New Release - Kim Cresswell's 'Lethal Journey'.

Recently a friend of mine, award-winning author Kim Cresswell, told me about her upcoming release 'Lethal Journey,' and I quickly volunteered to do a feature on her and her book. Kim is a lovely person and her writing is of a quality and standard worthy of praise, so it is without hesitation that I present her and her latest work to you.

 

Kim lives in Ontario, Canada and has been a story-teller all her life. After working in legal and adult education for most of her adult life she has thankfully returned to her first love, writing.

Her debut thriller, REFLECTION, has won numerous awards, including the UP Authors Fiction Challenge Winner (2013), Silicon Valley's Romance Writers of America (RWA) "Gotcha!" Romantic Suspense Winner (2004) and an Honourable Mention in Calgary's (RWA) The Writer's Voice Contest (2006).

LETHAL JOURNEY was a finalist in From the Heart Romance Writers (FTHRW) Golden Gate Contest (2003).

Her action-packed thrillers have been highly praised by reviewers and readers worldwide. As one reviewer said, "Buckle up, Hang on tight!"

Kim also recently entered the True Crime arena. Her latest story about accused Canadian killer, Cody Legebokoff, will be featured in Serial Killer Quarterly, a new e-magazine published by Grinning Man Press which debuts in December 2013. Her short story collection, Real Life Evil - A True Crime Quickie will release in January 2014.

 LETHAL JOURNEY 

Lethal Journey is a novella inspired by Kim's fascination with the Mafia and her love of action-packed thrillers.

  

A killer lurks in the shadows of Hyde Park, New York…waiting.

Manhattan District Attorney, Lauren Taylor, is about to take on the most important case of her career, prosecuting Gino Valdina, acting mob boss of New York’s most influential crime syndicate.

For three decades, Gino Valdina has led New York’s Valdina crime family. Since his recent indictment for murder, the leadership of the family is in turmoil, appalled by the death of one of their own, Gino’s wife, Madelina. Without the support of the family behind him, Valdina will do anything to save himself.

But Lauren soon discovers, things aren’t always as they seem when she’s tossed into a mystery, a deadly conspiracy that reaches far beyond the criminal underworld and a journey into the past makes her a target…and anyone she’s ever loved.

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Praise

“An entertaining and complex novella with some solid twists at the end.” — Cheryl Kaye Tardif, international bestselling author of SUBMERGED

“High tension, high intrigue, and an angry mob boss put young Assistant DA Lauren Taylor on the defensive as she prepares for the biggest courtroom case of her life. All she has to do is stay alive long enough to put the head of one of New York’s biggest crime families behind bars, and the jury is out on whether she can pull that off. Her greatest ally is a man she knew and loved long ago, who shredded her heart as his own demons of guilt tried to drown him in an alcohol induced haze.  

Lethal Journey by Kim Cresswell hits the ground running and does not stop! Are people as they seem or is there more to them? As the attempts on her life escalate and people close to her go missing, Lauren doesn’t have many options on who to trust. Enter the one man who broke her heart, Eric, a homicide detective who has also felt the burn of getting too close to the mob. Can Lauren trust him? Does she have a choice? It would be so much easier if her heart would stay out of it, wouldn’t it?

 
Kim Cresswell’s talent shines through again! With a talent for setting the stage, bringing in the characters and cuing the action, she held me from page one. She is not afraid to write a tale that is real, where the good guys do not go unscathed and they are not perfect. There is grit in her style, and when she says you are in a warehouse with a stench, you smell it. The romantic tension runs high, and using character flashbacks to the past not only builds on the development of each character as a flesh and blood entity, but serve to eventually bring everything full circle with an ending that you will NOT see coming!” —Tome Tender’s Book Blog 

“Lethal Journey, a fast-paced novella hits all the points of a romantic murder mystery. The protagonist is Lauren Taylor, the prosecutor in the trial of a Mafia crime boss who once before slid out from under the punishment he so deserves. Her father is the district attorney, both enmeshed in a tragic family history they can’t leave behind. Eric Brennan is the tough police detective, who moves in and out of Lauren’s life as their sometimes love connection flourishes and then falls apart. There are other great characters in this drama who deftly fill in the blanks as the plot of murder, deception and tenuous connections twist into a knot that defies the reader to solve the mystery and unearth the true antagonist. Be prepared for a surprise ending that will blow you away. It’s a quick read that will keep your attention. Kudos to Kim Cresswell for a job well done.” - Review by Fran Orenstein, Sunwriter

Need more convincing? Here's an excerpt from Lethal Journey

"Eric slowed the Mustang to a crawl and searched the street for his informant, Jimmy Flame. This part of Brooklyn had it all — garbage, graffiti and gangs — a snake pit where debts were paid in blood. As it turned out, he spotted the lanky twenty-something-drug-dealer strolling up the sidewalk.

