The Veiled Descendants (The Veiled Duchess #2) by Sophia Menesini

Meet MF Sullivan, author of The Hierophant's Daughter

Welcome to the book tour for The Hierophant's Daughter by M.F. Sullivan! Today she's letting us get to know her a little bit better, while also giving us some insight into her latest book. Please also enjoy an excerpt before you download your own copy. Follow the tour and leave plenty of questions and comments for the author as you continue to get to know her. And then be sure to enter the giveaway at the end!

Have you ever had an imaginary friend?

Of course! I give them whole worlds to ruin. Now that I’m into the occult (tarot was clearly an influence on, if nothing else, the structure of The Disgraced Martyr Trilogy—my cover artist, Nuno Moreira, did a wonderful job evoking tarot cards with the covers! The Hierophant’s Daughter is only the first beautiful example.

Do you have any phobias?

Heights, flying, needles—but I’m doing immunotherapy so I won’t be as allergic to my new black cat, Israel, so hopefully by the end I’ll be immune to phobia 3!

Do you listen to music when you're writing?

I must. I’ve talked in the past with another blogger about how important music is to me. The best thing a writer can do for themselves is to create a playlist and listen to it constantly, always envisioning the scenes of their story as inspiration calls. Listen to it so much that your knowledge of these images becomes routine, and when you sit down to write with this playlist, all your work will be second-nature to you.

Do you ever read your stories out loud?

Absolutely. Every third or fourth draft is like that—it helps me fix a lot of intolerable wording I wouldn’t have noticed otherwise.

Tell us about your main character and who inspired him/her.

General Dominia di Mephitoli, Former Governess of the United Front and the Bitch of Europa, is not just The Hierophant’s Daughter—she’s one of the most feared martyrs on the planet due to her prolific military career. That said, what I love about Dominia is her emotional complexity. While she thinks like a soldier, her political career—and her love of her dead wife, Cassandra di Mephitoli, whose death drives the plot of all three books even before the story has begun—has made her more emotional than that, and more attached to the human race than the rest of her cannibalistic martyr brethren. Part of her journey is about learning to honor those emotions, and learning to honor the horrors committed by the person that she was while acknowledging her ability to change into a new, better person.

I think one of the things I wanted to accomplish with this story was an LGBTQ protagonist, but I didn’t know any of that stuff about Dominia’s personal life going in. The most important thing for me was that the character’s problems not arise out of being gay—I respect YA coming-of-age tropes and the absolute bravery with which gay people must face the world to admit to being themselves, but I think the best way to create a world where LGBTQ people are normalized is to show them a world where they already are. So, when writing the plot, I basically wanted Dominia’s experience to be comparable in every way to that of a male sci-fi hero rescuing his wife. One of the ways I did that was by looking at one of the strongest people I’ve ever known, a young woman who’s a lesbian long after she’s a dynamic, reliable, intelligent and powerful human being. While she and Dominia are two very different people, I think I found that initial spark of the General’s motivations and self in the heart of my friend, Amber.

The Hierophant's Daughter

By 4042 CE, the Hierophant and his Church have risen to political dominance with his cannibalistic army of genetically modified humans: martyrs. In an era when mankind's intergenerational cold wars against their long-lived predators seem close to running hot, the Holy Family is poised on the verge of complete planetary control. It will take a miracle to save humanity from extinction.

It will also take a miracle to resurrect the wife of 331-year-old General Dominia di Mephitoli, who defects during martyr year 1997 AL in search of Lazarus, the one man rumored to bring life to the dead. With the Hierophant's Project Black Sun looming over her head, she has little choice but to believe this Lazarus is really all her new friends say he is--assuming he exists at all--and that these companions of hers are really able to help her. From the foulmouthed Japanese prostitute with a few secrets of her own to the outright sapient dog who seems to judge every move, they don't inspire a lot of confidence, but the General has to take the help she can get.

After all, Dominia is no ordinary martyr. She is THE HIEROPHANT'S DAUGHTER, and her Father won't let her switch sides without a fight. Not when she still has so much to learn.

The dystopic first entry of an epic cyberpunk trilogy, THE HIEROPHANT’S DAUGHTER is a horror/sci-fi adventure sure to delight and inspire adult readers of all stripes.

Read an excerpt:

VIII

Miki Soto

What couldn’t a person access from the Japanese Internet? The question inspired Dominia to get out of the bathtub for another look at the card. There was no address, whether web or physical, as there hadn’t been an address on the ad floating across that billboard; instead, when she studied the lotus embossed upon the card, the DIOX-I highlighted it as though it were a link. How fascinating, this augmented reality! After fixing the device’s settings back to manual control, she “clicked” on the link with an unsteady wink, and her right field of vision was covered by the floating window of a browser. Had she cochlear implants, she would have heard some sort of music, or even a voice accompanying the woman’s writhing in and out of the browser’s dark: less a whole person, and more a disembodied assortment of lips, fingers, lower backs, and thighs. At last, the vision disappeared to present her with the crimson words, “WELCOME TO THE RED MARKET.”

