Farewell Elizabeth!

Please welcome Berkley Sensation author Elizabeth Jennings back for her last day on the island! She's sharing with us a letter to readers posted in one of Berkley's newsletters and an excerpt from her recent release, Shadows at Midnight. Remember tomorrow I'll announce the winner of a book from Elizabeth's back list so be sure to check back! For more information on purchasing Shadows at Midnight, here's a link to Amazon and to Barnes & Noble. And, Elizabeth's website will be going live in the very near future so hopefully you'll be able to learn even more about this wonderful author soon!


According to a recent review of Shadows at Midnight (The Romance Studio, 5 heart review!) ... “Elizabeth Jennings pens one of the best romantic suspense novels I've read in quite a while....If this were a movie it would be full of the kind of action that would make it a hit. Without the big screen to make this better Ms. Jennings uses the power of her words to convey emotion, action, and suspense better than many do.” For the full review, click here.


Enjoy the letter and excerpt and thank you again to Elizabeth for hanging out with us these past few days!

Dear Reader,

When I was young, I was absolutely in love with the idea of spies. Spying seemed to me the epitome of cool, not to mention sexy. I think Sean Connery as James Bond jump-started my puberty.

As I grew older, my image of a spy morphed from James Bond skiing down slopes firing a machine gun or a Lara Croft-like figure (though alas not even in my dreams do I imagine I could look like Angelina Jolie) capable of taking down her enemies with ease, in heels and backwards, to someone very clever, capable of reading hidden reality, and capable of influencing world events.

I was tapping into something deep in the human psyche because what are we all, basically, if not spies? We all want to know more—more about our loved ones and our friends and neighbors. More about the deep, hidden internal workings of the world. We all sense that there are subterranean currents to our lives which are hard to discern, yet essential to an understanding of our own lives and the world around us. Spies dig deeper, look harder, see more clearly.

Enter Claire Day, Defence Intelligence Agency analyst, smart and dedicated, the heroine of Shadows at Midnight. She loves her job, believes in it, and is damned good at it. I guess Claire’s been brewing in my mind for a long, long time. Claire has a deep-seated drive to know, to understand. She’s trained herself to see and understand more clearly than most and has dedicated her life to that, in the service of her country, understanding full well that spooks rarely have a life outside the job because personal attachments cloud your judgment, throw you off your stride. Not to mention the fact that because of her job as a spook, she is transferred to a different country—often a different continent—every two years. But the job is worth it.

Imagine her grief when on one fateful day in the besieged US Embassy in Laka, the capital of Makongo, a West African country, spent with the only Marine on duty, Gunnery Sergeant Daniel Weston, a bomb blast puts her in a three-month coma. The blast takes away her job, her mental clarity and her memory. She is left a shell of her former self, a woman uncertain of everything, with panic attacks and memory loss.

The strong woman who saw reality so well now cannot see the danger approaching her and is unable to defend herself. That task is taken up by heroic Dan who protects her until she can reconnect with her former self. Together, the former spook and the brave Gunnery Sergeant uncover the cold conspiracy at the heart of the blast and discover that love can blossom even in the most dangerous of circumstances.

Elizabeth Jennings

Shadows at Midnight

www.elizabeth-jennings.com

Excerpt from Shadows at Midnight

Did we kiss?

The question hung in the air. Claire’s pretty mouth was a shocked O. She hadn’t wanted to ask the question, that was clear. And the strong, controlled woman he’d kissed a year ago would never have asked the question, she’d have finagled the info out of him, cleverly and casually.

But that Claire was gone.

In her place was this pale, shaking ghost. Man, she was in bad shape. So thin he could feel bone when he touched her, bruised-looking eyes with a lost look in them, the very light tan she’d had in Laka gone without a trace, though she now lived in Florida.

This new Claire had had a panic attack when Stavros’s waiter started piling food on the table. Dan could have kicked himself in the ass. It hadn’t even occurred to him that her system simply wouldn’t be able to deal with it. And yet he’d seen how thin she’d become, held her briefly in his arms and felt the fragility. Duh. It meant her system couldn’t handle food.

He’d seen that before. He’d seen every manifestation of PTSD there was. His gunner in Afghanistan, who’d had both legs blown off, had simply turned his face to the wall, unwilling to live. He’d had to be fed parenterally for a couple of months to keep him alive.

Dan hadn’t thought of that. He’d simply wanted to take Claire to a place that was warm and welcoming, where the food was good, and where she could relax. And Stavros’s place fit the bill. Except Stavros overdid the portions, always had. Marines had hearty appetites. And shit-for-brains Dan hadn’t thought of that.

Man, Claire had nearly fainted. She’d been pale before, but as the waiter slid the dishes in front of her, she’d turned the color of ice. He was lucky she hadn’t fainted, or thrown up.

But she’d had a panic attack. And in her panic, she’d blurted out her question and now looked as if she’d accidentally tripped a land mine.

