Book Review for STEALING FACES by Michael Prescott

Review by Aaron Paul Lazar

Title: Stealing Faces

Author: Michael Prescott

Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, Ulverscroft

Genre: Thriller

Formats: Hardcover, Paperback, and eBook

ISBN-10: 0708943500

ISBN-13: 978-0708943502

ASIN: B00547KH66

Price: Kindle, $ 0.99; Large Print, $29.91

Author’s website: http://www.michaelprescott.net/

I’ve been reading and reviewing a fair amount of books this year, all of them quite good, and most of them on Kindle. Of course, I vet them before I accept a review request by reading the first few pages and the synopsis. There’s nothing worse than reviewing a book that bores you to tears or that just isn’t your cup of tea. So I almost always love the titles I accept.

In the midst of all these excellent books, however, came STEALING FACES. This high suspense thriller literally knocked my socks off.

Mr. Prescott’s writing style is what hooked me from the beginning. Smooth, tight, and fast flowing, the prose held me as spellbound as the suspense. Frankly, STEALING FACES is one of the best-written novels I’ve come across in a very long time, and I can’t believe I haven’t discovered Mr. Prescott’s work to date.

Cray has been stalking and killing women for over a decade. Well-respected by day, savage hunter by night, the man’s character is impeccably drawn using inner thoughts and dialog. The contrast between his day job (revealed partway through the book) and his secret, sick obsession, accentuates his evil.

Now, meet protagonist Elizabeth Palmer. Desperate, broke, resourceful, and lovely, this woman has fixated on finding and bringing Cray to justice since she escaped his clutches twelve years earlier.

From the first primal scream of Cray’s victim to the kaleidoscope of terror-filled memories experienced by Elizabeth, Prescott doesn’t let his readers relax, or even take a breath. Both characters, juxtaposed brilliantly against each other, drive the story forward to its very satisfying conclusion.

The plot is well recounted in many of the 100 plus reviews on Amazon, so let it suffice for me to say that many plot threads and themes are tightly woven into this book, with shock after shock and absolutely no letting down of the tension. I would actually recommend STEALING FACES as a primer for those interested in pursuing a career in writing thrillers.

Thank you, Mr. Prescott, for showing us all how it should be done, and for several nights of delicious, exhilarating thrills.

Highly recommended by Aaron Paul Lazar.

Aaron Lazar

www.legardemysteries.com

What's a Good Title for a Book? Ask My Mother-in-Law

copyright 2011, Mike Wells

I’ll never forget the night I took my wife-to-be out to dinner and subtly asked about her parents.  When you get serious about someone, you naturally want to find out who your future in-laws are going to be.

“So what does your mom do?” I casually asked. 

“She writes a gossip column for a...well, some people might call it a 'yellow' newspaper.”

I searched the restaurant for the nearest exit—we hadn’t actually ordered any food yet.

“Come on, Mike.  She’s really sweet, I promise.”

Yeah.  So is a Bengal tiger, when its belly is packed full of fresh meat.

My fiancée dug around in her purse and pulled out a photograph.  "Just look at that face..."

The woman was grinning at me, a pencil behind her ear, one eyebrow raised.

This didn’t help.  Talk about “walking the line!”  One wrong move and she could destroy me with a single stroke of that pencil.

Well, love overcomes fear, and I got married anyway.

It turns out that, as a novelist, having a gossip columnist for a mother-in-law is one of the best things that ever happened to me.  And not for the reasons you may think—Luba has never written one word about any of my books (not that it would do any good—she lives and works in Latvia, which is not exact the center of my geographic market!)

What Luba is a genius at is titling books.  Having worked for so many years as a “yellow journalist”, she knows exactly what hits readers’ hot buttons.

When I finished my international thriller about currency counterfeiting, I titled it In God We Trust.

It hardly sold a single copy.  One day Luba overheard me complaining about it.

“Is it a religious book?” she asked.

“No, it’s an international thriller.”

“Sounds like a religious book.”

Exasperated, I said, “It’s not a religious book, Luba.”

“What kind of book is it, then?”

“Well...it’s about lust...it’s about money...it’s about murder—”

“There’s your title,” she said, pointing at me.

“Where’s my title?”

 “Lust, Money & Murder.”

I was skeptical, but I decided to try it.  As soon as I changed the name of the book, people started buying it.

Not long after that, I was finishing up another novel, a paranormal thriller.

“What’s it called?” Luba asked.

Hesitating, I said, “A Gift from the Stars.”

She lolled her head to one side, closed her eyes, and made a snoring sound.

“Luba!”

“Well, it sounds boring.  What’s it about?”

