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Showing posts with label JC Andrijeski. Show all posts
Showing posts with label JC Andrijeski. Show all posts

Monday, October 21, 2024

Haunted Halloween Spooktacular: Black In White (Quentin Black Mystery Book One) by JC Andrijeski + giveaway








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by JC Andrijeski
September 9, 2015
Genre: Urban Fantasy Mystery Romance
Publisher: White Sun Press
ISBN: ISBN-13: 978-1545436714
ISBN-10: 1545436711
ASIN: B01554ZHH6
Number of pages: 268
Word Count: 76,755
Cover Artist: Damonza
Meet Quentin Black: Private Investigator. Psychic. Possible murderer.

Gifted with an uncanny sense about people, psychologist Miri Fox works as a profiler for the San Francisco police. When her best friend, homicide detective Nick Tanaka, thinks he's finally nailed the serial murderer known as the "Wedding Killer," she agrees to check him out, using her gift to discover the truth.

But the suspect, Quentin Black, isn't anything like Miri expects.

He claims to be hunting the killer too, and the longer Miri talks to him, the more determined she becomes to uncover his secrets.

When he confronts her about the nature of her peculiar "insight," Miri gets pulled into Black's bizarre world, and embroiled in a game of cat and mouse with a deadly killer--who might just be Black himself.

Worse, she finds herself irresistibly drawn to Black, a complication she doesn't need with a best friend who's a homicide cop and a boyfriend in intelligence.

Can Miriam see a way out or is her future covered in Black?

THE QUENTIN BLACK MYSTERY SERIES encompasses a number of dark, gritty paranormal mystery arcs with science fiction elements, starring brilliant and mysterious Quentin Black and forensic psychologist Miriam Fox. For fans of realistic paranormal mysteries with romantic elements, the series spans continents and dimensions as Black solves crimes, takes on other races and tries to keep his and Miri's true identities secret to keep them both alive.

Excerpt:

I tilted my head, still smiling, but letting my puzzlement show.

“Why are you talking to me at all?” I asked finally.

“Why shouldn’t I talk to you?” he said. “I’ve already told you that you’re the first person to walk in here that I thought might be worth my attempting to communicate.”

“Because I’m female?” I said.

“Because you seem to be less of a fool than the rest of them,” he corrected me at once.

“But you said Nick had a mind?”

“I said he had a mind of sorts. Not the same thing at all. Although, given the nature of his intellect, he has undoubtedly chosen the right profession for himself.”

I smiled again. “I’m sure that will be quite a relief for him.”

I heard laughter in the earpiece that time, right before Nick spoke up.

“See if he’ll tell you his name,” he said to me.

“Certainly, if you really want to know,” the suspect said, before I could voice the question aloud.

“My name is Black. Quentin Black. Middle initial, R.”

I stared at him, still recovering from the fact that he’d seemingly heard Nick give me an instruction through the earpiece.

Clearly, he wanted me to know he’d heard it, too.

“You heard that?” I said to him.

“Good ear, yes?” he said. Smiling, he gave me a more cryptic, yet borderline predatory look.

“Less good with you, however. Significantly less good.”

He paused, studying my face with eyes full of meaning.

I almost got the sense he was waiting for me to reply—or maybe just to react.

When I didn’t, he leaned back in the chair, making another of those graceful, flowing gestures with his hand.

“I find that… fascinating, doc. Quite intriguing. Perhaps that is crossing a boundary with you again, however? To mention that?”

I paused on his words, then decided to dismiss them.

“Is that a real name?” I said. “Quentin Black. That doesn’t sound real. It sounds fake.”

“Real is all subjective, is it not?”

“So it’s not real, then?”

“Depends on what you mean.”

“Is it your legal name?”

“Again, depends on what you mean.”

“I mean, could you look it up in a database and actually get a hit somewhere?”

“How would I know that?” he said, making an innocent gesture with his hands, again within the limits of the metal cuffs.

Realizing I wasn’t going to get any more from him on that line of questioning, I changed direction. “What does the ‘R’ stand for?” I said.

“Rayne.”

“Quentin Rayne Black?” I repeated back to him, still not hiding my disbelief.

“Would you believe me if I said my parents had a sense of whimsy?” he asked me.

“No,” I said.

“Would you believe that I do, then?”

I snorted a laugh, in spite of myself. I heard it echoed through the earpiece, although I heard a few curses coming from that direction, too.

I shook my head at the suspect himself, but less in a “no” that time.

“Yes,” I conceded finally. “So it is a made-up name, then?”

The man calling himself Quentin Black only returned my smile. His eyes once again looked shrewd, less thoughtful and more openly calculating.

Even so, his weird comment about “listening” came back to me.

Truthfully, he was looking at me as if he were listening very hard.

The thought made me slightly nervous.

About the Author:
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JC Andrijeski is a USA Today and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of gritty, character-driven, “real”-feeling paranormal mysteries and apocalyptic fiction. Her books have strong romance subplots, found families, and often a metaphysical bent. JC has a background in journalism, history and politics, and loves hiking, people watching, yoga, meditation, weird tourist destinations, the beach, coffee, birds, snails, and tacos. She grew up in the Bay Area of California, but travels extensively and has lived abroad in Europe, Australia, and Asia, and from coast to coast in the continental United States. She’s now living and writing full-time in Hollister, California.



