Giveaway – In The Shadow Of The Bull by Eleanor Kuhns @partnersincr1me @EleanorKuhns

Posted on August 4, 2023 by fundinmental

In the Shadow of the Bull

by Eleanor Kuhns

July 17 – August 11, 2023 Virtual Book Tour

Synopsis:

Ancient Crete, 1450 BC. In a world of Goddess worship, sacred snakes and sacrifice, human jealousy, resentment, and betrayal still run wild . . .

When her sister Arge drops to the floor in convulsions and dies at her wedding, fifteen-year-old Martis, a young poet and bull leaper in training, is certain she was murdered. The prime suspect is the groom, Saurus, from the Greek mainland, but when Arge’s shade visits Martis, swearing Saurus is not the murderer, Martis vows to uncover the truth.

As Martis begins asking questions, she discovers that while Arge may have had no secrets, many of the people around her certainly do.

Praise for In the Shadow of the Bull:

“This complex, character-driven mystery is loaded with fascinating historical details”
~ Kirkus Reviews

Book Details:

Genre: Historical Mystery
Published by: Severn House
Publication Date: July 2023
Number of Pages: 224
ISBN: 9781448310869 (ISBN10: 1448310865)
Series: An Ancient Crete Mystery (#1)
Book Links: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | BookShop.org | Goodreads | Severn House

Read an excerpt:

Saurus was clad, not in a colorful loincloth, nor in the robe Cretan men wore for certain rituals, but in his leather armor. His wavy black hair spilled over his shoulders, un-oiled. And he carried his weapons, long knives in their scabbards, at his waist. His one attendant, his friend Kabya, stood behind him, dressed in like manner. Gasps of condemnation sounded through the crowd.

‘Does he think he’s going to fight someone,’ Mother said in angry disapproval.

Saurus looked around at the crowd, his eyes narrowed, and then he lifted his chin defiantly. Although I didn’t like him, I recognized his uncertainty. He knew we despised him and his barbarous ways.

When Saurus had first come to the palace, I’d been prepared to accept him. He knew my mother’s brother and had come with news of him. Like my uncle, Saurus was also a trader. At least he said he was, and we welcomed him into the house.

My dislike dated from that first day, before I knew he would take Arge from us. He examined me and my sisters with careless lechery. I’d just come from acrobatics and wore a boy’s loincloth. As his gaze swept over me, I shuddered with a strange prickly hot feeling. And then he dismissed me with a quick, indifferent turn of his head. Then the flush that burned through me was one of anger.

Despite my feelings, and his awkward broken Cretan, he’d quickly charmed all my sisters. And although Mother frequently eyed him with reserve, I saw them laughing together more than once.

At first, he’d spread his easy compliments among all my sisters – though I was invisible to him – but soon he paid more and more attention to Arge. A knot of worry formed on my mother’s forehead.

Several months after Saurus’s arrival, Arge announced she planned to marry him.

There was Arge now, in front of the mound of ash left by previous sacrifices. Against the deep purple of her jacket, her skin looked deathly pale. She’d pressed her mouth into a long thin line. Was she regretting her decision now? I looked up at the sky, so dark the stars spangled the expanse with flecks of silver, and sent another fervent prayer heavenward – ‘Please, Lady of the Animals and of Childbirth, stop this marriage. I will offer you all the honey from my bees.’

The High Priestess with her nine attendants suddenly appeared from the shadows, stepping through the trees into the torchlight. Their eyes sparkled and one of the attendants stumbled. They were drunk on the sacred liquor, a mixture of beer, wine, fermented honey and herbs. The priestesses wore the sacral knot tied at the nape of their necks, above the tight jackets. to show they were in service to Her who gave us life. Some of them wore doves on their heads, live doves tied to the headdress by the feet, for love. Three of the women carried baskets.

Instead of a dove, the High Priestess carried snakes in her headdress, living snakes that coiled as high as they could from the bindings, flicking their tongues and hissing. Snakes to promote fertility in this new marriage.

As the High Priestess approached the altar, a soft moan of anticipation whispered from the crowd. The goats began struggling even harder against their bonds as they caught the scent of the snakes. The Priestess, who did not seem to notice the throng of people standing on the other side of the altar of ash and bone, turned to the first attendant. She took away the lid and removed the large heavy snake from the basket to coil it around her waist. The remaining two baskets yielded additional snakes. Chanting sonorously, she allowed the snakes to twine up her arms.

I could not repress a tremor of remembered fear and my mother glanced at me. Only nine at Opis’s wedding, I’d been so terrified by the snakes that Arge had had to carry me from the ceremony. I looked at Arge now. Her expression was fixed in a grimace of pain.

Suddenly she fell to the floor, writhing in convulsions and spilling bloody vomit from her mouth.

For several seconds no one moved. The Priestess’s chant continued, then lurched to a stop mid-syllable. Pandemonium erupted. Screaming, Mother ran to her daughter and fell to her knees beside her. After a moment of frozen disbelief, Opis and Nuia followed at a run. I couldn’t move. I stared in horror at Arge’s body lying on the stones. What had I done? I’d pleaded with the Goddess to halt the wedding and She had. But why this way? Why kill Arge, the sweetest and most unassuming of all women? Raising my face to the sky, I began to sob. The stars in the sky blurred together into streaks of silver. ‘Why?’ I asked the Goddess. ‘Why?’

This was my fault: the Goddess had answered my prayers.

