THE PORTAL series has a wonderfully addictive blend of witchcraft and history. Witches and legends and saving the world from bad demons. Over three thousand years ago, three sisters were killed for practicing witchcraft, and throughout those years since they've been born again and again until the time has now come for them to serve their true purpose. But is their purpose for good or evil? And who is good or evil?
Indira is a modern day witch who doesn't like covens and refuses to be conformed. She is now a non-believer. In her dreams she lives through the life and death of a woman who is not her modern day self but it's her nevertheless. A woman who is pushed over a cliff by the man she loved.
In style that was very much like the movie Stigmata, she has a power that takes over her and makes her do things or does things to her. That's when she accepts the help of a priest who had decided to renounce his clergy position because he had lost his faith. But he will help Indy as his last job.
Their connection was pretty instant but with the fact that they are playing for two different teams, or so they thought, and the fact that he's a priest all prevent them from acting on that attraction. If you ask me, that might've been dragged a little too much and I always hate when the characters have to fight an obvious attraction for so long.
However, Indy was a fun heroine. Even if at times a bit crazy, she was still strong and determined to do the right thing. Father Tomas was hot and sexy and I guess I just wish he would've dropped that habit a lot sooner.
In order to do what she's supposed to do today, she must remember the past. I loved how the two overlapped and almost reflected the events. And although I feel that the story of the demon trapped on the other side of the Portal maybe wasn't developed enough, I have the feeling that the next book (or maybe that would be the third) will address that.
My one recommendation and complaint would be about the prequel to this series. I would definitely recommend that you read LEGACY OF THE WITCH before reading this book because it'll give you a good base as to the story and what's driving this series. My complaint is also about that prequel. I was very interested in the characters that we met there and would love to see how those puzzle pieces fit in the series but none of that was addressed in this book. I would've liked to see a small tie in.
Maidens, we have a treat today for you! We got a chance to ask the talented New York Times best selling author Maggie Shayne. She's kicking off her new series, The Portal and just released the first book MARK OF THE WITCH yesterday! If you haven't had a chance to take a look at the beautiful site she's put together for this series, then head on over to The Portal Series. And now, please help us welcome her to UTC!
Thanks for being with us today!! MARK OF THE WITCH is the first book in your The Portal trilogy. What can we expect from this book that we haven't heard already?
I didn’t plan them this way, but the books of this series wound up being far more than action-adventure-paranormal-suspense-breathlessly romantic novels. They took me deeper, on a spiritual journey and a quest for answers to some unanswerable questions. They are meaningful and maybe helpful to people beyond just being entertaining.
How did the idea for this series came about?
I’ve been studying the Ancient Mesopotamian civilizations for almost as long as I’ve been writing. Sumer and Babylon have fascinated me for years, probably because Sumer had the first written language (that we know of.) The first stories were Sumerian, and they hold up remarkably well. The first author whose name appeared on her story, was a woman, a high priestess of Inanna named En-Heduanna, and the story she wrote about the Goddess spread throughout Sumer and changed society and the religious structure, elevating Inanna to Queen of Heaven status. This she did with clay tablets and a reed-stylus. Amazing. Since I’ve also been a practicing Wiccan for just as many years, combining these two areas of expertise in a novel seemed like the next logical step.
The Wings in the Night series has been undergoing some changes throughout the years. I'll admit that I just started reading it at Demon's Kiss because I wasn't aware it was a series. Especially now with the re-release of some older titles in the series, with beautiful new covers by the way, how would you help a new reader knowing how to tackle this series?
Begin with the ebook bundles, Wings in the Night, Part 1, and Wings in the Night, Part 2. They include the first 12 stories in the series, at bargain prices. Part 1 is 9.99 and Part 2 is 15.37. Total breaks down to about $2.00 per story. That’s cheap.
From there, you’d still have the six most recent stories left to catch up, and those aren’t in bundles yet.
If you don’t read in ebooks, I don’t have a lot of hope for you. The earliest stories just aren’t out in print yet, and I have no way of knowing if or when the publisher will reprint them. If you’re resisting buying an e-reader, I suggest you compromise by downloading the free kindle or nook app onto your computer, tablet or smartphone and reading the books that way.
Do you have plans for releasing any more books in this series or in the Children of Twilight series?
I will never call this series finished. I left off with my surviving characters, post-vampire-Armageddon, hiding out in Romania, because I just that was an ironic place to put them. And it will make a fabulous setting for them to re-emerge when the time is right. In the meantime, I hope you’ll soon be enjoying some of Rhiannon’s backstory in a series of shorts we’ll be calling The Rhiannon Chronicles. Keep watching my soon to be remodeled website maggieshayne.com and my FB page for further announcements.
Obviously you've been writing about vamps since before Twilight made them famous again, but how do you feel the Twilight phenomenon has impacted not only paranormal but reading in general?
