Tag Archives: #writerslife

Maaja Wentz — Feeding Frenzy

About Feeding Frenzy:

The three-hundred-year-old town of Loon Lake looks as calm as a pond, but below the surface, clans of magic users clash like hungry sharks.

Shy first-year student Tonya isn’t privy to her family’s darkest secrets, but when her college campus is overrun by a deadly eating epidemic, only she can resist the hidden, mind-controlling entity behind it.

Meanwhile, Tonya’s new friends, Priya, an installation artist, and Digital Ninjas Drake and Zain, want to create the creepiest art installation Loon Lake Cemetery will ever know. Too bad what’s lurking in the graveyard is a lot scarier than Priya’s giant spiders.

Untrained and overmatched by powerful conspirators, Tonya will need to develop magical abilities she never knew she had. Can she uncover the mystery behind the epidemic and save her town?

Winner of the coveted Watty Award, supernatural thriller Feeding Frenzy is a witch’s brew of intrigue with a dollop of comedy, a teaspoon of romance, and a pinch of horror.

About Maaja Wentz:

Maaja Wentz is an award-winning writer of chilling thrillers about dark family secrets, and quirky speculative fiction.

Maaja’s short mystery, “Inside of a Dog,” is upcoming in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.

“You,” won a short story prize in the national Norma Epstein Foundation competition for Creative Writing, University of Toronto

Maaja’s first novel, Feeding Frenzy, received over 141 000 reads on Wattpad. It was chosen as a “Featured Story,” and went on to win the coveted HQ Love Watty award.

Rebecca Kightlinger – Megge of Bury Down

About the Book:

Set in thirteenth-century Cornwall, on a sheep farm in the shadow of Bury Down – known for a thousand years as the land of the second sight – a healer has vowed to face flames rather than fail in her one task in this life: to bring her young daughter to vow to protect The Book of Seasons, an ancient grimoire whose power sustains the spirits of all their ancestors.

On the night of her vow-taking, wanting only to become a woman of Bury Down like her mother and aunts, and drawn by an inexplicable yearning to possess her mother’s book, Megge reaches for it. But when she touches its cover, it burns her fingers and she hears it whisper, “Murderer.”

Fearing that the book will make her harm those she loves, she rejects it and renounces her birthright. To what lengths will Megge’s mother go to help the child find the courage to take that vow? And how far will Megge go to elude a terrifying destiny?

This newly released title, Megge of Bury Down, addresses family issues prevalent in today’s world in a tender yet cryptic setting, creating a storyworld readers of all ages will want to visit again and again.

Author Bio:

Rebecca Kightlinger is a novelist, a book critic for Historical Novels Review, a fiction- submissions reader for New England Review and Stonecoast Review, and a copy editor for Stonecoast Review. Born in Erie, PA, Kightlinger practiced medicine for nineteen years. For six of those years, she served on a Remote Area Medical volunteer team diagnosing and treating cervical cancer in Amerindian women living in the rainforests and savannas of rural Guyana.

In 2010, Kightlinger suffered an injury that permanently damaged her wrist, forcing her to leave medical practice and pursue a new direction in life. Earning an MFA from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA program and a copyediting certificate from UCSD, she turned her Masters thesis into her debut novel. Kightlinger and her husband reside in northwestern Pennsylvania.

Megge of Bury Down: Book One of the Bury Down Chronicles is available for purchase in paperback and e-book via Amazon and all major booksellers.

Connect with Rebecca Kightlinger

JM West — Dying for Vengeance

DYING FOR VENGEANCE by J M West (Sunbury Press)

In the first Carlisle Crimes Case, Carlisle Detective Erin McCoy battles the jitters as the first woman in Homicide partnered with Senior Detective Christopher Snow. They’re tracking a serial killer who’s stalking family members embroiled in an inheritance dispute. The elusive perp dispatches his victims with toxic chemicals. As the detectives chase clues and connect the victims, their mutual attraction blooms while she nurses him after a shooting incident. But sparks fly when FBI Special Agent Howard offers McCoy a job if she’ll train at Quantico. McCoy resurfaces in Carlisle when a co-worker tells her that she has a rival for Snow’s affections. (Available at Sunbury Press, the Bookery in Bosler Library, History on High and Amazon)

Dying for Vengeance is the first in the Carlisle Crime Cases series of murder/mysteries featuring Homicide Detectives Christopher Snow and Erin McCoy by J M West, Professor Emerita of English Studies at Harrisburg Area Community College, The Gettysburg Campus. She also taught at Messiah College and Shippensburg University as an adjunct and served as Assistant Director of the Leaning Center (SU). She has previously published poetry and Glory in the Flower, her debut novel, which plunges four coeds into the turbulent sixties.
A member of Sisters in Crime, she and her husband live near Carlisle, Pennsylvania. They have two sons and two grandsons. In her spare time, West volunteers at The Bookery, Bosler Memorial Library’s used bookstore, participates in a book discussion group, and reads voraciously. West’s fourth Snow/McCoy adventure, Had A Dying Fall, is due out soon.

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