I'm happy to share the cover release of my friend and sister
Broad, Terri Bruce on my blog today!
Terri is an amazing woman and an amazing writer, so look
forward to when you can get your hands on this book! ... And if you haven't
read the first in this series,
Hereafter,
you need to do that. Like now!
Without further ado, here is the GORGEOUS cover for Thereafter.
Now that you've seen the contest and the pretty, here are
all the details to further make you want this book! Besides a medieval Spanish knight AND a cowboy!!!!
Genre: Contemporary
fantasy/paranormal
Publisher: Mictlan
Press
Date of Publication:
May 1, 2014
ISBN:
978-0-9913036-2-5 (print) /
ISBN: 978-0-9913036-3-2
(ebook)
Number of pages:
318
Word Count: 99,000
Cover Artist:
Artwork by Shelby Robinson;
cover layout by
Jennifer Stolzer
Book Description:
When
recently-deceased Irene Dunphy decided to “follow the light,” she thought she’d
end up in Heaven or Hell and her journey would be over.
Boy, was she wrong.
She soon finds that
“the other side” isn’t a final destination but a kind of purgatory where
billions of spirits are stuck, with no way to move forward or back. Even worse,
deranged phantoms known as “Hungry Ghosts” stalk the dead, intent on destroying
them. The only way out is for Irene to forget her life on earth—including the
boy who risked everything to help her cross over—which she’s not about to do.
As Irene
desperately searches for an alternative, help unexpectedly comes in the
unlikeliest of forms: a twelfth-century Spanish knight and a nineteenth-century
American cowboy. Even more surprising, one offers a chance for redemption; the
other, love. Unfortunately, she won’t be able to have either if she can’t find
a way to escape the hellish limbo where they’re all trapped.
Author’s Note:
I am THRILLED
beyond all measure to finally be able to bring you Thereafter, and I want to thank all the fans who have waited (more
or less patiently) an extra year for this book to finally come out. Thereafter
would not have been possible without your support—thank you all! I hope you
love this beautiful new cover as much as I do, and I hope you find Thereafter to be worth the wait.
Excerpt:
Her hand touched a rock,
one of the flat beach stones she’d seen on graves. She picked it up, laying it
flat in her palm. She didn’t remember picking this up. In fact, she had been
careful not to take any. It had seemed disrespectful and too much like stealing
to remove them, and while she’d seen a few here—both loose and piled in
cairns—she hadn’t picked any of them up. There had been no point. What would
she do with a rock?
No wonder her bag was so
heavy.
She tossed the rock over
her shoulder and heard it hit the ground with a satisfying thud some distance
away. It felt good to be rid of something, to make a decision and be sure it
was the right one.
She surveyed the pile
again and then grabbed a small handful of paper animals. She picked one up
between a finger and thumb. It was a horse. Irene had been in Chinatown during
Chinese Ghost Festival, a holiday in which the living left offerings for the
dead. These offerings included paper replicas of things people thought the dead
would need in the afterlife—money, clothes, television sets, and even animals.
Irene had admired the precise and delicate folds of the Origami figures and had
picked some up to admire them more closely. Without thinking, she had dropped
them into her bag and apparently been carrying them ever since.
Well, even Jonah couldn’t
argue with her on this—there was no way she was going to need a paper horse on
her journey through the afterlife. Plus, these didn’t hold any sentimental
value. She cast the horse onto a nearby fire and watched as the paper curled
and blackened in the low-burning flames.
The fire leapt and seemed
to glow blue for a moment. Irene tensed—what was happening?
Thick black smoke began
to rise slowly from the flames, spiraling upward in a thickening column. The
smoke grew denser and then elongated sideways. Irene leapt to her feet and
backed away, her heart pounding. Something was forming in the fire.
The smoke was taking
shape now; there was purpose and design in its movements. She could see a long,
horizontal back, four legs, a neck, and finally a head and a tail. The smoke
swirled with a final flourish and then shuddered into the solidity of a
smoke-colored horse. The animal blinked passively. Then it violently shook its
head, blew out a breath, and delicately picked its way forward out of the fire.
It immediately put its head down and began to lip the ground, looking for food.
Irene stared stupidly at
it. “Are you shitting me?”
About the Author:
Terri Bruce has
been making up adventure stories for as long as she can remember. Like Anne
Shirley, she prefers to make people cry rather than laugh, but is happy if she
can do either. She produces fantasy and adventure stories from a haunted house
in New England where she lives with her husband and three cats.
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