Twilight picked up where Harry Potter left off, in pulling a new generation of readers into the fold. The teenage twilight fans are the future of the grown up romance novel genre. Everything that is successful lays groundwork for more things to be successful. I think Stephanie Meyer’s phenomenal success with her series is nothing but a huge gift to reader and every writer out there.
Which authors are on your must buy list?
Stephen King, Gregg Braden, Sandra Brown, Karen Robards, Anne Stuart, Christina Dodd, Teresa Medeiros, Jane Porter, Shelly Thacker, Gayle Callen aka Emma Cane, Christine Wenger, Susan Mallery, Nalini Singh and so many many more. Also, reliable sources say that Phoebe Conn and Rebecca Paisley, some top romance divas who’ve been away for a while, are both making comebacks and I couldn’t more excited.
Of ANY book character, who would you want to have a date with?
You know, every one of my male characters are just thinly disguised versions of my soulmate Lance. Some are more alpha than he is, some are more beta than he is, some are richer, some are poorer, and they all have more of a dark side to them. My Lance just has no bad in him.
I’m so ridiculously in love that after seeing Real Steel with another couple, the female half of that pair and I were recapping the film privately while freshening up and she said, “Best part was seeing Hugh Jackman with his shirt off.” And I said, “He had his shirt off?”
Yeah, I’ve got it bad.
So my answer is, I get to “date” them all. I live with their inspiration.
And which female character in ANY book would you take out for a drink?
The female characters are all based on various parts of my inner self. And we don’t drink. ;) But if you’re asking my favorite, ever, female character, it’s Rhiannon. I adore her.
Tell us the first thing that comes to mind:
* Shifter: The cool “Rat Fink” shifter knob I bought Lance for his Boss 5.4 pickup truck. * Vampire: Dracula * Tattoos: Ouch! (I have two. I will not get more. I cried when they pierced my ears, so....)
Thank you so much for stopping by Maggie and now a little teaser excerpt and book trailer from MARK OF THE WITCH.
Dammit straight to hell, I was being sacrificed again.
I stood on the edge of a precipice, the hard ground under my bare feet already warming beneath the rising, scorching sun. The unblinking red-orange eye of an angry god rose slowly over distant desert sands, beyond endless dunes, watching as I paid for the sin of practicing magic without a license.
Just as I had been at every execution before, I was dressed in almost nothing. A white scrap of fabric tied at my hip, covering one leg and leaving the other bare below the knot. Another length of the same stuff was draped around my neck, crossed in front to cover each of my humongous boobs, and then tied behind to keep it there. I wore no jewelry. Resentment rose up in me at the notion that Sindar, High Priest of Marduk had stolen it. And then I wondered how I knew that.
This isn’t me, after all. I mean, it feels like it’s me, but it can’t be, me. She’s olive skinned. She’s gorgeous. Her boobs are huge. I’m pale and blonde and too thin. No curves here. Not like those, anyway.
And yet it was me. I was there. On that cliff, in that body. No denying it.
There were two other women, dressed pretty much the same way I was, standing on either side of me. I felt close to them. I loved them.
Three men stood behind us. I felt the one behind me, his hands, warm and trembling, resting softly on my back, low, near my waist, where the skin was bare. My back was screaming with pain I didn’t understand, but that man’s touch was good. Soothing. I tried to relish it, thinking it was the last time I would feel it, or anything good. Ever.
I wanted to turn my head, to look back at him, to see his face, but somehow I could not convince my dream self to do that. It didn’t matter, though. I knew what he looked like. In my mind, I saw him clearly; his long, black hair, his fine white tunic with a sash of scarlet, the fat gold torc around his corded neck. His arms were banded with steel and coated in fine dark hairs. He was strong, and he had ebony eyes.
I didn’t need to see him, nor the poor, half dead captive man held by soldiers a bit farther away. He was still struggling to break free as they forced him to watch. He’d already been beaten bloody. I’d glimpsed his face as they’d marched us up the cliff, far from our city gates. He barely looked human. His own mother wouldn’t have known him.
And Sindar, the High Priest, he was there too. I knew his face as well. Eyes lined with kohl, lips darkened with the juices of rare desert berries. The rolls of fat at his neck, sporting layers upon layers of gold. His robes of the finest fabric, imported from the East. His belly so big that his golden cords had to be tied above the bulge, making him look like a mother about to give birth. I knew he was there, knew the secret lust in his eyes for what was about to happen to us. He was twisted, turned on by violence. Or maybe just by the rush of knowing he held the power of life and death in his hands.
I was going to have to kill him one day.
I tried to look at the other women instead, because, aside from the touch of those large male hands on my skin, they were the most interesting part of this whole thing. They had dark hair and dark eyes, just like I did. But as I looked at them, they changed, the way a reflection in still water will change when a stone is dropped into it. One, briefly became a blue-eyed brunette, and the other, a fiery redhead, modern looking women in modern looking clothes. It was brief, the illusion, and then the High Priest was speaking in some long dead language, and the hands at my back began trembling harder than before, kneading my waist, I thought, and I closed my eyes in some kind of bittersweet anguish.
