I would like to introduce you to a new blog segment called Author Spotlight. Here I will highlight and discuss some fantastic authors. My hope is that you will discover some new writers and stories that you may not have thought to check out.

Without further ado, the first Author is…

Blake Crouch

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One of my favorite authors is Blake Crouch. You may not have heard of him, but he is sure to be remembered long from now when he is old and gray. In my opinion, he has a brilliant and creative mind that will create many many stories in his career that I will indeed read and enjoy. I was introduced to Blake when I was shopping for a free book to read on my Kindle. Most of the time I look down my nose at the free Kindle lending library and write those books off as books I wouldn’t read. However, when I read the premise for the book “Pines” by a guy named Blake Crouch, I was immediately drawn to the book. I was even more excited when I the series was picked up as a TV show on Fox and was being produced by M. Night Shayamalan! So I dove right into the first book and finished it super fast! I read the next two books in the series and then was devastated when it was over. I have posted a summary of this series before so I won’t do it again here, I will just say that if The Twilight Zone and Twin Peaks had a baby, The Wayward Pines Trilogy would be their kid. I loved this series in part because it surprised me, but also because it felt so unique. I think any author who can think outside of the box in order to produce stories that others haven’t written has a one way ticket to my must read authors list. Since that series, I have read many of Blake’s other books. There are all different and equally great. I like some more than others of course, but they all kept me on the edge of my seat. I am currently reading his short story collection “Good Behavior: Letty Dobesh Chronicles” which will be coming out as a TV show on TNT November 15th. Again, he has written stories that surprise me! I was given this book as an advanced reader and it is one of those books that I cannot wait to read at the end of each night. All of the stories chronicle a women named Letty Dobesh who is smart, sexy and strong. I posted a blog post last Friday (10/21/16) with a YouTube trailer for this new show. Bottom line is that this is an author who writes in the Mystery, Thriller, Sci-Fi and Horror genres in new ways that I have never seen before. I love Stephen King for this same reason. They are both constantly reinventing themselves and creating stories that are out of this world.

Novels & Short Stories Written by Blake with purchase links:

The Wayward Pines Trilogy

This may be one of my favorite series of all times. Start with Pines, then move onto the next two. My suggestion is to purchase all three at once because you will be dying to read the next one.

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Secret service agent Ethan Burke arrives in Wayward Pines, Idaho, with a clear mission: locate and recover two federal agents who went missing in the bucolic town one month earlier. But within minutes of his arrival, Ethan is involved in a violent accident. He comes to in a hospital, with no ID, no cell phone, and no briefcase. The medical staff seems friendly enough, but something feels…off. As the days pass, Ethan’s investigation into the disappearance of his colleagues turns up more questions than answers. Why can’t he get any phone calls through to his wife and son in the outside world? Why doesn’t anyone believe he is who he says he is? And what is the purpose of the electrified fences surrounding the town? Are they meant to keep the residents in? Or something else out? Each step closer to the truth takes Ethan further from the world he thought he knew, from the man he thought he was, until he must face a horrifying fact—he may never get out of Wayward Pines alive.

 

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Dark Matter   – http://amzn.to/2eDvQSK

“Are you happy with your life?”

Those are the last words Jason Dessen hears before the masked abductor knocks him unconscious.

Before he awakens to find himself strapped to a gurney, surrounded by strangers in hazmat suits.

Before a man Jason’s never met smiles down at him and says, “Welcome back, my friend.”

In this world he’s woken up to, Jason’s life is not the one he knows. His wife is not his wife. His son was never born. And Jason is not an ordinary college physics professor, but a celebrated genius who has achieved something remarkable. Something impossible.

Is it this world or the other that’s the dream? And even if the home he remembers is real, how can Jason possibly make it back to the family he loves? The answers lie in a journey more wondrous and horrifying than anything he could’ve imagined—one that will force him to confront the darkest parts of himself even as he battles a terrifying, seemingly unbeatable foe.