***

Author Bio:

Eleanor Kuhns is the 2011 winner of the Minotaur/Mystery Writers of America first mystery prize for A Simple Murder. That was the first in the Will Rees series. She went on to write ten more.
In the Shadow of the Bull is the first in the Ancient Crete Mystery series.

Catch Up With Eleanor Kuhns:
www.Eleanor-Kuhns.com
Goodreads
BookBub
Instagram – @edl0829
Twitter – @EleanorKuhns
Facebook – @writerkuhns

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Giveaway – A Sense For Murder by Leslie Karst @dollycas @LeslieKarst

Posted on July 28, 2023 by fundinmental

A Sense for Murder (A Sally Solari Mystery) by Leslie Karst

About A Sense for Murder

A Sense for Murder (A Sally Solari Mystery)
Cozy Mystery
6th in Series
Setting – California
Severn House (August 1, 2023)
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 224 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1448309050
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1448309054
Digital ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0BXPY61Q1

Chef Sally Solari has – to her own bewilderment – built a reputation as a talented sleuth who keeps tripping over dead bodies. But getting mixed up in the curious case of a cookbook killer threatens to be the final chapter in not just her investigating career . . . but her life.
It’s the height of the tourist season in Santa Cruz, California, and Sally Solari has her hands full, both juggling crowds of hungry diners at her French-Polynesian restaurant Gauguin, as well as appeasing her father, who’s distressed at the number of homeless people camped out in front of Solari’s, the family’s Italian seafood restaurant out on the historic fisherman’s wharf.
Nevertheless, when Sally gets the opportunity to volunteer at a farm-to-table dinner taking place at the hip new restaurant and culinary bookshop Pages and Plums, she seizes the chance. Not only is it a fundraiser for an organization aiding the homeless and seniors, but up for auction at the event is a signed boxset of Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Sally’s hero, the renowned chef Julia Child.
But then the Pages and Plums dining room manager turns up dead – the locked cabinet containing the precious books now empty – and the irrepressible Sally once again finds herself up to her neck in a criminal investigation. She may have a sense for murder, but can Sally outwit a devious killer with a taste for French cooking before the villain makes mincemeat of her, too?
A Sense for Murder is a fast-paced, super fun culinary cozy mystery that will have your brain working and your mouth watering. And if you haven’t met sleuthing chef Sally yet, it’s safe to jump right in.

EXCERPT

If not for the clatter of my bicycle bouncing down the wooden planks of the Santa Cruz Municipal Wharf, I felt certain that every tourist I whizzed past would have been startled by the loud rumblings emanating from my empty stomach.

I’d set off on my morning ride with only a cup of coffee for sustenance, and the effects of the initial caffeine buzz had now been replaced by a severe case of low blood sugar. As a result (notwithstanding the million-dollar view of the historic fisherman’s wharf stretching out from the sparkling beach and the iconic roller coaster rising up behind), the only thing on my mind at that moment was the prospect of biting into one of my father’s famous ricotta-and-mascarpone-filled cannoli.

I spotted Dad’s tall, stocky figure standing in front of Solari’s Restaurant as soon as I rounded the bend near the end of the wharf. He was turned toward me, waving, so I waved back, then quickly grabbed hold of my handlebars as I hit a nasty bump in the road. Once closer, however, I realized he wasn’t waving at me. He hadn’t even noticed my arrival. Rather, he was shouting and gesticulating at a form sprawled on the sidewalk at the corner of the building.

‘Why the hell do you insist on camping out here?’ I heard him yell as I approached. ‘You and your kind are driving away my business!’

Wheeling up to the front entrance, I clipped out of my pedals and leaned my red-and-white road bike against the restaurant’s whitewashed wood siding. Through the neon Budweiser and Amstel Light signs hanging in the window above, I could see a table of early lunchers chowing down on plates of crab salads and linguine.

‘Hey, Dad. What’s going on?’

‘Sally.’ He turned to me with a frown. ‘I didn’t hear you ride up.’

‘Probably because you were making quite a bit of racket yourself.’

The person at his feet – a thin, gray-haired man wrapped in a dark green sleeping bag – pushed himself to an upright position and regarded the two of us with dull eyes. A fat seagull pecked at a discarded French fry not three feet from where he sat.

Dad returned the man’s gaze with an angry stare. ‘I’ve been trying for five full minutes to get this guy to move his sorry ass away from my restaurant, but he pretends like he doesn’t even hear me. Maybe I should just call the cops on you,’ he said to the cocooned man, ‘and let them deal with it.’

‘Maybe if you tried treating him like a human being, your powers of persuasion would be a little more effective,’ I responded. ‘I mean, really: “you and your kind”?’ But my father merely shook his head and turned to walk back inside Solari’s, clearly now annoyed not only with the guy in the sleeping bag but also his only daughter.

About Leslie Karst

Leslie Karst is the author of the Lefty Award-nominated Sally Solari mystery series and Justice is Served: A Tale of Scallops, the Law, and Cooking for RBG. After years waiting tables and singing in a new wave rock band, she decided she was ready for a “real” job and ended up at Stanford Law School. It was during her career as an attorney that Leslie rediscovered her youthful passion for food and cooking and once more returned to school—this time to earn a degree in culinary arts. Now retired from the law, Leslie spends her time cooking, cycling, gardening, observing cocktail hour promptly at five o’clock, and of course writing. She and her wife split their time between Santa Cruz, California, and Hilo, Hawai‘i.

Author Links