Have a look at TK Sheffield's NEW RELEASE, The Valentine Lines! #RomCom #Humour #Romance @RABTBookTours

The Valentine Lines
By TK Sheffield
 

Cupid trades arrows for scones in a magical screwball comedy

“The Valentine Lines” reimagines Cupid—aka Bart McGee—as an underdog ditching the corporate grind of Mt. Olympus, Inc., for small-town life in quaint Mineral Point, Wisconsin. When Bart launches a matchmaking business and falls in love with a local baker, chaos ensues as his meddling Olympus relatives crash the scene. It’s packed with snappy banter, slapstick escapades, mythological mishaps, and thoughtful explorations of love, trust, and self-discovery.

It’s a modern “Bell, Book, and Candle.” A light, literary escape for readers craving whimsy with emotional resonance. 

No sex, politics, foul language. Manuscript winner/finalist in CIBA (humor) and Southwest Writers.

Genres: Romantic Comedy, Humor Novel, Light Fantasy, Small Town Romance 
Pages: 373

 

Grab a copy HERE!

 

 TK Sheffield, MA, writes stories to laugh and escape, including new a romcom "The Valentine Lines," and "Nellie’s Island," a children’s horse story set in Mackinac Island. Sheffield also writes funny cozy mysteries, "The Devil Wears Prada" meets a Wisconsin supper club, which have earned an IBPA Humor medal, a Claymore, and an IPPY. She’s on the Wisconsin Writers Association’s board, host of the Wispresso Café, an author talk show, and a member of Blackbird Writers, Sisters in Crime, and SCBWI.

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Take a look at Chris Karlsen's latest release, Killer Friends (Bloodstone Series #4) #HistoricalFiction #Thriller #Suspense @RABTBookTours

Killer Friends

(Bloodstone Series #4)

By Chris Karlsen

Henrietta Newell stormed into the detective bureau. She claimed her adult son was missing and feared for his safety. The detectives attempted to reassure her that the absence of a bachelor in his thirties, in a city like London, wasn’t extraordinary. Despite their efforts, she insisted an investigation be conducted, reminding them of her political connections.

Detective Rudyard Bloodstone and his partner were told to look into the matter. Their investigation reveals evidence of suspicious and unusual activity but no clues regarding the man’s disappearance. The few leads they develop take them from the world of wealthy families and into the secret society of sexual peculiarities.

The detectives discover the victim didn’t simply disappear. He was murdered. They have the evidence except for one problem, they’re missing is the victim’s body.

Genre: Historical Suspense

Pages: 334

Grab a copy HERE!

I was born and raised in Chicago. My father was a history professor and my mother was, and is, a voracious reader. I grew up with a love of history and books.

My parents also love traveling, a passion they passed onto me. I wanted to see the places I read about, see the land and monuments from the time periods that fascinated me. I’ve had the good fortune to travel extensively throughout Europe, the Near East, and North Africa.

I am a retired police detective. I spent twenty-five years in law enforcement with two different agencies. My desire to write came in my early teens. After I retired, I decided to pursue that dream.

I’m currently working on the Bloodstone Series, which is historical suspense stories set in Victorian London. I’ve also written two World War 2 romances: The Ack Ack Girl and Moonlight Serenade.

My past series include my historical/time travel romance series is called, Knights in Time. My romantic thriller series is Dangerous Waters.

Each series has a different setting and some cross time periods, which I find fun to write.

I currently live in the Pacific Northwest with my husband and three wild and crazy rescue dogs.

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NEW RELEASE! Take a look at The Brothers Brown (A Family Saga, Part 2) by R. G. Stanford #HistoricalFiction #FamilySaga #NewRelease @RABTBookTours

The Brothers Brown

(A Family Saga, Part 2)

By R. G. Stanford

Based on a true story.

Set in the late 1890’s, The Brothers Brown - a family saga, Part 2 - For the Sake of Family is a sweeping frontier saga of love, guilt, and redemption - an unflinching portrait of a man’s descent into madness amid the unforgiving wilds of Indian Territory.

