thriller, Fitcher’s Brides, was a finalist for both the World Fantasy and International Horror Guild Awards for Best Novel.

His latest short story, “The Dingus,” leads off in Ellen Datlow’s anthology Supernatural Noir, now out from Dark Horse. He is one of the fiction workshop directors at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, PA.

We are glad to welcome him to BVC. You can find Greg online here, where his novel Lyrec premieres in its ebook edition in the BVC eBookstore, at his website, http://www.gregoryfrost.com/, at  LiveJournal, on Twitter , and at his Powell’s Bookstore bookshelf for print editions.

Greg’s BVC bookshelf is here: http://tinyurl.com/3dw43xa

And his debut ebook, Lyrec: http://www.bookviewcafe.com/index.php/Gregory-Frost/eBooks/