“It’s about this guy who mysteriously disappears when his family is on vacation in—”

“A mysterious disappearance, then.”

“Yes.”

“What’s the guy’s name?”

“Kurt Kramer.”

She pointed at me.  “The Mysterious Disappearance of Kurt Kramer.”

I changed the title. 

The book started selling. 

Now, I no longer resist Luba’s suggestions.  I recently published a novel that I was calling Cosmic Casanova, and it wasn’t selling at all.

“Sounds like science fiction,” she muttered.

Even though I don’t resist her suggestions, she still makes me mad.  “It’s not science fiction, Luba.  It’s a romance novel.”

She raised an eyebrow.  “Oh, really?”

“Yes, really.  It’s about this guy who’s dating several women at the same time, and he wants to keep them secret from each other—”

“So it’s about secrets.”

“Yes.”

“Lover’s secrets.”

“Yes.  The guy in the story is kind of dodgy, is hard-to-get.  You know, elusive—”

She pointed at me.  “Secrets of the Elusive Lover.”

I don’t have to tell you how that one ended.

***

Mike Wells is American bestselling author of 'unputdownable' thrillers and also teaches in the Creative Writing program at Oxford. See his blog at: www.thegreenwater.com.

Where Do Characters Come From?

© Paul Martin Midden 2011 all rights reserved

 Author of ONE VOICE TOO MANY

I was trying to explain to a friend the other day how I got my ideas for characters in my novels.

“Where do you get these people?” she asked.

It’s not an easy thing to explain. For one thing, I don’t know how other writers create, develop, or fill in their characters; all I know is how I do mine. And mostly it’s as much a mystery to me as it is to anybody else.

But as with most mysteries, there are some things I know about it. I know, for instance, that all my characters start with just a spark. A ‘divine spark’ might be a little pretentious, but it wouldn’t be entirely inaccurate. It begins with a name, a basic idea, and a step off a cliff.

In my novels, I start with a name. I don’t know where the names come from. In my first novel, the first name was ethnic, it was odd, and it was perfect. I didn’t want to write about John or Tom or Brad or Trevor. But I apparently did want to write about Radko. I don’t think I even knew it was a name until it showed upon my computer screen. The rest is mystical. Radko (and then Jake and then Jeremy, in subsequent books) emerged out of the narrative in a manner that remains inexplicable to me. I am as eager to find out how my characters think and what they do as any future reader might be. It is at times an engaging process, at other times an exhilarating one. It is never a tedious one.

The basic idea is the opening situation. I love openings. They are the seeds that contain and dictate what follows, what forms throughout the narrative. Those beginnings come to me all at once. I suppose that is called ‘inspiration’. It feels more like fun.

The cliff is a little more complicated. It has to do with how alien writing fiction is from what I do in my professional life and especially from the professional writing I’ve done. Mostly, I write psychological reports. Now you might think that is great preparation for writing fiction, but the truth is that most psychological report writing is as dry as the Sahara. And because I do a lot of them, they are often as equally tedious. An analytical, fact-gathering, limited-hypothesis kind of thing.

Writing fiction, on the other hand, has little to do with rationality. When I was kicking around ideas for my first novel, I tried to plan it out; organize it the way I would a report of some kind. Bad plan. The characters were thin, contrived, and for the most part reflective of various psychological issues of my own which I am too embarrassed to mention in a public space.

But then I ran across Ann Lemott’s lovely little book, BIRD BY BIRD. I am sure many if not most writers are familiar with it. In it, she describes her daily process of writing 500 ‘shitty words’. The next day, she goes back and revises those and adds another 500. This was a revelation for me. It freed me to do an end run around my overly intellectual, data-gathering, analytical habits that I have relied on for so long in my work. It allowed me to allow my characters to emerge, much as Michelangelo’s famous unfinished slaves seem to emerge from the blocks of marble from which they originated.

Because I cannot easily break years of habit—I am a psychologist, after all—I imagine sometimes that there are meaningful psychological connections between myself and my characters. In fact, I am sure of it. But I don’t care about that. What I care about is the process of creation, of being witness to those characters coming to life. What I care about are the characters themselves. I love them. As I said, it’s like falling off a cliff.

I am reminded of the time when I was just starting professional practice, and I asked an older colleague a question that is on the minds of most young professional psychologists.

“Phil, where do patients come from?”

Phil’s eyes twinkled in that distinctly Jewish way, and he smiled and said simply, “They come from God.”