When Matt Brown boards a northbound train, he carries more than a pistol. He carries the weight of his brother’s death, a marriage strained to its breaking point, and a conscience at war with itself. A doctor’s brown vial of medicine offers fleeting relief but soon draws him into a darker world where pain and guilt blur into something far more dangerous.

His wife, Milla, proud and rooted in her Choctaw heritage, stands as both his anchor and his judge as the world around them shifts under the weight of change and loss.

From Fort Smith, Arkansas, to the wooded banks of Bokchito Creek, two families are bound by tragedy and love, vengeance and mercy. A celebration meant to heal ignites old resentments. A family gathering ends in bloodshed. And a winter dance turns deadly, forcing each to face the cost of survival, forgiveness, and the ties that bind them.

Steeped in the spirit of the Choctaw Nation and the rough mercy of the Old West, For the Sake of Family is a haunting tale of madness, murder, and the fragile hope that redemption can be found on the far side of ruin.

Genres: Family Saga, Historical Fiction, Native American

Pages: 220

Grab a copy HERE!

Raised on the beaches of South Texas, R.G. Stanford has always been drawn to stories that transcend time. That passion was ignited in 1976 with the discovery of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, and deepened with The Feast of All Saints just a few years later. Though historical fiction wasn’t an immediate calling, a personal journey into genealogy changed everything.

With no close relatives nearby, R.G. Stanford turned to online resources in search of extended family. That search became a twenty-year journey through genealogy websites, Federal Census records, the National Archives, and old newspapers. Along the way, R.G. Stanford uncovered incredible stories about her family and the people who once lived in the Choctaw Nation, Indian Territory.

Compelled to record the truth of her family in the lore, sprinkled with imagination, R.G. Stanford is a history lover, a research buff, and a passionate genealogy enthusiast. She is also a mother, a grandmother, and a teller of stories, now living near Orlando.

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Check out Eric Avedissian's new book, The Book of Wine and Sorry (The Martyr's Vow series, Book 4)! #UrbanFantasy #Adventure #NewRelease @angryreporter @RABTBookTours

The Book of Wine and Sorry

(The Martyr's Vow series, Book 4)

By Eric Avedissian

Newlyweds Armand and Vonnie are traveling to Armenia, where Armand hopes to reconnect with his estranged culture and investigate his family’s troubled history. But when a sadistic oligarch kidnaps them, their honeymoon spirals into a living nightmare.

Frightened and far from home, Armand and Vonnie race against time to locate a powerful artifact before their captor does, or they’ll join the dead in the underworld forever. The couple’s frantic quest takes them to lush mountains, desolate monasteries, and bustling markets, but they’re not traveling alone. A distant cousin with a penchant for stretching the truth, a mythological strongman who hurls boulders like skipping stones, and a stuffy ghost with a love for poetry join them on this macabre treasure hunt.

Armand must summon the courage of his ancestors and sacrifice himself for love, or the Scribe of Death will come for his beloved.

Bittersweet and brutal, The Book of Wine and Sorrow is the thrilling conclusion to The Martyr’s Vow series and a heart-aching testament to survival and wrestling with your demons.

Genres: Urban Fantasy/Adventure

Pages: 373

Preorder now!

Amazon UK • Amazon US

 

 Eric Avedissian is an adjunct professor and speculative fiction author. His published work includes the award-winning novel The Ocean Hugs Hard and the Martyr’s Vow series (Accursed Son, Mr. Penny-Farthing, Blood Family, and The Book of Wine & Sorrow). His short stories appear in various anthologies, including Across the Universe, Great Wars, and Rituals & Grimoires. Avedissian received a 2024 Fellowship in Prose from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. He lives in New Jersey with his wife and a ridiculous number of books. Find him online at www.ericavedissian.com if you dare.

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Check out It Came Upon One Christmas Eve by S R Kerr #HolidayFiction #Christmas #ShortStories @RABTBookTours

It Came Upon One Christmas Eve

By S R Kerr

This is a selection of short stories perfect for the dark, cold nights of the Christmas season. Each warm tale is set on Christmas Eve and is best enjoyed from a comfortable armchair by the fireside, as the special ambience of Christmas fills the room and our hearts.

