A Sneak Peek @ Zombie Candy by Frederick Lee Brooke!

Please enjoy this excerpt from Zombie Candy, a genre-bending mystery by Frederick Lee Brooke. Then read on to learn how you can win huge prizes as part of this blog tour, including $550 in Amazon gift cards, a Kindle Fire, and 5 autographed copies of the book.

They sit at long tables under grape arbors. Heavy bunches of grapes hang from the vines. An eight-piece dance band in white tuxes and black bow ties plays tunes from every decade. Heavy silver dessert forks and coffee spoons rest untouched on the linen tablecloth. She can’t eat another bite. All the glasses, at least, she has used: white wine, red wine, water.
A light breeze comes up. It feels heavenly on her face. With nightfall, the heat has gone out of the air. The heat must be trapped in these old stone walls — the walls of the farmhouse, the walls surrounding the vineyard. The aroma of fresh herbs floats from a nearby garden, rosemary, and mint, she thinks as she watches people dancing. The bride, her beautiful white dress with the daring silk bodice; the groom’s parents, a man with close-cropped gray hair and a red rose in his lapel, and his wife in a shimmering blue dress that looks specially made by an Italian designer.
She keeps one eye on the young man in the navy suit with the green silk tie. He looks like something Michelangelo might have sculpted, then breathed life into. This young man knows everyone here, and has danced every dance for the last hour. But he’s dancing with both older and younger women, probably cousins, friends, the mothers of cousins and friends. She has no idea who he is.
She feels outclassed in her red silk dress from Bloomingdale’s. She had worn the same dress at a wedding in June in Chicago. No one here has ever seen it. If there are any more weddings this fall, she will just have to go shopping in Siena or even Florence, that’s all there is to it.
“May I have this dance?”
Like a vision, Michelangelo man stands beside her. Has somebody cast a magic spell here? How did he sneak up on her like that? She didn’t even notice the song had ended. Or that another one had started.
“I’m not much of a dancer.”
“We’ll see.” He tugs her hand.
“Really, you don’t have to.” He obviously feels a duty to make sure every woman in the place gets at least one dance.
“Of course I don’t have to. I’ve danced with all the women I was obligated to dance with. Now I want to dance with you.”
She doesn’t need more arm-twisting than this. He leads her to the dance floor. The band is playing a quiet song from the 1940s, she thinks, something familiar. Grape arbors surround the dance floor and fill the air with sweet perfume. He turns and puts one hand around her waist. “My name is Giancarlo,” he says, switching to Italian.
“Candace,” she says. “I’ve been here for three weeks. I can’t believe I’m at this beautiful wedding.”
“Your Italian is marvelous.”
Your lips are marvelous, she thinks. Your curly hair, the color of black coffee, and your handsome chiseled face are marvelous too. But you can’t say such things to a man you’ve never met before. Not in Tuscany. At least not before the end of the first dance. He glides around the floor, leading her with slight shifts in his weight, slight pressure with his hands. Her feet know where to go, just as her mouth knows how to form the words.
“We don’t have weddings like this in Chicago. The food … the music … the grapes.”
“My uncle’s house is nice,” Giancarlo agrees. “But I am sorry for Lucia. She has married a playboy. I do not think they will be happy.”
“They certainly look happy.”
Giancarlo makes a face. “I should not talk about the details. I know him. I’ve known him all my life, and he will never change. I tried to talk to my cousin, but she is in love and blind. What can we do?”
Giancarlo’s smile, Candace realizes, has a hypnotizing effect. Thank God a fast dance is starting, the Bee Gees. He makes no attempt to bring her back to the table, merely releases his hold on her waist.
“You are a beautiful dancer,” he says when the Bee Gees song ends. The band takes a break. Everyone is leaving the dance floor. Her heart sinks. Somehow she has managed to cling to him for two dances, something no woman before her had managed. Now he will bring her back to her table, his duty done. He will go back to his people.
“Thank you for the lovely dances.”
“Come, let’s get some fresh air. I’ll show you around,” Giancarlo says. And the really amazing thing is he doesn’t let go of her hand.

