Samhain Publishing Ltd Weblog

PRIVATE MANEUVERS-THE HOT ZONE IS BACK!

No, I’m not talking about global warming, a great day spent on a tropical beach, or a heavy duty survival reality show where you’re stuck for weeks on end with hunky men who can make a raft out of palm trees and sunscreen out of an exotic combination of plant and herb. I’m talking about my series at Samhain Publishing.

My first story with Samhain Publishing was released in May 2007 and is called MALE CALL. At that time I didn’t have a notion of writing anything in a connected story or series. Bang! One day an idea just came to me. After writing the first story about an Army reservist overseas in Iraq falling in love with his pen pal back home, I knew I had to write about more men who experienced wartime and the women they would love. So, the HOT ZONE series was launched, and I haven’t looked back. In the second story, UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER, I used the theme of old friends coming back together after twenty years and renewing not only their friendship but discovering a simmering romance and danger.

Both MALE CALL and UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER will be packaged together in a print edition in late August 2008 called INTIMATE ALLIANCE and you can already preorder it at Amazon.

Today PRIVATE MANEUVERS is available! Both the heroine, Marisa Clyde, and the hero, Jake Sullivan, showed up at the end of UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER and screamed for their own book. How could I refuse? Marisa wants nothing to do with the soldier who is acting as a temporary bouncer in her uncle’s tavern. Stoic and over six feet of smoldering masculinity, the hunk helped rescue her during a tour gone bad in Mexico. During those few short moments after she first met him, the tension between them screamed off the charts. A devastating hurt in the past blocks her willingness to surrender to him. If she can wait him out now, he’ll only be in town a month and then he’s out of her life. Jake watches Marisa like a hawk, well aware his need to protect is messing with his mind and making him care for Marisa way more than he should. Priding himself on clinical detachment in the game between man and woman, he figures once he’s slept with her, she’ll be out of his system for good. But that’s before he experiences her on a deeper level and learns she just might be in danger again.

With these novellas I tried to convey a sense of homecoming and what that can mean to someone who has survived a dangerous situation. Plus, I wanted the character’s pasts to catch up with them in some way, to have them stretch and grow and discover it is possible to find love even when you least expect it.

What types of stories make your blood race? Do you like stories set in dangerous situations, or do you prefer the more mundane and often more realistic home fire settings? Stay tuned to my web page at www.deniseagnew.com and www.myspace.com/deniseagnew for all the news on this series and my other series and stand alone novels.