What's Up With the MB4 Team?

Kim Smith’s BURIED ANGEL: Shannon Wallace Mysteries was released on January 14. Kim is conducting a virtual book tour through the end of this month! To keep up with Kim’s tour, visit her blog at http://www.writingspace.blogspot.com/

Book blurb:

When Shannon and Dwayne are hired to videotape mysterious goings-on in the local cemetery in South Lake, Mississippi, they find more than just old tombstones, including a "plot" that has nothing to do with the dead!

Read the excerpt here: http://murderby4.blogspot.com/2010/01/release-day.html

Buy it here: http://redrosepublishing.com/bookstore/product_info.php?products_id=640

Kim would welcome a review! Please contact Kim if you’re interested!

Aaron Lazar’s MAZURKA, the fourth book in the LeGarde Mystery series, released Sept. 09, was submitted by Twilight Times Books for the coveted Edgar Awards for best original paperback. In addition, it is being used for a creative writing class at Pfeiffer University this spring.

MAZURKA has been touted as a "honeymoon from hell." Set in Europe, it's a roller coaster ride through Paris, Germany, Vienna, and the Austrian woods. Gus, Camille, and Siegfried battle neo-Nazis and become embroiled in a cat and mouse game where the stakes are lethal and the future of Europe hangs in the balance.

If you missed Aaron's recent blog post about his next book, Healey's Cave, you'll find it here complete with an excerpt of this next wonderful book!

S. W. Vaughn, author of Hunted (urban fantasy), Skin Deep (erotic urban fantasy), and the House Phoenix series: She claims she doesn’t know how it happened. In 2009, when it seemed everyone she knew was having the worst year they could remember, S. W. Vaughn hit the figurative jackpot. Everything she'd been working toward for the last decade of her life came together. She sold an urban fantasy novel she loved to a wonderful publishing house after everyone in "big publishing" deemed it not genre enough to publish, and also sold her "baby" series to the same house. S. W. wrote and sold her first erotica novel to another awesome house, and received her first taste of fan mail just days after its release. And her agent sold yet another urban fantasy series to a major NYC publisher.

So, 2010 will see our pal S. W. writing and/or releasing at least three novels (more if she can swing it!) We have no doubt she will! You can check out her latest release, Broken Angel, on her website or at the publisher's website.

What's new with Marta Stephens? Right before Christmas, my publisher, BeWrite Books announced they had converted over 50 of its authors' published books (including my Sam Harper novels) into the appropriate e-books format (to be viewed on hand-held readers) and are now available on Smashwords. Write Books Technical Director, Tony Szmuk in Canada, said: “We always considered ourselves ahead of the game, having made those PDF files available for computer screen reading since our launch ten years ago – but the sudden explosion in the popularity of ebook reading on the new portable reading devices, mobile phones, iPods and what have you over the past few weeks woke us up to the fact that we were in danger of becoming dinosaurs in the new age."

Both THE DEVIL CAN WAIT and SILENCED CRY are now available. Another bit of good news is that BeWrite is in negotiations to sell language rights to several of their books to China. It'll be a while before all of that is finalized, but it's a very exciting development for this small independent British press.


After publishing these two books in the Sam Harper series, I switch gears (sometimes change it’s the best thing for the soul) and have been working on a new novel since June featuring a woman PI named Rhonie Lude in SHROUD OF LIES.

This book has literally poured out of me, but just when I thought I was through with this latest round of edits, I decided to change the method and motivation for the crime. As a result, several chapters were affected, but heck, what’s a few thousand words (more or less) here and there? At any rate, the changes are just what the story needed. On January 1, I began to dedicate my Prose and Musing blog to a daily log of my writing experience as I work on this book. Soon I’ll be sharing the ups and downs of my attempts at finding an agent. Wish me luck. If you’re interested, read about the thoughts behind my process and the madness behind this writer here: http://mstephens-musings.blogspot.com/