Monday, July 6, 2015

Violet Crow Book Blast! (+$10 Amazon GC Giveaway!)

Title: Violet Crow
Author: Michael Sheldon
Series: Bruno X #1
Pages: N/A
Date Published: 2015
Publisher: Liberty Island
Format: Kindle
Genre: Mystery 
Source: Goddess Fish Blog Tours
Buy Me!

Synopsis:
A brutal murder stuns the quiet South Jersey suburbs of Philadelphia. No grieving parents come forward to claim the unknown girl’s body, and there aren’t any clues. The police are inexperienced. The local media are casting blame and demanding answers. A mini-culture war is brewing . . .

So what do the civic leaders do? They hire Bruno X, Psychic Detective.

No joke, the guy’s got talent. And a track record. Sure, his psychic shtick is a bit unorthodox. Yet, somehow, he gets results — solving long-forgotten mysteries locked inside the old brick Quaker meeting house, and uncovering closely held secrets hidden within the biotech company whose symbol is the Violet Crow.

~Try an Excerpt!~
Introducing Bruno X

He was dressed in a black Vestimenta suit and white shirt with no tie. Classy Italian duds, but about 10 years old and showing obvious signs of wear. He was less than average height and slightly overweight—typical for a guy in his late 30s or early 40s who didn’t do much manual work. With thick dark hair, brown eyes and glasses with metal frames, he had the look of one of those orthodox Jews from Brooklyn, except he didn’t have a beard and he wasn’t wearing a hat.

Chief Black greeted him personally and began to show him to a room they’d prepared for him. He tried a mild pleasantry to break the ice. “We hope we got the feng shui right for your purposes…” The room was dark with a comfortable chair, incense holders, and other new-age paraphernalia.

“Feng shui, shmeng fui,” the psychic scoffed. “You should know, I can’t tolerate incense. And who wants to sit in the dark? Let’s go in your office. You can test me there.”

“Test you?”

“Sure. Don’t you want to find out if I really have psychic powers?”

The Chief said something lame about trusting the people who recommended him, then hated himself for saying it.

The psychic nodded and pointed toward the Chief’s office. “OK. I get the picture. Shut the door please. Thank you. So you don’t want to test my powers…? You say you believe me…? That’s baloney! You don’t care. You think I’m a shnorrer, a con man, a fake… But it was the newspaper lady’s idea—what’s her name, Cromwell, the one with the cute little tuchus?—to use a psychic, and you think I’m gonna do something that’ll make her look stupid. Am I right?”


He gazed with disconcerting directness; he was right in the Chief’s face. It was as if he had eavesdropped on the conversation with the Mayor.
~Meet Michael!~ 
Michael was born in Philadelphia and grew up in Haddonfield, New Jersey. His father was a dentist, which accounts for his sense of humor. His mother, a Jewish mother without peer, instilled in him the idea that the world doesn’t owe you a living—and a love of raw oysters and dry martinis. His training in the craft of storytelling came from reading the masters beginning with Chaucer and Rabelais, through Sterne, to MacDonald and Westlake.
Michael Sheldon will award a randomly drawn commenter via Rafflecopter a $10 Amazon/BN gift card.

4 comments:

  1. "His mother ... instilled in him the idea that the world doesn’t owe you a living." Loved reading that. My hat's off to his mother!

    ReplyDelete