This was going to be hard. But Dan was a Marine. He knew how to do hard.

He picked up her cold, trembling hand.

“I don’t know why I said that.” Claire’s shaking voice was high, breathless. “It’s crazy. I am so sorry. I don’t know where that came from, it just—“

Dan laid a finger across her lips. “Sh.” He couldn’t stand to see that lost look on her beautiful face. “Hush. It’s not crazy. You’re not crazy.” Reluctantly, he lifted his finger from her mouth. She had amazingly soft lips. He remembered that, nightly. “And for your information, we did kiss. Just before you left with Marie.”

“We did? We kissed?” Claire’s huge, silver-blue eyes never left his face, watching him as carefully as if he were a grenade that could blow up at any moment. Or as if he would kiss her again.

Which, well, he wanted to do. Badly. So badly he held his right fist under the table, tightly clenched. It had taken all his willpower—and he had a lot of willpower—to take his finger away from her. He didn’t just want his finger against her mouth. He wanted his own mouth there, too. He wanted to be mouth to mouth, chest to chest, groin to groin, with Claire Day. So close he could breathe for her. So close he could feel her heartbeat.

“Yeah.” His voice was hoarse. He cleared it. “And then you went out and got yourself blown up.”

Her face lightened a little. It wasn’t a smile, but it was the ghost of one. “I’m sure the two events were unrelated,” she said. The big chandelier in the middle of the room reflected off her eyes as she searched his, bright lances of silver. “How did we—how did we get to that point? Had we been…dating? That past week? Because I don’t remember you at all.”

“We didn’t date.” Dan pushed a small plate of baklava a little closer. “Eat some of that. You don’t have to finish it, stop when you don’t want any more. But I want you to eat a little. One. Just a bite or two of one, if you can’t finish it. Please.”

Because now Dan knew what his new mission in life was. Dan had been intensely mission oriented ever since he joined the marines. He focused on his goal and he achieved it.

And now his goal was to take care of this incredible woman. She was magic. Smart and beautiful and strong, brought low by thugs. He’d almost lost her and by some miracle had found her. He wasn’t losing her again. No way.

“Yessir.” A corner of her beautiful mouth lifted. For a second, Dan had a flash of the woman that was, hidden somewhere inside this frail, wounded creature. She wanted out and he wanted to help her get out. “Nobody disobeys the Detachment Commander.”

That was true. In times of danger, the Detachment Commander was Commander in Chief. He was to be obeyed instantly. He was God.

“Damn straight.” Dan cut a corner of a piece of Stavros’s superb baklava. “Now put that in your mouth.”

“Yessir,” she said again. He watched the forkful disappear in her mouth, and envied it. “So.” She tilted her head to one side, considering him. He knew what he was. A battered 34 year old with a metal knee, no spleen, half deaf in one ear, who’d had to start over from scratch. A man who owned his own home and his own business, but who didn’t have looks and didn’t have charm.

She smiled. “I guess it was that old classic. The moonlight, the exotic locale, the gunfire...”

“Exactly.” Great. A flash of the old Claire Day. “Now eat.”

Elizabeth Jennings Day 1

Please welcome the fabulous Elizabeth Jennings to the island! She writes for Berkley Sensation and Grand Central Publishing. And under her pseudonym (Lisa Marie Rice) she writes for Avon Red and Ellora's Cave.

Elizabeth Jennings has been a wordsmith all her life, as a simultaneous interpreter, a translator, and now as a romance writer. She writes romance because she loves it. Passion, adventure, danger, heartbreak, joy—what’s not to love? There’s no better profession than writing. And writing romance? Icing on the cake. She wouldn’t swap places with anyone in the world. She just hopes there are books in heaven, otherwise she’s not going.

1. Okay, let’s start with the obvious. Can you tell everyone a little bit about yourself?

As I said before, I’ve been a wordsmith all my life, starting as an avid reader. I was the one in class with an exciting novel open in her lap while the teacher droned on about quadratic equations, which I do not understand to this day. One summer I read so much I lost a dioptre of sight, but what can you expect when you live across the street from the county library? It’s like an addict having a building chock full of crack cocaine. It’s right there across the street, the doors are wide open and all you need is a card.


Though I always knew I’d end up writing, the road there was long and fairly tortuous, as there was this tedious business of earning a living that had to come first. I’m not a starving-in-the-garret kind of person.

I moved to Florence, Italy from a small, provincial town in Central Oregon in my late teens and it took me years to get over the culture shock. I think everything about me, down to the molecular level, changed, definitely for the better. I learned that I loved language and languages, which led to interpreter’s school. Being an interpreter is just about the best preparation I know of for becoming a writer, besides being a lawyer. More fun, too.