Within these six stories, you will discover a rich variety of seasonal magic. One tale takes you to a snowbound ancestral home, where family secrets are finally revealed beneath a blanket of white. Another follows a German refugee in the 1940s who, by joining the local junior football team, finds hope and a sense of belonging during the festive period.

You'll also encounter unexpected meetings at a lonely country crossroads, where characters' destinies become entwined on the most magical night of the year. The collection journeys further afield to the warmth and wonder of an Australian Christmas, where high summer temperatures provide a striking contrast to the traditional spirit of the season.

One story features two old neighbours returning to their hometown, doing their utmost to recreate the cherished Christmases of years gone by. Each narrative offers its own unique perspective on the joy, togetherness and wonder that define this special time of year.

This book is lovingly crafted for readers of all ages and backgrounds who delight in the spirit of Christmas. Let these stories bring warmth and festive cheer into your home.

Genre: Holiday Fiction

Pages: 125

Grab a copy HERE!

Steve's interest in writing came from the early 1970s when his somewhat unconventional English teacher encouraged his creativity. His creativity and imagination went back however to childhood when he would create stories and draw them in a series of pictures. He has always had a strong interest in History and music. As a teenager he composed many songs but never met with success his creative abilities were slowly channeled into writing books.His first Novel " A Cafe In Arcadia",about life in an insular Greek town, was published in 2014. He had already published " The Christmas Tree Of Tales " in 2013 under the name S R Kerr Under the same name,he also published another book of short stories for Christmas,"It Came Upon One Christmas Eve"..In 2021 he published another novel "The Winding Streets Of Kolonaki" set in Athens..His last book to be published was the non-fiction Eurovision ;A Plea For Respect(Continental Songs And British attitudes). He counts a love of music in his interests as well as travel and reading. He has travelled extensivly to places as diverse as Pakistan and Peru and hopes to visit Japan, Hong Kong and the USA in the near future. Growing up next to the beach on the River Tay in his home town was a a major influence on him as was living in a castle. He was always interested in anthropology and visiting other countries where he often immersed himself in their culture. Places he visited and lived in inspired much of his writing, as did his interest in psychology, people watching. He worked as a lecturer, tutor, journalist ,civil servant in London where at a point he shared a house with the group The Test Department. He is at the moment working on three other books 1)Short Stories For Christmas 3)The afternoons of Sanjay Bassinger. 4.)The Golden Road To Glyfada

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Read about the inspiration behind Daughter of Mercia by Julia Ibbotson #DaughterOfMercia #JuliaIbbotson #anglosaxon #dualtime #timetravel #mystery #TheCoffeePotBookClub @JuliaIbbotson @cathiedunn

Daughter of Mercia

By Julia Ibbotson

Echoes of the past resonate across the centuries as Dr Anna Petersen, a medievalist and runologist, is struggling with past trauma and allowing herself to trust again. When archaeologist (and Anna's old adversary) Professor Matt Beacham unearths a 6th century seax with a mysterious runic inscription, and reluctantly approaches Anna for help, a chain of events brings the past firmly back into her present. And why does the burial site also contain two sets of bones, one 6th century and the other modern? 

As the past and present intermingle alarmingly, Anna and Matt need to work together to solve the mystery of the seax runes and the seemingly impossible burial, and to discover the truth about the past. Tensions rise and sparks fly between Anna and Matt. But how is 6th century Lady Mildryth of Mercia connected to Anna? Can they both be the Daughter of Mercia?

For fans of Barbara Erskine, Elena Collins, Pamela Hartshorne, Susanna Kearsley and Christina Courtenay.

Publication Date: June 6th, 2025

Publisher: Archbury Books

Pages: 301

Genre: medieval dual-time mystery romance

Grab a copy HERE!

This novel is free to read with #KindleUnlimited subscription.