As part of this special promotional extravaganza sponsored by Novel Publicity, the price of the Zombie Candy eBook edition is just 99 cents this week. What’s more, by purchasing this fantastic book at an incredibly low price, you can enter to win many awesome prizes. The prizes include $550 in Amazon gift cards, a Kindle Fire, and 5 autographed copies of the book.

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About the book: Weaving elements of mystery, horror and romance in a hilarious romp that starts in Chicago and ends in a quaint medieval town in sun-drenched Tuscany, Zombie Candy is a genre-hopping knee-slapper of a novel. Get it on Amazon.
About the author: Frederick Lee Brooke has worked as an English teacher, language school manager and small business owner and has travelled extensively in Tuscany, the setting of part of Zombie Candy. Visit Fred on his website, Twitter, Facebook, or GoodReads.

The Lola Quartet by Emily St. John Mandel

Quoted from GoodReads:
Gavin Sasaki is a promising young journalist in New York City, until he's fired in disgrace following a series of unforgivable lapses in his work. It's early 2009, and the world has gone dark very quickly; the economic collapse has turned an era that magazine headlines once heralded as the second gilded age into something that more closely resembles the Great Depression. The last thing Gavin wants is to return to his hometown of Sebastian, Florida, but he's drifting toward bankruptcy and is in no position to refuse when he's offered a job by his sister, Eilo, a real estate broker who deals in foreclosed homes. 


Eilo recently paid a visit to a home that had a ten-year-old child in it, a girl who bears a strong resemblence to Gavin and who has the same last name as Gavin's high school girlfriend Anna, whom Gavin last saw a decade ago. Gavin -- a former jazz musician, a reluctant broker of foreclosed homes, obsessed with film noir and private detectives -- begins his own private investigation in an effort to track down Anna and their apparent daughter. The Lola Quartet, a work of literary noir, is concerned with jazz, Django Reinhardt, economic collapse, friendship and love, Florida's exotic wildlife problem, fedoras, and the unreliability of memory.



The title and the book cover art of The Lola Quartet give very little indication of the books' contents. Instead of causing me to bypass this book, both the cover and the title intrigued me.  I am not sure what I was expecting, but the story within was a pleasant surprise.

I am not sure that this novella fits into any one genre.  It is a little bit of a mystery, a bit noir and a bit of a commentary on the mistakes we make during our youth and the ability for these choices to follow us into adulthood.

All of the characters are flawed in some way.  Many of the decisions that they make seem to be random choices and not very well thought out.  Quite typical of the way most adolescents approach life changing choices.  The main character of Gavin is  sympathetic, although he seems to live in a reality of his own creation.  He develops and grows over the course of the book and by the end appears to be attempting to make some well though out mature decision.

The story weaves back and forth between the present the the past, gradually unveiling an interesting plot.  The writing is flawless and flows effortlessly from beginning to end. At some points during the first half, it did seem to drag just a bit, however this is a minor concern. What I really enjoyed about this book was how different it was from anything else I have read recently.  St. John Mandle is an author to watch!

Special thanks to Netgallery for the complementary copy of the Lola Quartet, allowing me to read and offer an unbiased review.

Pure (Pure #1) by Julianna Baggott

Published February 8th 2012 by Grand Central Publishing
ISBN 145550306


Quoted from GoodReads:

"We know you are here, our brothers and sisters . . . 


Pressia barely remembers the Detonations or much about life during the Before. In her sleeping cabinet behind the rubble of an old barbershop where she lives with her grandfather, she thinks about what is lost-how the world went from amusement parks, movie theaters, birthday parties, fathers and mothers . . . to ash and dust, scars, permanent burns, and fused, damaged bodies. And now, at an age when everyone is required to turn themselves over to the militia to either be trained as a soldier or, if they are too damaged and weak, to be used as live targets, Pressia can no longer pretend to be small. Pressia is on the run. 