Eric didn’t trust the scar-faced kid dressed in clothes three sizes too big, but Jimmy knew the streets and somehow stayed clear of the gangs. A real miracle. He also knew Jimmy would be discreet, if he knew what was good for him.

Eric pulled the car over and stopped. Jimmy looked him square in the eye, turned, and kept walking. Eric jumped out of the car and snatched the back of Jimmy’s shirt. “We need to talk.” He whirled him around.

“Hey, you promised you’d only come around at night.” Jimmy scanned up and down the street clearly worried someone might see him with a cop.

“It’s important. Get in.”

Jimmy hopped into the car and scrunched down low in the passenger seat. Eric started the engine and glanced at Jimmy’s low riding jeans. “How the hell can you wear those baggy ass pants? They should be outlawed.”

“What man? You don’t like my gear? These pants are cool.” Jimmy ran his hand over his knee. “What’s so important?”

“Heard anything about prosecutor Stephen Taylor or the new district attorney?” Jimmy kept one hand clutched on the door handle.

Convinced the kid might bolt if he had the chance, Eric sped up.

“I ain’t heard nothing on the DA, but—”

“If you know something, spit it out. I’m not in the mood for games.” Eric looked at him. 

Jimmy’s shaved head glistened with sweat in the early morning sun.

“Man you’re gonna get me killed.” Jimmy sank back into the seat, his fingers tightened around the handle of the door. “Some dude was looking for someone to put the scare into Taylor and the DA. I never saw him, but one of my boys told the guy to hit the road. The deal didn’t smell right. Something was way off.”

“How did Paul Cassico end up dead?”

Jimmy lit a cigarette and took an extra-long drag. “Cassico is a small-time bookie, you know, neighborhood shit, horse races and fights. Valdina learned the guy would be cooperating with the feds so Valdina had one of his crew take him out.”

“Did Cassico ever mention who killed my father?”

“The stupid shit went around flappin’ his gums. Said he knew who shot the cop in the warehouse drug deal. He also said he’d make a large stash when he went to the cops.”

Eric’s heart pounded. “Did he give a name, Jimmy?”

“Nope.”

“Shit. I need to find the shooter.”

“I don’t wanna get involved with Valdina’s crew. You’re talking Mafia.” Jimmy shook his head. “Man. I’m too young to die.”

Eric could tell by the quiver in the kid’s voice, he was scared. Something he’d never seen before. “Has someone threatened you?”

“Not yet. They will as soon as I start asking questions.”

“You’re smart. You’ll find a way to get the info. Besides, if you piss me off, I’ll drag your drug-pedalling ass off to jail. You understand?”

Jimmy remained silent for a moment. “Man, you’re a hard-ass.”

“Find out what you can.” Eric steered the car into an empty parking lot and tossed fifty bucks at him. “I’ll be back in a couple of days and watch your back.”

As Eric pulled away, he heard Jimmy call him an asshole. Okay, he deserved that. And yeah, he was tough on the kid when he needed to be. It was all part of the job. He liked Jimmy, but he’d never admit it. From what he just witnessed, Jimmy was scared shitless and that worried Eric even more."

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Back Story. Behind the Scenes, 'Blood Related' out-takes.

More sneak peaks at the origins of 'Blood Related'

Throughout the book you will find these adages referenced to some degree. Inescapable truths about the evil of humanity. The degree to which some of us can go, parasitic hominid but essentially as those who have come before, right back to the ocean, the shallow end of the gene-pool. After all, in some ways we are all Blood Related.

Food for thought.

'Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a god.'

- Jean Rostand

For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak With most miraculous organ. 

- William Shakespeare
Source: Hamlet Prince of Denmark (Hamlet at II, ii)

The very emphasis of the commandment: Thou shalt not kill, makes it certain that we are descended from an endlessly long chain of generations of murderers, whose love of murder was in their blood as it is perhaps also in ours.
- Sigmund Freud

It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.

- Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) British author.

You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination.

- Thomas de Quincey (1785-1859) British author and intellectual.

When once a certain class of people has been placed by the temporal and spiritual authorities outside the ranks of those whose life has value, then nothing comes more naturally to men than murder. 

- Simone Weil (1910-1943) French Philosopher

Cruel with guilt, and daring with despair, the midnight murderer bursts the faithless bar; invades the sacred hour of silent rest and leaves, unseen, a dagger in your breast. 

- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) British author.

Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest. 

- W. H. Auden (1907-1973) English-born poet and man of letters.

 

Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have it; it does not unsettle him, or fright him from his ordinary notice of trifles; it is an act quite easy to be contemplated.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) U.S. poet, essayist and lecturer.