Author's Inspiration

Daughter of Mercia is a timeslip/dual time novel in which the main character in the present-day timeline, Dr Anna Petersen, is a university academic, which is inspired by my own profession. The historical timeline, that of the 6th century Lady Mildryth, has been the greatest inspiration for my last four novels, including Daughter of Mercia (and its subsequent WIP series), namely the Anglo-Saxon world. I studied it for my first degree many years ago when Professor Barbara Raw was the lead academic at my university. Sadly, she is now no longer with us but I owe her a great debt of gratitude. She taught us Anglo-Saxon (Old English) as if it were a current language, in the modern languages lab! Those of us in the OE group used to go around campus talking to each other in Anglo-Saxon; I’m sure the other students must have wondered what country we were from. Little did they know it was from the 5^th/6^th/7^th centuries, and beyond, to the Norman Conquest!  She also taught us Anglo-Saxon history and, perhaps most importantly to me, domestic history and literature, far from the old view of a dangerous, dark and barbaric world of battle and bloodshed. 

I have been intrigued ever since, to learn about domestic history of those times, how people used to live, and archaeology, my next inspiration, has revealed so much more to me, especially in more recent times. There have been some extremely enlightening finds from excavations in the past few years. We have little in the way of written evidence from the Anglo-Saxons, certainly as far as the early years of the era are concerned. But we have the evidence of found artefacts and we now know that it was a much richer and more cultured period than previously thought. I wanted to show this in Daughter of Mercia.

After all, the period we used to call ‘the Dark Ages’ was only ‘dark’ because we didn’t know very much about it. The lack of written or archaeological evidence previously hampered our understanding. Now archaeologists, with their more sophisticated tools, can find traces and images on artefacts which provide us with a clearer picture of the life and times of the folk who lived a millennium and a half ago in our land. 

We discovered that life was much more ‘advanced’ than had previously been supposed. There is now a growing body of archaeological, geophysical and isotopic evidence to indicate how the people of the 5^th and 6^th centuries lived: feasting halls, jewellery, imported luxury goods. Silver coin, bronze and silver rings, amethyst beads, gold rings, jewel-encrusted brooches, bracteates (neck pendants), gold torcs (neck rings) and so much more, have been excavated. Recent digs have uncovered evidence of large feasting halls (mead halls) as a focal point of the settlements, and the place where the Witan (decision-making council) was held. Osteo-archaeological analyses of human bones found in the cemeteries attached to these villages have confirmed the diet as more varied than previously thought, with some foods even imported from distant lands for the wealthy. 

Literary evidence from the 7^th or 8^th century heroic poem Beowulf (the dating isn’t clear) indicates the riches of the hall and its decoration: ‘tapestries worked in gold glittered on the walls’, ‘eofor-līc scionon ofer hlēor-bergan: gehroden golde’ (‘boar-crests glittered above the helmets adorned with gold’), ‘māđm-æht’ (‘precious treasures’), ‘bēag-gyfa’ (the treasure-giver, or lord/leader/chieftain/king). The feasting and drinking are emphasised in the poem and many Anglo-Saxon words emphasise the importance of mead: ‘medo-ful’ (the mead cup), ‘medo-benc’ (the mead benc), ‘medu-drēam’ (revelry in mead-drinking and feasting).

There would be entertainment during the meal: a scōp would be employed, the poet/musician who entertained with ‘harp and voice’ (not a harp as we know it), and the poetry and story-telling would celebrate both traditional Christian and pagan heroic deeds and values. These narrative poems would honour and glorify the community and unify the society. All this inspired my descriptions in Daughter of Mercia.

I’m also inspired by the notion of ‘what if’. What if there was much more mingling of Romano-British society than previously thought, through inter-marriage with Romans who remained after the Roman troop withdrawals, and a similar intermingling between Britons and the immigrant Angles and Saxons. What if there was a much more gradual change and evolution in post-Roman Britain and throughout the Anglo-Saxon era, with immigration and settlement, rather than sudden brutal change from invasion and suppression by Anglo-Saxon marauders. What if domestic life was much more ordered and settled. It’s the view of more recent historians and archaeologists in view of new findings, and one advocated by (among others) Professor Susan Oosthuizen (The Emergence of the English 2019). 

