I am pleased to announce a special promotion from DSP Publications for Mad Lizard Mambo and Black Dog Blues! Notice the [!] because I’m rather excited about this.

If you order Mad Lizard Mambo directly from the DSP Publications website, you will be able to download the book EARLY on Sept 10th [!]. Spend the weekend chasing dragons with Kai and the crew. If you haven’t already read Black Dog Blues (book #1), DSP Publications will be running a special 99 cents promotional sale of Black Dog Blues for ONE Week only (Sept 6th to the 13th). (Link to series page)

* For those who are going to ask, if you’ve pre-ordered from another site, you should be able to cancel the pre-order and get it from DSP Publications.

** Also, remember, if you’ve ordered a paperback from Dreamspinner Press and / DSP Publications, you receive the e-book versions for free.

And now for something completely different, an excerpt from Mad Lizard Mambo.

Coffee is a gift from the gods. It doesn’t matter which god. Just any god. Every single last one of them must have sat down and said Yes, this is the mana of life. Or at least that’s what I felt like a few hours after Cari dropped me and the egg off at the converted warehouse I called home.

My body was one long road rash from the lava, and my sidhe blood was kicking in, stretching my ravaged skin back together. There’d been a hard knot in my stomach when I had to peel my clothes off after I stumbled home, hoping none of the torn edges were caught beneath my scabbed-over wounds. I’d had that happen before, and nothing made my teeth hurt more than peeling myself open. I’d washed off as much of the pumice and egg snot as I could with the water Cari had in the Nova’s trunk, but we hadn’t come close to getting it all off, and I’d been pretty sure I’d also be picking out small shards of glassy black rock as well as denim once I got home.

Lucky for me, I hadn’t disappointed myself.

The agony of reopening my wounds was taken care of with a few shots of rotgut whiskey and a few sharp yanks to pull the embedded fabric out from under my skin. Healing faster than a human is only fun and games when I’m in the middle of a fight. Other than that, it’s a pain in the ass if I let my wounds seal up before I get my clothes off.

I’d nearly drained the bottle by the time I worked the remains of my jeans free.

There’d been a long hot shower where I stood in a puddle of blood-pinked water. Then I fell over onto my bed. I must have still reeked, because Newt, the mangled cat I’d pulled off of a dead giant salamander and taken home, decided he wasn’t going to come near me. He took one whiff of me and got that gnarly scowl face he usually only made when the cat food had tilapia in it. For a hardscrabble thug of a feline, Newt still had standards, and they sure as hell didn’t stretch to his elfin roommate smelling like overcooked sulfur.

Since I couldn’t shake the reek out of my nose, I took another long shower when I woke up, using up every ounce of vinegar and lemon juice I had in the pantry. From the look on the cat’s face when I stepped out of the bathroom, I gathered I’d only succeeded in now smelling like pickled eggs.

“Screw you, flea ball,” I muttered while making coffee. He risked contamination long enough to hook his needle claws into my ankle to demand breakfast. I left the snarky bastard to chew on a chunk of packed tuna and headed to the roof with a cup of hot black coffee.

The best thing about living in my old warehouse was the view. Well, that and the lack of neighbors. Other than the one owned by Dalia, who lived next door and spent her hours away from Medical trying to mother me, most of the others were still used for storage and the occasional art gallery. Perched on one of the low mesas at the lip of San Diego’s downtown, I had a great view of both the city and the Pacific from my rooftop.

San Diego extended out along the coast, glittering under the rising sun. When the Underhill shoved its way into Earth—or maybe even the other way around, no one’s really sure—the world violently changed. Forests emerged where cities or prairies once stood, and entire oceans emptied only to form elsewhere, reworking familiar shapes into a patchwork of jumbled terrain. Some areas, like Orange County, disappeared entirely, replaced by the sprawling forests and floating towers of Elfhaime, while others were expanded, fanning out in ripples of torn land. Pendle was a prime example of that. It’d gone from a ten-mile stretch on the old maps to nearly one hundred miles, a craggy landscape of broken roads, lava, and dragons.

Most of the big human and elfin cities fell, their skyscrapers shattered and tumbled when the elfin world merged with ours—or rather, the humans’. It was hard to remember I wasn’t human. But San Diego was my city. My home. My world. My people. I was going to live, eat, fuck, and die here. And I was good with that.

Instead of folding back into the ground, San Diego grew, building on top of its fractured bones until it stood firm on the Pacific shore. The old city’s corpse existed somewhere deep below the under level, with its scrabble of squatters, low-rent flops, and dog-eat-dog living. San Diego’s upper level was sleek and shining, but its bowels held the foulest of existences, a blue shadow to the yellow-bright of the city above. Grime and filth found its way into everything, and the constant chatter of the city’s rich could barely be heard over the rumble-mutter of the lower classes below. I lived where the two levels merged at the edge of the shoreline, having converted an old warehouse into someplace to call home, its location accessible to both levels but really not a part of either.

I couldn’t be a part of anything. I was elfin. And not even a real one.
****

Follow the Mad Lizard Mambo Tour at these fantastic review sites:
Sept 6:             Jeep Diva / http://thejeepdiva.com/
Sept 7:             Prism Book Alliance / http://www.prismbookalliance.com/
Sept 8:             It’s About The Book / https://itsaboutthebook.com/
Sept 9:             MMGoodBookReviews / https://mmgoodbookreviews.wordpress.com/
Sept 10:            Sinfully Gay Romance / http://sinfullymmbookreviews.blogspot.com/
Sept 11:            The Novel Approach / http://www.thenovelapproachreviews.com/
Sept 12:            Oh My Shelves / http://ohmyshelves.com/
Sept 13:            Blogger Girls / https://thebloggergirls.com/
Sept 14:            Joyfully Jay / http://joyfullyjay.com/

Mad Lizard Mambo
by Rhys Ford, from DSP Publications

Kai Gracen has no intention of being anyone’s pawn. A pity Fate and SoCalGov have a different opinion on the matter.

Licensed Stalkers make their living hunting down monsters and dangerous criminals… and their lives are usually brief, brutal, and thankless. Despite being elfin and cursed with a nearly immortal lifespan, Kai didn’t expect to be any different. Then Ryder, the High Lord of the Southern Rise Court, arrived in San Diego, Kai’s not-so-mundane life went from mild mayhem to full-throttle chaos.

Now an official liaison between the growing Sidhe Court and the human populace, Kai is at Ryder’s beck and call for anything a High Lord might need a Stalker to do. Unfortunately for Kai, this means chasing down a flimsy rumor about an ancient lost Court somewhere in the Nevada desert—a court with powerful magics that might save Ryder—and Kai’s—people from becoming a bloody memory in their Merged world’s violent history.

The race for the elfin people’s salvation opens unwelcome windows into Kai’s murky past, and it could also slam the door on any future he might have with his own kind and Ryder.

Purchase Mad Lizard Mambo at these and other fine book sites:

DSP Publications:
https://www.dsppublications.com/books/mad-lizard-mambo-by-rhys-ford-309-b

Amazon Link:
https://www.amazon.com/Mad-Lizard-Mambo-Gracen-Book-ebook/dp/B01K9KEXSA/