Suzie O’Connell tops today’s Buffet with her 2012 debut novel, Mountain Angel, the first in a series of contemporary romances set in Montana.
Suzie grew up in Western Washington state, but has called the mountains and valleys of Western Montana home for well over a decade. She has been writing stories for as long as she can remember and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Literature and Writing from the University of Montana-Western. She now teaches high school English. When she isn’t writing or teaching, she enjoys spending time in the mountains with her husband Mark, their daughter Maddie, and their golden retriever Reilly.
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Mountain Angel (Northstar Angels, Book 1)
Welcome to Northstar, Montana, where friendship and love triumph, and wounded hearts find a place to call home.
Aelissm Davis figured she would eventually return home to Northstar, Montana, but not like this—desperate for the tranquility of the secluded valley and plagued by memories of her dead boyfriend and the advances of an obsessive former friend. Just when she begins to relax, a call from her old friend makes it clear he wasn’t deterred, and she calls her overprotective uncle for advice. Things become even more tangled when he sends Patrick O’Neil “on vacation” to keep an eye on her.
Aelissm is pretty sure her uncle is playing matchmaker again, but despite her annoyance, she finds herself irresistibly drawn to Pat. He is a haunted man with a kind smile and sad eyes, and he may just be the best thing to ever happen to her… if she can convince him to stay.
Wings of a Dream
Rebekah Hendricks dreams of a life far beyond her family’s farm in Oklahoma, and when dashing aviator Arthur Samson promises adventure in the big city, she is quick to believe he’s the man she’s meant to marry.
While she waits for the end of the Great War and Arthur’s return, her mother’s sister falls ill. Rebekah seizes the opportunity to travel to Texas to care for Aunt Adabelle, sure that her glamorous and exciting life is about to start.
But the Spanish flu epidemic changes everything. Faced with her aunt’s sickness, Arthur’s indecisiveness, and four children who have no one else to care for them, Rebekah discovers she must choose between her desire to escape the type of life she’s always led and the unexpected love that just might change the dream of her heart.
Unfit: A Novel
Chrissy Rollings has a mountain of troubles to overcome, one that would crush most other girls her age. She was born in a small North Carolina town in 1952, into a poor but happy and loving family that always managed to scrape by each month… until the night her father died in a car crash, plunging the family into poverty. Chrissy’s mother is forced to take low-paying jobs to supplement her meager welfare checks, leaving Chrissy to raise her five siblings. But even these sacrifices are not enough.
North Carolina was among the states to practice eugenics — forcing sterilization procedures on thousands of people deemed “unfit” to reproduce. When Chrissy’s mother was faced with the choice of having 14-year-old Chrissy sterilized or losing her welfare check, she makes the only choice she feels she can and signs the consent form. That act of survival sets into motion a series of events that shape the course of Chrissy’s life forever.
Despite knowing in her heart that she did not deserve to be sterilized, that she was not in fact “unfit,” Chrissy struggles for the rest of her life with feelings of inadequacy, low self-esteem, and a belief that she doesn’t deserve to have anything good happen to her.
Little by little, though, Chrissy claws her way past every obstacle, slowly building a new family of friends and eventually finding her soul mate, with whom she is reborn. With their support, she becomes a woman who is strong, loving, intelligent, and anything but unfit.
South Face
In 1989 Karl Blaine and his wife Fiona traveled to Nepal to climb Mt. Everest with their college friend Zachary. Only Zachary came back alive.
Two decades later, in 2009, a French climbing expedition discovered Karl’s frozen remains. Of the five man party who finds Karl, only the Sherpa guide makes it down alive. He brings with him a whooper of a ghost story no one can believe.
When a much older Zachary is notified of this discovery it sets off a dangerous chain of events that puts Zachary and Karl and Fiona’s son Derrick on a collision course.
What did Karl have in his possession when he disappeared?
What really happened in 89?
Can what the Sherpa guide reported really be true?
And one other question . . .
Is Fiona Blaine still entombed at the top of the world?
