Tag Archives: Shallow Reader

Right Before Your Eyes Only

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Know how it was just Easter and you just ate all those chocolate Easter eggs?

Perhaps you may still be hunting for chocolate Easter eggs, or maybe now you’re after calorie-free Easter eggs to make up for  all the chocolate you ate, and if you are, let me tell you the In Service series is chock-full of calorie-free Easter eggs. CHOCK FULL.

And by “Easter eggs,” I mean Easter eggs of the meta kind, and by meta I mean the inside jokes, little nods to spy fiction and film, to well-known characters, to familiar tropes and cliches that run across the spy and romance genre. If you look, you can find them. Some are obvious. Some aren’t. Some are buried. Some are very, very subtle. Some are a running wink to a good-natured battle I have with a shallow-reading librarian friend named Vassiliki. Some show a connection between characters in Forever in Your Service and one of my earlier books, another seasoned romance, one not many have read.

Yeah, I mean the one I wrote for part of my doctoral work, the one that has a 50-ish peanut-butter-loving nuclear physicist heroine who’s solving a mystery with a local hot detective, while carrying out work as an FBI mole, the one with the cover that makes me shudder, the one that, at my publisher’s request, I had to change the title of to something that’s, well,  um… well… kind of a joke in itself that, like eating too much chocolate, which proves not all Easter eggs are a smart choice.

But they sure are fun.

At Your Service is available as a paperback and ebook

Forever in Your Service is available as an ebook

The origin short story, Your Sterling Service, is available as an ebook

For Your Eyes Only (yes, I KNOW) is available in paperback and and as an ebook

 

 

ShallowreaderBINGO–It’s Better Than Winning a Meat Tray!

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Oh YEAH MAMA! I won a game that wasn’t a trivia contest!

I just took the February round of ShallowreaderBINBINGOWINGO (was his name OH!), which I have to say is way more exciting than winning a trivia contest or winning the meat tray at the Italian Club because:

  1. I’m vegetarian
  2. BOOKS!

I’ve been playing the Shallowreader’s reading Bingo all year. I got close to winning last month, but I wasn’t quite able to do it because I only read four books. This month, I had six going. I thought I’d get shot down by Lust and/or Netflix and Chill since most of my reading selection wasn’t what you’d consider romance fiction.

The squares I took were:

A Flower Amongst Flowers—that one was easy. I re-read S. Morgenstern’s (William Goldman) The Princess Bride and HAWOAH Pwincess Buttercup! Get it? Buttercup—a flower—the most beautiful woman in the land marries that son of a bitch Prince Humperdinck and is saved by Farm Boy/The Dread Pirate Roberts Westley in The Kissing BOOK!

Reading Flagellation: I took this to mean a book that was painful to read. And I am sorry to say it was Susan Donovan’s Sea of Love. It was my second attempt to read this book. I failed the first time after three chapters. Or maybe it was two. Anyhow, I started again and finished it, but only because I kept the book in Dr Shrinkee’s car, and read it whenever Dr Shrinkee said he’d only be 5 minutes, and was more like 20.

Wildcard: This free space was a FREE SPACE and FREE IS GOOOOOD!

Ethically Iffy: Mary Roach’s sublime nonfiction book Stiff The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. The book discusses the “good deeds of cadavers,” advances in medicine and science, and how modern day cadavers are treated with respect. It’s really quite amusing and eye-opening about what happens to people who donate their body to science. However, one chapter is all about “Crimes of Anatomy” where doctors resorted to, well, ethically iffy means to procure cadavers.

Green: Never saw this one coming. I started reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s annotated autobiography Pioneer Girl. The third or fourth chapter in, Ma got a library book from Sunday school and read a little poem to Half-pint and Mary. Hey, look Sandra, it’s VERSE, only I knew there was no way I was going to get that line with Verse, seeing as it was in the same row above Lust and Book Boyfriend, but holy crap, Ma read the word GREEN in that poem and….BINGO!

Come on and play along, read along with the Shallowreader’s Book Bingo because reading and shouting BINGO is so much more fun than a Meat Tray!

shallreadbing

 

 

A Little Squee From Me!

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0913 Eyes Only_Final[1]That squeal you heard up in the Northern Hemisphere, yeah, that was me.

My September release, For Your Eyes Only got a double whammy recommendation this morning!

First, I was Loved by the Librarian aka, The Shallow Reader. Then that same librarian loved me more and gave me a shout out on a list of Best Books of 2013 for 702 ABC Sydney radio!

Pardon me whilst I jump up and down and make high pitched noises o’ glee. I am honoured to have been included and so pleased that The Shallow Reader Librarian Vassiliki liked For Your Eyes Only, the novel I wrote as part of the PhD I submitted for examination yesterday.