About the author:

Paul Martin Midden is a practicing psychologist and the author of two previous novels, ABSOLUTION and TOXIN.  He lives in Saint Louis, Missouri. ONE VOICE TOO MANY is Midden’s latest novel. Visit Paul Midden online at:  www.paulmidden.com

Interview with Author Sheila Deeth

APL: Sheila, how many books have you written? I think I counted 20 book covers on your website, which is amazing. What genres do your books span?

SD: My ebooks with Gypsy Shadow are all spiritual speculative fiction. I write Bible fiction too, which I self-publish and sell on my Lulu storefront. And I write novels—my first one’s coming out next summer with Stonegarden. Plus short stories… plus poems… plus whatever… If you count all my children’s Bible books, and a couple of anthologies that included my short stories, that really does make 20—but some of them are picture books so they’re really very short. (I draw my own pictures too.)

APL: Do you have a favorite genre to read or write?

SD: My kids say I have no taste because I’ll read almost any genre and listen to almost any type of music. I seem to be writing a lot of spiritual speculative fiction at the moment, but it’s probably just a phase. I love writing the children’s Bible stories too. I just like to read and write.

APL: I loved your explanation of why you hold a passion for rainbows on your website. You said you are “an English American, a Catholic Protestant, a mathematician that can't add up and a writer that can't spell, a contradiction in search of a direction...” Can you elaborate on that mysterious quote?

SD: Well, it’s all true. I grew up, married and had kids in England, then we moved to the States while the kids were still in school; we had green cards back then, and ten years later we finally became US citizens. I’m a Catholic Protestant because my Dad was Catholic and my Mum’s Methodist; I grew up Catholic but ended up being a Church of England lay reader, free evangelical worship leader, Presbyterian elder, and now a Christian Reformed Sunday school teacher. My brother’s a Catholic priest though and my uncle served a term as President of Gideons in England. As to the math, I’ve got a bachelors and masters degrees in mathematics from Cambridge University England, so I must be a mathematician, but it was always the abstract math that appealed to me, patterns, manipulation of ideas, logic and all that. And, of course, I love to write. I was finally beginning to understand the rules of spelling when my kids were in elementary school, but then we moved to the States…

APL: You are originally from the UK, and have over time migrated to Oregon. How did this happen, and did any part of this journey inspire your stories or characters?

SD: We moved to Utah first with my husband’s job, then to Oregon when outsourcing caught up with us. I’m not sure moving’s ever directly inspired my stories, but it probably helped me recognize how culture influences thought. Things we imagine are blatantly obvious can look very different from a different point of view, and I make a deliberate habit of seeking out unexpected viewpoints when I write fiction. My Bible stories usually center on children that might have lived in the real historical, scientific world, so again, the point of view might be a little different.

APL: Were you a reader when you were a child? Who were your favorite authors?

SD: I’ve always read voraciously but I remember I wasn’t keen on fairy tales, didn’t like the Hobbit, couldn’t get into Narnia, loathed Alice in Wonderland, and really, really, really hated the Snow Queen. (I like them all now!) I can’t remember what my favorite childhood books were—Westerns, Gollantz Science fiction with those bright yellow covers, James Bond, anything on my big brother’s or my Granddad’s bookshelf…

APL: I checked out your Linked In profile, and discovered you used to write software test plans. It’s neat, because in my old day job, I used to write test plans for large electromechanical devices (high speed printers). At any time, did your day job influence your writing?

SD: Only to the extent that I kept the stories in my head and didn’t write them down. I was doing a lot of children’s sermons at church back then, and when I lost my job I turned them into a book. But working and looking after kids and home didn’t leave much time or energy—besides which, the kids monopolized the computer and my ancient typewriter was so slow the keys kept getting tangled.

APL: Have certain people in your life influenced your characters more than others?

SD: Not really. My kids used to believe I used them in all my stories but it wasn’t true. I used bits of them, and bits of everyone else, and lots of random memories.

APL: Have you ever worked with or been a writing mentor? A critique partner? If so, tell us about these experiences and how they influenced your books or writing.

SD: I’ve never really worked one-on-one with anyone, though I do meet one of my friends from our local writing group on a regular basis. We drink coffee, encourage each other, and borrow and critique each other’s work; it certainly helps to see what we’ve written through different eyes. The local writing group’s been really good for me too—some of their writing prompts grew into my published stories, and taking part in group critiques has made me a much better editor of my own work.

APL: I see that God has found his way into many of your books. How has He influenced your writing or story content? What do you hope to teach your readers about God?

SD: I guess I’d like my stories to entertain and intrigue first of all. But I hope they might encourage readers to think critically too—believers to realize they maybe don’t have all the answers; Christian believers to read the Bible instead of relying on other people’s interpretations; and non-believers to recognize there might be more to life (and maybe the Bible) than meets the eye.