Do You Talk Funny? 7 Comedy Habits to Become a Better (and Funnier) Public Speaker
Public speaking can be terrifying. For David Nihill, the idea of standing in front of an audience was scarier than cliff jumping into a thorny pit of spiders and mother-in-laws. Without a parachute or advanced weaponry. Something had to change. In one year, David went from being deathly afraid of public speaking to regularly performing stand-up comedy and winning storytelling competitions in front of packed houses. And he did it by learning from some of the best storytellers in the world: standup comics. In Do You Talk Funny: 7 Comedy Habits to Become a Better (and Funnier) Public Speaker, you will learn the key principles of standup comedy and how they can be applied to your speaking engagements and presentations to make you funnier, more interesting, and better looking. (Or at least two of the three.)
Whether you are preparing for a business presentation, giving a wedding toast, defending your thesis, raising money from investors, or simply want to take on something you’re afraid of, this book will take you from sweaty to stage-ready.
My America
Martin Jones was birthed into a world of violence. His first experience came on the eve of him being transported home from the hospital; a few days after he was born.
As Martin comes of age, his disdain and hatred toward authoritive figures fuels his anger. Martin has no clue why his heart contains so much hate. He’s at war everyday with himself; trying to figure it out.
Baby Stetson (Love and Music in Texas Book 1)
In small Texas towns, strangers come and go…
Left in a Stetson hat, on the steps of the local bed and breakfast, Avery Callimer came into the world on a wing and a prayer. Raised by loving adoptive parents, she’s never lacked for love … only the knowledge of her past.
By day she works at the inn, but by night … Avery comes alive as lead singer in a band. Life was good … stable, until new guests blew into town.
Some strangers come with secrets and lies.
Lucas Bennett is one such stranger. Drifting from one mess to another has left him jaded. Doesn’t matter the dramas are never his doing. Giving it one last shot to make a fresh start lands him Harmony’s Echo, Texas and smack dab in front of the tantalizing Avery.
Despite his best efforts to ignore the burn Avery’s ignited within, he’s intent to keep his distance. Secrets have followed him. Secrets he doesn’t want Avery to know.
Each time they’re near the other, things heat up like a brushfire on a dry Texas prairie.
40 Days Till 40RTY: Life Lessons from the Ramblings of My UNFILTERED Thoughts
Conceived as 40 Facebook lessons to be posted daily 40 days before her 40th birthday, TeeJ, a bold domestic violence survivor, told all of her deepest secrets and turned her heartbreaks and comedic misadventures into 388 pages of transparent, raw, purging and practical life lessons for people of ALL ages. From ages 18-99, you will undeniably relate to TeeJ as she takes you on a ride full of twists and turns that will have you crying one minute, thrown for a left turn, and then spontaneously cracking up laughing because she has caught you off-guard with one of her unabashed admissions. TeeJ is the hilarious and brutally honest best friend we all want to have.
Veteran TV editor TaJuan “TeeJ” Mercer is a self-proclaimed “hater of writing/lover of people,” whose day job consists of shaping stories of popular television shows for network giants such as NBC, ABC, MTV, VH1, TLC, Style, The History Channel and WEtv.
With a revealingly fresh, honestly raw and amusingly incisive perspective, TeeJ bares her soul with grace, humility and humor, as she converses openly with God, family, friends and even complete strangers about the trials, the challenges and the disappointments she has faced, including almost losing her life at the hands of her ex-husband-several times. Each day along the way, TeeJ offers another life lesson illustrating the three concepts for a happy, giddy, and guilt-free life:
* OOPS AIN’T IN GOD’S VOCABULARY releases you from the mistakes of your PAST
* I DON’T FIX CRAZY reconciles the circumstances of your PRESENT
* JUST KEEP WAKING UP reestablishes hope for your FUTURE
Until the Debt Is Paid
Berlin detective Jan Tommen expected to wake up with a hangover—not a murder charge. But a well-known judge has been brutally killed and hard evidence places Jan at the crime scene. When disturbing gaps in Jan’s memory make finding an alibi impossible, the case against him looks open and shut.
Faced with life on the inside, Jan flees police custody to take refuge with an old friend deeply enmeshed in the capital’s seedy underworld. Hampered by a citywide manhunt, Jan soon finds that investigating leads while eluding capture isn’t easy. Before long, he’s relying on a team of misfits for help, including an icy blonde medical examiner and a brilliant but reclusive computer whiz.