So, for more years than I care to tell, I travelled and interpreted. Simultaneous interpretation requires very close and careful listening to what the speaker is saying, to the choice of vocabulary, to the register of language, to the hidden meanings. It’s intensely stressful and it burns language into your brain. Couple this with constant travel to sometimes interesting places (and sometimes not-interesting places—to wit, eight long damp years in Brussels), and with thousands of pages of translation work and you have a viable path to becoming a writer.

After travelling the world, another culture shock—marriage at a late age and residence in a small, provincial town in southern Italy, a little like circling back to square one. Matera, the unknown beauty of Italy, with its spectacular Sassi and incredible isolation from the mainstream of Italian life, became my new home. It’s been an enormous privilege watching the city open up to the world like a blossoming flower.

At the age of forty, it was time to finally try to achieve that lifelong dream of writing. I knew I wanted to write mainly genre fiction—romantic suspense and mysteries. I like to read exciting fiction and it’s what I like to write. With a lot of help from my friends along the way, I’ve published 8 novels and now have a two-book contract with Berkley Publishing (Penguin USA). The first book, Shadows at Midnight, comes out on August 3. Part of that help with becoming a writer was attending writers’ conferences in the States. It was such an overwhelming experience that—again—with the help of friends, I established a literary festival and spectacular international writers’ conference in Matera, the International Women’s Fiction Festival —www.womensfictionfestival.com — where members of our tribe of writers meet, bond, talk shop, listen to top editors and agents, sell novels, overeat and get drunk on the finest food and wine this side of heaven. Visit me at www.elizabeth-jennings.com I can be contacted at e.jennings@tin.it.

2. What publishing houses do you write for?

A great one. Berkley Sensation.


3. What would you say has been your most significant accomplishment as a writer?

Hmmm. I think marrying depth of character to suspense. I try very hard to make my characters very well rounded and to give the reader an idea of who they are even outside the relationship. I hope I succeed.


4. When did you realize you wanted to be a writer? And how long have you been writing?

Forever. I’ve wanted to be a writer forever, ever since I taught myself to read at the age of five. It was always there—the ultimate dream. Every time I move (which is often) I uncover and discover tons of notebooks from my teens and twenties and thirties, filled with half-baked ideas and musings and terrible first chapters. It wasn’t until my forties though that I got serious.


5. Tell us something about yourself that we might not know.

Wow. I’m a really good cook and a bit of a foodie (read: food snob). I like pop and rock songs of the 80s. I actually enjoy reading soldiers’ memoirs.

I'm not a foodie but I feel ya on the 80s!

6. Who are your favorite authors?

Romance: Shannon McKenna and Nora Roberts (the Divine Nora). Thrillers: Lee Child, Michael Connolly, Thomas Perry, Richard Marcinko, Stuart McBride. The list changes but these are staples.


7. Tell us about your latest/upcoming release, SHADOWS AT MIDNIGHT. (Berkley Sensation, out August 3).

I was so happy to sign the contract with Berkley because SHADOWS AT MIDNIGHT is a story that’s been with me for a long time. I felt I not only knew the characters but that they existed outside me and were waiting, arms crossed, tapping a foot, for me to tell their story. It’s a suspense story, with danger and a puzzle to figure out, but it’s basically a story of two people who suffered a devastating attack and put their lives back together. They were both caught in a bombing of the Embassy in a West African country. Claire Day was an up and coming intelligence analyst, at the peak of her powers. After the bombing, she is a shadow of her former self, with memory holes and panic attacks and nightmares. The hero, Daniel Weston, had been the Marine Security Guard at the Embassy, and had to retire on disability, when being a Marine was all he had ever wanted to be. These two brave, smart people put their lives back together piece by piece, and fall in love doing it.

My Barnes and Noble order of Shadows hasn't arrived yet but it should sometime this week! Call me biased since I'm married to one but I'm so glad you've written about a hot Marine :)

8. Anything you’d like to add for your readers and/or aspiring writers?

For my readers—above all I like to make my characters appealing and I hope they appeal to you. Note I say appealing, not perfect. They have their flaws but they are never small-minded or mean. To aspiring writers, wherever they are on that spectrum from wanting to be a writer to being published—never give up. If that’s what you want to do, do it. Join a writers’ organization, form a writers’ group in your home town or join one. Write. Every day. Study writers you admire and discover what it is that they do that you admire so much. Never give up.

9. Please let readers know where they can find you.

e.jennings@tin.it

elizabethmjennings@gmail.com

www.elizabeth-jennings.com

I’m late to the website party (the website is going live in a couple of days) for very complicated reasons, but I look forward to having it and to blogging on the writing life and on life in Italy.

Thank you so much for answering all my questions and for hanging out with us today! Elizabeth is offering a giveaway of one of her books, Pursuit (in paperback format only). All you have to do is leave a comment over the next three days and be entered to win. I’ll announce the winner on Sunday! Don't forget to come back tomorrow because she's talking about romantic suspense, my favorite genre!