APL: Please tell us what the best website is for us to learn more about your books and how to purchase them.

SD: You can find all my books at http://sheiladeeth.weebly.com.

My ebooks are available on Gypsy Shadow’s website at http://gypsyshadow.com/SheilaDeeth.html

or on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Smashwords, etc.

My Inspired by Faith and Science storefront is at http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/sdeeth.

APL: Tell us about your newest book and when we will be able to buy it!

My latest book has just been released. It’s an ebook called FLOWER CHILD. It tells the story of a grieving mother and her unborn child and draws, in part, from my own experience of miscarriage:

When Megan miscarries her first pregnancy it feels like the end of everything; instead it’s the start of a curious relationship between the grieving mother and an unborn child who hovers somewhere between ghost and angel. Angela, Megan’s “little angel,” has character and dreams all her own, friends who may or may not be real angels, and a little brother who brings hope to her mother’s world. But Angela’s dream-world has a secret and one day Angela might learn how to be real.

You can buy FLOWER CHILD direct from the publisher at http://gypsyshadow.com/SheilaDeeth.html#Flower

or from Smashwords at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/91467.

or Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/Flower-Child-ebook/dp/B005PGMT4O/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1317398482&sr=8-1

APL:  Thank you for joining us here today, Sheila!

SD: My pleasure, Aaron.

Author Bio: Sheila Deeth grew up in the UK and has a Bachelors and Masters in mathematics from Cambridge University, England. Now living in the States with her husband and sons, she enjoys reading, writing, drawing, telling stories, running a local writers' group, and meeting her neighbors’ dogs on the green.

Sheila describes herself as a Mongrel Christian Mathematician. Her short stories, book reviews and articles can be found in VoiceCatcher 4, Murder on the Wind, Poetic Monthly, Nights and Weekends, the Shine Journal and Joyful Online. Besides her Gypsy Shadow ebooks, Sheila has several self-published works available from Amazon and Lulu, and a full-length novel under contract to come out next year.

Why I’m Happy with My Small Press Publishers

© Marilyn Meredith a.k.a. F. M. Meredith 2011 all rights reserved

Recently, I attended a writers’ conference that gave a lot of information about epublishing. One of the main speakers was Mark Coker who owns and runs Smashwords. He had a lot of interesting information to impart, the majority about Smashwords and how you can publish an e-book through them. One of his comments, though, was that Smashwords publishes anything—the good, bad and ugly.

He cautioned anyone using Smashwords to make sure the writing was as good as possible, the manuscript properly edited and that the cover professional looking with all the correct information. He shared some examples of covers that were awful.

I’m sure everyone knows about publishing on Kindle too, but the same cautions apply: a good book first, properly edited and a professional looking cover.

With both entities, you must follow their guidelines to put it in the proper format so it flows and looks as a book should.

I write two series, producing two books a year. My goal, of course is to produce a good book. Every chapter I write is heard and critiqued by my writing group. Of course, I do multiple rewrites, and I have a couple of beta readers.

When I send off my book to either one of my publishers I know that the book will be edited once again. I’ll get to go over the galley proof. The formatting of the book will be done by the publishers. For one publisher, I have a questionnaire to fill out about what I’d like or not like for the cover of the book, the other publisher asks me informally. I don’t have to design the front, back and spine of the cover. If I don’t like what the cover artist has come up with, I can ask for changes.

Both my publishers do trade paperbacks using the POD printing process and see that the books get onto the proper book sites. They both also make sure that the book is set up for all the e-book readers.

Some promotion is done by both publishers, books are sent out for review—though I still have to do a lot of the promoting. No matter who I was published by, I’d have to do the major share of the promotion.

Frankly, I barely have enough time to do what I’m doing now, writing and promoting my books, I don’t want to take the time to first learn how to produce an e-book and then do it. I have a life to live too.

I’m quite happy to let both my publishers, Mundania Press (publishes my Deputy Tempe Crabtree mystery series) and Oak Tree Press (Rocky Bluff P.D. crime series), do what they do far better than I would do—or even want to do.

Marilyn Meredith a.k.a. F. M. Meredith

http://fictionforyou.com

http://marilynmeredith.blogspot.com/

Latest book in the Deputy Tempe Crabtree series: BEARS WITH US

CONTEST DETAILS: Would you like to be immortalized in print? Marilyn Meredith is running a contest during her BEARS WITH US virtual book tour. Whoever leaves a comment on the most blog sites during the tour, will have his or her name used for a character in Marilyn’s next book. Please visit http://www.pumpupyourbook.com/2011/08/11/bears-with-us-virtual-book-tour-october-2011/ for her entire schedule. Good luck!