When a lucky break leads Jan to connect the murders to a heinous trafficking ring, the team risks it all to find answers. Meanwhile, the body count continues to rise and the police department starts to close in. Desperate to prove his innocence, Jan must identify the true killer—before his time finally runs out.
What It Takes (The Rocky Creek Series Book 1)
After graduating college, Kelsey Morgan left her small-town Virginia roots to make it in L.A. After years slogging in commercials and music videos, her movie career is finally taking off. But she’s still miles behind her current costar, and Hollywood playboy, Patrick Lyons. Kelsey does everything she can to avoid Patrick off-set, hoping to not become fodder for the supermarket tabloids that scour the streets for Patrick, trying to get an exclusive look at him and his alleged woman of the week. Kelsy has successfully kept Patrick at a distance, and her reputation intact, until her drunkard brother-in-law Richard threatens to ruin everything by selling her darkest secret to the highest bidder. Now the victim of blackmail, Kelsey has nowhere else to turn but to Patrick’s arms. But, can he be trusted? Or will the past destroy them all before she can find out if he’s the hero she needs? “What it Takes” is the first book in the Rocky Creek Series by Kathryn Ascher. Sequels are expected to release in 2015 and 2016.
Radiant: Towers Trilogy Book One
Xhea has no magic. Born without the power that everyone else takes for granted, Xhea is an outcastno way to earn a living, buy food, or change the life that fate has dealt her. Yet she has a unique talent: the ability to see ghosts and the tethers that bind them to the living world, which she uses to scratch out a bare existence in the ruins beneath the City’s floating Towers.
When a rich City man comes to her with a young woman’s ghost tethered to his chest, Xhea has no idea that this ghost will change everything. The ghost, Shai, is a Radiant, a rare person who generates so much power that the Towers use it to fuel their magic, heedless of the pain such use causes. Shai’s home Tower is desperate to get the ghost back and force her into a bodyany bodyso that it can regain its position, while the Tower’s rivals seek the ghost to use her magic for their own ends. Caught between a multitude of enemies and desperate to save Shai, Xhea thinks herself powerlessuntil a strange magic wakes within her. Magic dark and slow, like rising smoke, like seeping oil. A magic whose very touch brings death.
With two extremely strong female protagonists, Radiant is a story of fighting for what you believe in and finding strength that you never thought you had.
Frost (The Frost Chronicles Book 1)
In the icy, monster-plagued world of the Frost, one wrong move and a person could end up dead—and Lia Weaver knows this better than anyone.
After monsters kill her parents, Lia must keep the family farm running despite the freezing cold and threat of monster attacks or risk losing her siblings to reassignment by the village Elders. With dangers on all sides and failure just one wrong step away, she can’t afford to let her emotions lead her astray. So when her sister finds a fugitive bleeding to death in the forest—a young stranger named Gabe—Lia surprises herself and does the unthinkable.
She saves his life.
Giving shelter to the fugitive could get her in trouble. The Elders have always described the advanced society of people beyond the Frost, the “Farthers,” as ruthless and cruel. But Lia is startled to find that Gabe is empathetic and intelligent…and handsome. She might even be falling in love with him.
But time is running out. The monsters from the forest circle the farm at night. The village leader is starting to ask questions. Farther soldiers are searching for Gabe. Lia must locate a secret organization called the Thorns to help Gabe escape to safety, but every move she makes puts her in more danger.
Is compassion—and love—worth the risk?
First to Kill (The Nathan McBride Series Book 1)
Ten years ago, a botched mission in Nicaragua ended covert ops specialist Nathan McBride’s CIA career. Now he utilizes his unique skill set in the private sector—until the night Frank Ortega, former director of the FBI, calls in a favor. A deep-cover federal agent has vanished, along with a ton of Semtex explosives, and Ortega needs them found—fast. Because for him, this mission is personal: the missing agent is his grandson. And Nathan McBride is the only man he trusts to save him.
But it quickly becomes clear that something bigger than even Ortega could have imagined is at stake. Within days of accepting the assignment, McBride finds himself trapped between a ruthless adversary hell-bent on revenge and a group of high-ranking federal officials who will stop at nothing to reap their own brand of justice. Here there are no rules, no protocol, no backup. Only McBride…
… See the rest of today’s Editor’s Picks here on page 2