Blog tour - Dark Secrets - Jack Steele

 

Hippo publication day Jack Steele!!

I'm super excited to be kicking off the blog tour for Dark Secrets by Jack Steele today on publication day.🍾 This is the third and final book in the Detective Joe Stone series and what a final book it is!

When several prisoner's escape from Broadmoor following a ransomware attack on the hospitals system, Detective Joe Stone and his team at the Special Investigations Unit are called in. When the name Geb Blood comes up as being one of the criminals suspected to have escaped, a shiver of fear runs down the backs of Stone's team as this is a name that's all too familiar to them.

Stone's team played a large part in Blood's conviction of life imprisonment at Broadmoor and if he has escaped they all know that there's a strong chance that he will be looking for retribution. Known as The Chameleon, due to his ability to successfully disguise himself, the team know that they need to be vigilant and work fast to find and apprehend him, along with the other fugitives, as quickly as possible. Then they find out that their colleague Miranda has been kidnapped which means that their level of urgency has just been significantly upgraded, while at the same time protecting the rest of the team.

I loved reading Dark Secrets - the only problem was - I read it too fast! With it's short, punchy, action packed chapters, most of which ending with a sentence that just compelled me to quickly flick to the next one - it's easy to see why. As an author, Jack Steele has a very clever knack of drawing you in and captivating you right from the first chapter and Dark Secrets is no exception. I knew as soon as I started reading it that the rest of my day would have to be written off as I'd be unable to tear myself away from my kindle.

I know that this is the last in the Detective Joe Stone series but I'm secretly hoping that this isn't the last we see of Joe and his team. I'm not great with saying goodbye to characters I've come to know and love over the years but this was the perfect end to an exceptional series of breathtaking books. I'm sure that whatever comes next from this talented author it will be another triumph.

If you haven't read Loose Cannon or Long Shot, the first two books in the series, I'd highly recommend them and they are available to download for 99p each for the duration of the blog tour so that could possibly be your holiday reading sorted! 😉

Loose Cannon UK
Loose Cannon US
Long Shot UK
Long Shot US
Dark Secrets UK
Dark Secrets US


                                            Author bio

I live in Nottinghamshire but was born in Hackney, London and grew up on the Bannister House Housing Estate in Hommerton. I work full-time in the printing industry but with the help of a very understanding wife I manage to find time to indulge in my favourite passions of reading and writing. It can be a balancing act trying to fit it all in but as I enjoy writing so much it doesn’t seem like too much of a trial.

I spent five years researching books, magazines, documentaries, movies and internet articles on various subjects as well as completing a creative writing course and attending workshops run by the Nottingham Writers Studio.

It was a great achievement in 2016 when I published my first Crime Thriller novel 'Loose Cannon' with great reviews.


Be sure to follow the rest of the tour with these fantastic blogs:

With kind thanks to Jack Steele for the review copy.

The Hippo Hands Over . . . . to Sue Moorcroft

I'm delighted to be handing over to Sue Moorcroft today to talk about her hugely popular book A Summer to Remember. This little beauty is on my list of books to read this summer and the ebook is currently available for 99p so why not add it to your TBR too!

COME AND SPEND SUMMER BY THE SEA!

WANTED! A caretaker for Roundhouse Row holiday cottages.

WHERE? Nelson’s Bar is the perfect little village. Nestled away on the Norfolk coast we can offer you no signal, no Wi-Fi and – most importantly – no problems!

WHO? The ideal candidate will be looking for an escape from their cheating scumbag ex-fiancé, a diversion from their entitled cousin, and a break from their traitorous friends.

WHAT YOU’LL GET! Accommodation in a chocolate-box cottage, plus a summer filled with blue skies and beachside walks. Oh, and a reunion with the man of your dreams.

PLEASE NOTE: We take no responsibility for any of the above scumbags, passengers and/or traitors walking back into your life…

GET IN TOUCH NOW TO MAKE THIS A SUMMER TO REMEMBER!

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Sue's written an interesting post about why it was so difficult for her to write it.

A Summer to Remember was my fourteenth novel and somewhere in the process I went wrong. It became my most difficult book to write.

Looking back, I think it happened in two stages. I didn’t follow my own golden rule in knowing my heroine and hero’s major goals and conflicts well enough and I let myself go down a blind alley. I think the latter happened because even though I’d finally paused to analyse the conflicts in the book, I forgot to keep them in mind. One story strand refused to work with another.

I woke up one morning on a horrible moment of realisation and thought, ‘Oh nooooooo …’ There was nothing for it but to rewrite the work of several days. As a measure of what a trauma this was, I seem to purged from my memory whereabouts in the story this happened! I only know it was a nightmare and I went out one evening with a writing friend and wailed miserably about not being able to get the book back on track and that I’d never hit the deadline.

Deadlines are a bit of a thing for authors. Some like to joke about them whooshing by but whenever an author misses a deadline, their publishing team has to work around that. I’m not keen on that idea so I did send the book in on time, thinking, ‘My editor’s going to earn her salary with this one …’ I despatched the manuscript to my friend and beta reader Mark at the same time and went off gloomily to catch up other jobs like putting food in my fridge.

The first surprise was when Mark messaged me and said, ‘I can’t see too much wrong with this.’ I was so astonished that I messaged back to say, ‘Are you sure? Have you read it all?’ He was, and he had.

A few days later the email came from my editor with the heading A Summer to Remember - edit. Despite Mark’s positivity I literally didn’t want to open the email. I could imagine eight pages of structural changes or, even worse, just an invitation to a telephone conversation so we could discuss how to salvage things. Instead, the email - when I couldn’t put off opening it any longer - was upbeat. She loved the story and the characters and edits were very light. Somehow my storytelling skills had seen me through and my sigh of relief could probably be heard in Norfolk, where the book’s set!

For the next book, I definitely knew the conflicts and kept them to the forefront of my mind.

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Photo courtesy of Sue Moorcroft

Sue Moorcroft is a Sunday Times and international bestselling author and has reached the coveted #1 spot on Amazon Kindle. She’s won the Readers’ Best Romantic Novel award and the Katie Fforde Bursary, and has been nominated for several other awards, including the Romantic Novel of the Year Awards.

Her short stories, serials, columns, writing ‘how to’ and courses have appeared all over the world.

Part of an army family, Sue was born in Germany and lived much of her childhood in Malta and Cyprus before setting in the UK.

You can get your 99p copy using the links below:

Amazon

Apple iBook

Kobo

You can find out more about Sue, her books and connect with her using these links:

Website

Amazon

Facebook

Twitter

Instagram