A button appeared: “Connect Your Halcyon for Age Verification.” The idea of giving the women of the international and highly loathed illegal organization any information might have stopped her in a simpler time, as it surely stopped 70 percent of potential Red Market customers—the ones able to access the site, anyway, inaccessible from Europa and the Front through traditional routes. That had been all the Hierophant could do to combat in any meaningful way the world’s oldest profession-cum-cult. Far trickier than hampering Internet access was controlling in-person transactions in gold or silver, or the off-brand cryptocurrency, Redcoin; and because there were almost no freelance prostitutes left in the world, catching a working girl was difficult.

Buy/Review Links:

Amazon * NetGalley * Goodreads * Barnes & Noble  

Hardback: 978-0-9965395-6-2

Paperback: 978-0-9965395-7-9

eBook: 978-0-9965395-8-6

About M.F. Sullivan

M.F. Sullivan is the author of Delilah, My Woman, The Lightning Stenography Device, and a slew of plays in addition to the Trilogy. She lives in Ashland, Oregon with her boyfriend and her cat, where she attends the local Shakespeare Festival and experiments with the occult. Find more information about her work (and plenty of free essays) at https://www.paintedblindpublishing.com!

Author Links:

Blog: https://www.paintedblindpublishing.com

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/TheRealMFS

Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/M.-F.-Sullivan/e/B013DDEQVE

Goodreads Author Page: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/14199461.M_F_Sullivan

One randomly chosen winner via rafflecopter will win a $50 Amazon/BN.com gift card. Follow the tour for more chances to win!

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For Fox Sake by Susan Mac Nicol

Welcome to the book blast for For Fox Sake. Check out an excerpt from this smoking hot LGBTQ romantic suspense and please leave comments and questions for the author as you follow the tour. Plus there's a great giveaway!

For Fox Sake

Tate and Clay's newest case has all the earmarks of typical investigative work: lies, deception, collusion, and a dead body - except the body was found in Fetish Alley, and nothing that happens there is typical.

Read an excerpt:

Tate sat beneath the covers, his iPad propped up against raised knees as he scrolled down the screen. His brow furrowed as Clay climbed in next to him. “Look at this. Rick’s sent me the police report from Dixon’s case. No one could find them earlier in the station. He made a stink about it and hey, presto. Now we have it.”

Clay picked up his reading glasses from the bedside table, unfolded them, and perched them on his nose. “What am I looking at?” he enquired, peering over at the tablet.

Tate’s finger moved across the screen as he pointed out areas of interest. “The man who alerted the cops didn’t find the body himself. He saw a severed hand, and what appeared to be a costume, then called the cops.”

Clay blinked. “But Dixon wasn’t missing any hands.”

Tate nodded. “I know. Turns out it was a prop, something used in a previous production of who knows what. The place was full of old stage stuff.” He ran his finger across another area of the report. “The cops checked it out, just in case, and they were the ones who discovered the real live body.” He sniggered. “Well, not live, but you know what I mean.”

Clay did. His partner’s dark and often twisted sense of humour was entertaining even if sometimes it bordered on being downright scary.

Tate frowned. “They found Dixon in the basement, still dressed in his fox costume. He must have had his suit on underneath, because, look here.” Tate pointed to what looked like an amateur mobile phone shot. “There’s a cufflink right there.”

Clay leaned in and sure enough, there was a gold cufflink in the shape of a fox in the right shirt cuff. “Hmm,” he mused. “The report says he’d collapsed there on the spot. Then the doctor on scene confirmed it looked like a heart attack and that was it. No bloody post-mortem or anything.” He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “He must have been boiling in his suit and the costume. I suppose it was a cold night, and it was raining, so that might explain it. I’d be interested as to why no one saw a man dressed as a fox walking down to the theatre. I mean it’s not that far from the club, but the area is populated.”

Tate nodded. “I wondered about the lack of witnesses too. Someone should have seen something. And how could the cops not find the death suspicious, even a little, when the man was wearing a fox costume over his suit?”

BUY LINKS:

Boroughs Publishing * Amazon * Smashwords * Barnes & Noble * Kobo  

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About Susan Mac Nicol

Susan writes steamy, sexy and fun contemporary romance, some suspenseful, some gritty and dark, almost all M/M, and some stories that she hopes makes you think. She’s also Editor in Chief at Divine Magazine, an online LGBTQ e-zine, and a Charity Board trustee at The Being Me Campaign in London.

Susan attained PAN status with the Romance Writers of America with her first M/M book, Stripped Bare. She’s currently a member of The Society of Authors in the UK, and the Authors Guild in the US. She enjoys being a member of Queer Romance Ink, All Author, Book + Main Bites and the Paranormal Romance Guild.

The ‘Unofficial’ stuff

She loves going to the theatre, live music concerts (especially if it’s her man crush Adam Lambert) walks in the countryside, a good G &T, lazing away afternoons reading a good book, and watching re-runs of Silent Witness.

Her chequered past includes being mistaken for a prostitute in the city of Johannesburg, being chased by a rhino on a dusty Kenyan road, getting kicked out of a youth club for being a ‘bad influence’ (she encourages free thinking), and having an aunt who was engaged to Cliff Richard.

Website: authorsusanmacnicol.com

Facebook: Author-Susan-Mac-Nicol

Twitter: SusanMacNicol7

Instagram: susiemax77

Linkedin: susanmacnicol

Susan Mac Nicol will be awarding a copy of Feat of Clay + Damaged Goods to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.

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