Burn a Pure and Breathe the Ash . . . 


There are those who escaped the apocalypse unmarked. Pures. They are tucked safely inside the Dome that protects their healthy, superior bodies. Yet Partridge, whose father is one of the most influential men in the Dome, feels isolated and lonely. Different. He thinks about loss-maybe just because his family is broken; his father is emotionally distant; his brother killed himself; and his mother never made it inside their shelter. Or maybe it's his claustrophobia: his feeling that this Dome has become a swaddling of intensely rigid order. So when a slipped phrase suggests his mother might still be alive, Partridge risks his life to leave the Dome to find her. 


When Pressia meets Partridge, their worlds shatter all over again."

I am developing a love-hate relationship with books that are part of a series.  I love that the story continues and that I get to visit some of my favorite characters again, but I hate waiting for the other books to come out.  I want instant gratification!  I do not want to wait to see what happens!

OK, now that I got that out of my system, I can proceed to the book review....

There seems to be a lot of debates out there about the genre that this book falls into.  Is it YA or adult dystopian or is it a "crossover"??  When I was growing up we only had two genres, fiction and non-fiction.  I don't really think it matters what genre you place this book in.  I read what I like.  And I liked Pure.

Now, not everyone is going to agree with me about this book (no matter what their age is).  Which is part of why I liked it.  This a dark, dark world.  It's not a happy place to be. There is very little romance and the heroine is not beautiful, kind and brilliant.  This is a world that the conspiracy theorists will love!  This book is refreshingly different from anything I have read recently.

The story is told from multiple characters view points.  The writing was so well done, that I hardly noticed this until after I was finished with the book.  Usually I have to stop and re-read pages of books that are written in this manner and I find it confusing and distracting.  The author, Julianna Baggott makes the transition between characters seamless.  Overall, it is a beautifully written novel. ( I didn't have the urge to grab my red pen and correct grammar and sentence structure once!)

This is a world where the people of influence, power and wealth have isolated them selves from the rest of the population.  Instead of a gated community and exclusive country club, they built a self contained Dome and plotted to destroy the rest of the population.  They are the "Pures".  Hitler and his Aryan race come to mind about now. This political undertone continues to be just barely submerged beneath the surface of the plot.

The bombs are detonated. The people outside the dome suffer but continue to survive in their damaged world. Instead of the genetic experiments and concentration camps of the Holocaust, the detonations were engineered to destroy and create genetic mutations.  People fused with whatever objects they happened to be near at the time.  The results are so bizarre and deeply disturbing that it adds a surreal feeling to the book, an almost "nightmarish" feeling of horror that persists throughout  the book.  This is where the book begins.

These mutated characters are fascinating, yet repulsive.   Pressia is the "heroine" of this tale, but as I mentioned above, is not your typical heroine.  She has mutations like all of the others, but I found hers to be particularly freakish. Despite this, Pressia is resilient and resourceful.  She evolves as the book progresses and becomes stronger even though she is discovering some horrific facts about her life pre-detonation.

 Not a lot of action takes place in beginning chapters.  But the author uses this part of the book to vividly describes the world and it's inhabitants. The pace of the book picks up in the second half of the story.  The first half didn't drag, but there was a tremendous amount of world building and detailed description needed to set the tone of this world.  It is worth the wait.


When I read the first book of a series, I try to treat it as a prologue to the rest of the series.  There will be unanswered questions and parts of the plot that are not resolved.  I have to remind myself  of this as I get near the end of the book and everything is not neatly resolved.  (back to the love-hate thing...)  But, I am ready for more!  I need to know what happens!

As dark as this story is, I  didn't find it depressing.  At the end you are left with a little glimmer of hope for the main characters and their world.

P.S. The book cover art is beautiful and intriguing!


Thanks to Netgalley and the author for allowing me the opportunity to read and provide an honest review this book.