A murderer is regarded by the conventional world as something almost monstrous, but a murderer to himself is only an ordinary man. It is only if the murderer is a good man that he can be regarded as monstrous.

- Graham Greene (1904-1991) English writer.

People begin to see that something more goes to the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads to kill and be killed – a knife – a purse - and a dark lane. Design, gentlemen, grouping, light and shade, poetry, sentiment, are now deemed indispensable to attempts of this nature.

 - On Murder, Considered As One Of The Fine Arts. Thomas de Quincey (1827)

Once that you’ve decided on a killing

First you make a stone of your heart

And if you can find that your hands are still willing

Then you can turn a murder into art.

The Police, ‘Murder by Numbers’

Acts must be carried through to their completion. Whatever their point of departure, the end will be beautiful. It is because an action has not been completed that it is vile.

 - Genet, Journal du Voleur

A work of art is a dream of murder, which is realized by an act.

 - Sartre, Saint Genet

In that every action today leads to murder, direct or indirect, we cannot act until we know whether or why we have the right to kill.

 - Camus, L’Homme revolte

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create . . .

- T.S. Eliot, ‘the Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’

We have to become murderers in order to experience ourselves as real . . . isn’t that horrible?

 - Gregor von Rezzori, The Death of my Brother Abel

The murderer is the last man who still seeks human contact; the remaining members of the species merely continue to ride past each other on escalators. In such a world, murder and conflict govern humanity.

 - Heiner Muller

The Second Coming

W.B Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert.

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

……….

And who made terror, madness, crime, remorse,

      Which from the links of the great chain of things               20

      To every thought within the mind of man

      Sway and drag heavily, and each one reels

      Under the load towards the pit of death;

      Abandoned hope, and love that turns to hate;

      And self-contempt, bitterer to drink than blood;

      Pain, whose unheeded and familiar speech

      Is howling, and keen shrieks, day after day;

      And Hell, or the sharp fear of Hell?

From Prometheus Unbound by Percy Bryce Shelley

Angelic Knight Press: William Cook - BLOOD RELATED, debut Novel to be released December

Angelic Knight Press: William Cook:


Angelic Knight Press is excited to announce that William Cook, a very talented author, poet, and artist/ illustrator from New Zealand will be gracing us with his presence in the form of his fantastic novel "Blood Related" which we are slating for release in December. We have to take advantage of the holiday season sales mania! 

Yvonne, Stacey, and I are in love with this chilling horror, mystery tale. William sent us a very polished Ms. Below is a portion of the synopsis sent to us by him.

Meet Caleb Samael Cunningham, a diabolical serial-killer with an inherited psychopathology, passed down via a blood-soaked genealogy. Caleb is a disturbed young man whose violent father is a suspected serial killer and mother, an insane alcoholic. After his Father’s suicide, Cunningham’s disturbing fantasy-life becomes reality, as he begins his killing spree in earnest. His identical twin brother Charlie is to be released from an asylum and all hell is about to break loose, when the brothers combine their deviant talents.Blood Related is a serial-killer/crime novel told in a first-person narrative style from the killer’s (Caleb’s) point-of-view. 

Need I say any more? Later, I will, but for now this should give you a vivid idea of what to expect with this great novel. As for the cover art, William asked if he could do his own. He is quite an accomplished artist so I naturally said yes. We can hardly wait to see what he will present to us.

We feel very fortunate to have William joining us. Angelic Knight Press is not the only publisher interested in publishing this novel. We won!


Keep tuned for more information, dates, etc. Exciting times for all of us!

Novel finally finished - hooray. Now to find a publisher [hopefully]!

Hi, it's been a while as I have been working frantically to complete my novel before Christmas time. It has been a 'work in progress' for the past four years and i'm pleased to say that the end is nigh. I am editing the last draft and will have it ready for submission to publishers in the New Year. As you can probably guess from the book cover mock-up (by yours truly) and the working title, it is a novel about a killer. Actually about a family of killers to be exact, told through the journals of a budding serial killer whose twin brother is also afflicted with the same unfortunate disposition.

I guess you could place this novel under the genre banner of 'Serial Killer Fiction,' or crime fiction. I realise that this field is littered with cliched monsters all trying to replicate the success of Harris's Hannibal Lecter trilogy +, hopefully I might have succeeded in providing a new twist to the genre - or at least to the smaller sub-genre of 'First-person Serial Killer Fiction.' Whew, anyway - worth a crack, so there it is.

If I don't have any success with publishers I will probably post it here in installments for at least some people to read and hopefully enjoy.

If anyone has any publishing contacts who might be interested in this kind of work please let me know via 3cagency@gmail.com. Also, what do you think of the cover?

Have a great Christmas everyone. Will/Grant.