Dark Matter is a brilliantly plotted tale that is at once sweeping and intimate, mind-bendingly strange and profoundly human—a relentlessly surprising science-fiction thriller about choices, paths not taken, and how far we’ll go to claim the lives we dream of.

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Good Behavior – http://amzn.to/2dH2enS

*TV Show beginning November 15 on TNT starring Michelle Dockery*

Now a television series starring Michelle Dockery, coming to TNT this fall.

Fresh out of prison and fighting to keep afloat, Letty Dobesh returns to her old tricks burglarizing suites at a luxury hotel. While on the job, she overhears a man hiring a hit man to kill his wife. Letty may not be winning any morality awards, but even she has limits. Unable to go to the police, Letty sets out to derail the job, putting herself on a collision course with the killer that entangles the two of them in a dangerous, seductive relationship.

Good Behavior comprises three interlinked novellas (The Pain of Others, Sunset Key, and Grab), which together form a novel-length portrait of Blake Crouch’s all-time favorite character creation, Letty Dobesh. This edition is the complete Letty Dobesh collection.

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Abandon – http://amzn.to/2dH6Mur

 I loved this book. It was definitely scarier than some of his other books, but really good!

On Christmas Day in 1893, every man, woman, and child in a remote gold-mining town disappeared, belongings forsaken, meals left to freeze in vacant cabins—and not a single bone was ever found.

One hundred sixteen years later, two backcountry guides are hired by a history professor and his journalist daughter to lead them to the abandoned mining town so they can learn what happened. Recently, a similar party had also attempted to explore the town and was never heard from again. Now the area is believed to be haunted. This crew is about to discover, twenty miles from civilization with a blizzard bearing down, that they are not alone, and the past is very much alive.

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Snowbound – http://amzn.to/2dUUXPL

This book was crazy!

For Will Innis and his daughter, Devlin, the loss was catastrophic. Every day for the past five years, they wonder where she is, if she is—Will’s wife, Devlin’s mother—because Rachael Innis vanished one night during an electrical storm on a lonely desert highway, and suspected of her death, Will took his daughter and fled.

Now, Will and Devlin live under different names in another town, having carved out a new life for themselves as they struggle to maintain some semblance of a family.

When one night, a beautiful, hard-edged FBI agent appears on their doorstep, they fear the worst, but she hasn’t come to arrest Will. “I know you’re innocent,” she tells him, “because Rachael wasn’t the first…or the last.”
Desperate for answers, Will and Devlin embark on a terrifying journey that spans four thousand miles from the desert southwest to the wilds of Alaska, heading unaware into the heart of a nightmare, because the truth is infinitely worse than they ever imagined.

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Run – http://amzn.to/2ePaheg

This book has the craziest concept and was so good! ( I know I sound like a broken record…I love this author though)

For fans of Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and Thomas Harris…picture this: a landscape of American genocide…5 D A Y S A G O…A rash of bizarre murders swept the country…Senseless. Brutal. Seemingly unconnected. A cop walked into a nursing home and unloaded his weapons on elderly and staff alike. A mass of school shootings. Prison riots of unprecedented brutality. Mind-boggling acts of violence in every state. 4 D A Y S A G O…The murders increased ten-fold…3 D A Y S A G O…The President addressed the nation and begged for calm and peace…2 D A Y S A G O…The killers began to mobilize…Y E S T E R D A Y…All the power went out…T O N I G H T…They’re reading the names of those to be killed on the Emergency Broadcast System. You are listening over the battery-powered radio on your kitchen table, and they’ve just read yours. Your name is Jack Colclough. You have a wife, a daughter, and a young son. You live in Albuquerque, New Mexico. People are coming to your house to kill you and your family. You don’t know why, but you don’t have time to think about that any more. You only have time to….R U N.

I will leave you with this list of Blake’s work for now. Please check him out!

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