I guess the final (and the basic spring-board) ‘What if’ inspiration for my novel is the intriguing concept of time. I find it fascinating. My own career as a university academic inspired the setting of Daughter of Mercia and the work of Dr Anna Petersen, but I wanted her to be able to somehow get closer to life in the times she researched as an academic, and to her counterpart in the 6^th century, Lady Mildryth. My research into timeslip and dual time links was so exciting for me. I looked again at the scientific theories of quantum mechanics, which, I admit, sounds a bit weird: the Einstein-Rosen Bridge theory, and that of ‘worm-holes’. These are all basically ideas about space-time portals through which you could slip from one layer of the universe into another, or from one historic period into another. I started thinking more deeply about this idea when I experienced some odd events of déja vu: that weird feeling that I’d already experienced something that I thought was actually happening for the first time. It inspired me to start to write stories about this, and especially in Daughter of Mercia, the possibility that someone could even get trapped in a different time.

If you want to read more about this period of history, I have a series (Living with the Anglo Saxons) on my blog at https://juliaibbotsonauthor.com.

Julia Ibbotson is fascinated by the medieval world and the concept of time. She is the author of historical mysteries with a frisson of romance. Her books are evocative of time and place, well-researched and uplifting page-turners. Her current series focuses on early medieval time-slip/dual-time mysteries.

Julia read English at Keele University, England, specialising in medieval language / literature / history, and has a PhD in socio-linguistics. After a turbulent time in Ghana, West Africa, she became a school teacher, then a university academic and researcher. Her break as an author came soon after she joined the RNA’s New Writers’ Scheme in 2015, with a three-book deal from Lume Books for a trilogy (Drumbeats) set in Ghana in the 1960s.

She has published five other books, including A Shape on the Air, an Anglo-Saxon timeslip mystery, and its two sequels The Dragon Tree and The Rune Stone. Her latest novel is the first of a new series of Anglo-Saxon dual-time mysteries, Daughter of Mercia, where echoes of the past resonate across the centuries.

Her books will appeal to fans of Barbara Erskine, Pamela Hartshorne, Susanna Kearsley, and Christina Courtenay. Her readers say: ‘Julia’s books captured my imagination’, ‘beautiful story-telling’, ‘evocative and well-paced storylines’, ‘brilliant and fascinating’ and ‘I just couldn’t put it down’.

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Read an excerpt from Scents of Lavender: Queer Love Through the Ages –In Verse by D. C. Wilkinson #HistoricalFiction #LGBTRomance #IllustratedPoetry #TheCoffeePotBookClub @dcwilkinson2024 @cathiedunn

Scents of Lavender: Queer Love Through the Ages –In Verse 

By D. C. Wilkinson

Timeless and unwavering, love flows through a universal melody that echoes in every corner of the globe. Transcending borders and cultures, it sows the seeds of memories that sprout and blossom in Scents of Lavender, a collection of 25 illustrated poems that breathe life into evocative scenes where queer love proudly re-emerges from the depths of history, uncovering deep and everlasting bonds.

Each poem invites the reader to explore the narrator’s deeply personal and intimate perspective through pantheistic eyes. Written in the first person, every verse unfolds as both a reflection and a manifestation of a single universal mind and soul, drawing the reader into a shared understanding that love –in all its forms– is boundless, eternal, and permeates the cosmos.

Publication Date: June 1, 2025

Publisher: DCW Press

Pages: 108

Genre: Poetry / Historical Fiction / LGBTQ+ Romance

Grab a copy HERE!

EXCERPT

In gentle chains,

I find no plea.

Release me not,

for I am thine,

and thine alone

forevermore.

From Buckingham

D. C. Wilkinson is an award-winning novelist, poet, and lifelong voyager of inner and outer realms. His literary work centers on his passion for historical tales, portal fantasies, and dreams and visions often weaved into narratives that highlight LGBTQ+ experiences. 

He began his career in the Midwest as a student of Language Arts before relocating to the East Coast in his early twenties. A graduate of Columbia University and former New York City public school teacher, he now calls Connecticut his home, where he resides with his spouse and their beloved beagle.

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