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Saturday, July 27, 2019

Book Review: Vampire Detective Midnight (Book 1) by JC Andrijeski + giveaway

Vampire Detective Midnight (Book 1) 
by JC Andrijeski
June 27, 2019
Genres: Adult, Urban Fantasy
Vampire with a past and homicide detective, Naoko “Nick” Tanaka just got transferred to the NYPD, where he works as a “Midnight,” or vampire in the employ of the human police. Like all state-registered vamps, he gets his food delivered to his door, lives in government housing, and basically can’t sneeze without the U.S. government knowing about it.

Still, he’s determined to play by the rules. More than anything, he just wants to be left alone, to finish out his immortality in peace… but he’s barely there two weeks when things already start to go sideways.

It starts with a weird case involving inexplicable paintings that predict murders before they happen.

Between his mystery painter, a bunch of dead hybrid-humans, a conspiracy involving the richest families in New York, and a school principal who has an unsettling effect on him, Nick finds he can’t get personally uninvolved with any of it.

Instead, he gets sucked in even deeper, until he’s pretty sure he’ll end up forcibly reprogrammed by his human masters — assuming they don’t just rip his heart out of his chest and be done with it.

VAMPIRE DETECTIVE MIDNIGHT is book #1 of a gritty, romantic new series set in a futuristic, dystopian New York, involving vampires, humans and psychics trying to rebuild their world after a devastating race war that nearly obliterated all of them.


In this science fiction paranormal novel set in an alternate New York City, Naoko “Nick” Tanaka has been a vampire for a few hundred years. After a war between humans, Seers, and vampires—the humans won—Nick chose to go back to doing what he did when he had been human, a police detective. 

Vampire employees of the police are call “Midnights” because they work the night-shift. Transferred from the L.A Police to NYPD, he is like all state-registered blood drinkers. He gets his food (living donors) delivered to his door, lives in government housing, and basically can’t sneeze without the U.S. government knowing about it. Nick and his partners are called to investigate a murder of four people who Nick soon realizes are human-seer hybrids. At the crime scene, there’s an ominous painting of the murder they are investigating. They discover the picture was painted days before the murder.

The world-building, characters and storyline are unforgettable. I can see this New York City, the Bladerunner Dystopian flavor where the rich live in the lovely area, but the homeless and degenerates are fenced off from the rest. 

No one is allowed outside of the bubble the city is under, due to a poisonous atmosphere, but Bick goes surfing in because it doesn't affect him. 

Because it’s a mix of the hardboiled detective, paranormal, and dystopian science fiction set in the future, I'm not sure hard science fiction readers will like this. But I suggest you give it a try.


I give Vampire Detective Midnight 4 sheep.





Pamela Kinney


EXCERPT:
He needed to feed.

It was putting him in a foul mood.

That, and all this fucking blood…

Nick frowned, staring around at the alley floor.

It hit him again.

There was something wrong with this blood.

It smelled too fucking good.

It smelled way too fucking good.

That couldn’t all be Nick’s hunger.

“Anyway, that’s what I can tell you so far,” he said, making his voice deliberately casual. “Without knowing who the victims are, or what brought them to this alley, it’s pretty hard to speculate on motive, but…”

Nick hesitated then, realizing something.

Frowning, he stepped closer to the pools of blood.

Nose wrinkling, he crouched down so he could smell it from closer, even though the scent was overpowering, even from a lot further away. Taking a few full whiffs, he felt his fangs begin to extend in earnest.

That time, he couldn’t pull it back.

A flush of heat hit his gut and chest, burning in his throat. It was intense enough, he almost got hard, but he’d gotten pretty good at squelching that reaction, too.

He stood up at once.

Really, he lurched back.

It happened so fast, that smell and his reaction to it, Nick forgot to modulate his body’s natural reflexes to accommodate the people around him. He was up and moving in a heartbeat, darting back in pure instinct, without slowing his movements at all.

He moved fast enough to make the humans around him freeze.

Instantly, they turned into prey.

Ignoring them, and ignoring their deer-in-headlights reactions to how he’d just moved, Nick backed away from the pool of blood with a scowl.

He backed away from the human detectives and tech team, too.

“They’re hybrids,” he said, emotion reaching his voice.

He turned around, staring at the humans sharing the alley with him.

The stared back at him, faces blank, eyes holding flickers of fear.

Frustrated, wanting to smash through that frozen prey look, Nick let his voice turn into a harder growl.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Nick said. “Did you hear me? They’re all fucking hybrids.”

When they still didn’t speak, he averted his gaze with a scowl. His eyes returned to the alley. Staring around at all of that blood, it sank in what it really represented.

Once it had, he couldn’t help but feel sick.



About the Author:
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JC Andrijeski is a USA TODAY and WALL STREET JOURNAL bestselling author who writes paranormal mysteries and apocalyptic fiction, often with a sexy, romantic and metaphysical bent. JC has a background in journalism, history and politics, and loves martial arts, yoga, meditation, hiking, swimming, horseback riding, painting… and of course reading and writing. She grew up in the Bay Area of California, but travels extensively and has lived abroad in Europe, Australia and Asia, and from coast to coast in the continental United States. She currently lives and writes full-time in Bangkok, Thailand.

Current series include: Vampire Detective Midnight, the Bridge & Sword series, the Quentin Black Mystery series, The Morph series, and the Alien Apocalypse series. She’s also written a number of standalone novels, novellas and short stories, as well as nonfiction articles and essays.


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