“Remember, my sisters,” said the brunette, who had, of course, become raven haired again now. “Remember what we must do. We cannot cross over until it is done.”
Oddly, the words I heard were spoken in some exotic language, and yet I understood every word.
I tugged at the ropes that bound my wrists, tugged so hard I felt new blood seeping from the welts those ropes had already cut into my flesh because of my struggling. My gaze strayed to the jagged rocks far, far below, and my toes dug into the hard earth as my body instinctively resisted.
But as always, it was futile, and I knew it. And I relaxed, and reminded myself of the plan.
An instant later, my body was plummeting.
There were no screams, not one, not from any of us, as we arrowed downward like hawks diving onto their chosen prey. Our own weight propelled us as our feet peddled uselessly. The only sounds were the soft flapping of our garments, and the arid wind rushing past my ears and face, whipping my long black hair above me. I smelled that wind, sucking it in deeply, tasting every flavor it held in my final breath. I closed my eyes, and awaited my fate. And I heard the other two, their voices chanting some familiar verse and I joined them. My heart raced faster and faster as I waited to feel the impact of the already bloodstained rocks below.
There was a sudden, jarring blow, like the hit of a powerful electric jolt, in every cell of my body. And then nothing. Blackness.
About the Author
Maggie Shayne is best known as the New York Times bestselling author of
more than 50 novels, nearly 30 novellas, a former soap writer, (The
Guiding Light, As the World Turns,) a former advice columnist (Shayne on
You,) and RITA Award winner. But what’s less known about her is that
she’s been a practicing Witch for almost as long as she’s been a
published author.
Not knowing what to expect of this series, this prequel was the perfect teaser. A touch of the Middle East, legends, witches and a magical box. This series is shaping up to be a very interesting read.
Amarrah's grandmother used to tell her stories from long ago about three witches in the king's harem, and how they could never find love. Except Amarrah knew these stories, because she had been there and lived through them. On her deathbed, her grandmother puts her in charge of guarding a box from those times, a box without a lock that cannot be open. But Amarrah quickly loses it. Now years later, while Amarrah has made a life for herself in American and forgotten a lot about those stories, the box reappears and turns her world upside down. And it brings her to Sergeant Harrison Brockson.
Amarrah is a character I can grow to like. She didn't do much for me other than the fact that I could see her determination to get the box back and not fail her grandmother, at any cost. Harrison is hot, in a alpha, men in uniform, kinda way.
I loved the flashbacks that Amarrah has. They serve the purpose of giving the reader a good glimpse into the witches and what the series is about, but they also serve the purpose of showing you the connection between Amarrah and Harrison. A connection that has lasted through times and even though they are different people today.
Then there's the box. The box has me very intrigued. What power does it have? What is Amarrah's mission with the box? And obviously it has power because other people want it as well.
I can't wait to dive in and start reading the first book in this series. I am very curious if it will be Amarrah's journey or if the books will focus on bringing happiness to the witches that were denied then.
If you know me, you know I'm pretty much OCD about reading a series in order, most of the time that includes prequels and short stories. At least I try as much as possible. But I'm sad to say Wings in the Night has been the one series I haven't done that. I picked up books 13, 14 and 15 (without knowing they were part of a bigger series) because they were available at the time on audio. I thought they were pretty good and had a fairly decent storyline. Then I find out there's MORE as in A LOT MORE books!
So one day I'll go back and try to catch up with all the books I've missed. But for now I had the oppotunity to read this book and I have to say I'm glad I did! It was really, really good! And from what I remember of the stories in the books I read, I was not too lost following this story.
Basically the concept is an immortal was risen to kill all vampires! Utana was trapped for about 5000 years and he believes the Gods have assigned him with the mission of exterminating all vampires using his powers. James is the 1/4 vampire Chosen that raises him, and his twin sister Brigit is now sent to kill him and prevent the destruction of their people. But now it's not just him, and his appointed mission, the government wants to use him as a weapon in their efforts to get rid of vampires.
Of course what has to happen is that cute caveman-like Utana and 1/4 vampire Brigit, who should be enemies, fall in love, or is lust, at first sight.
Utana is soooo adorable, trying to learn english at a rapid rate, and learning how things work by just touching them and trying to drive Brigit's car. He feels a connection to her instantly and wants to do what's possible to spare at least her life.
Brigit can't bring herself to kill him, even when she has a chance. But she slowly starts believing there's hope that she can show him there's another way. But she might have to go against her family to do that.
At the beginning I was a bit confused because every few pages we were switching to someone else's POV, I almost couldn't figure out who the book was about. But once the plot was set up and the story progressed, it was written very well and covered all bases.
I did notice the appearance of a character I enjoyed in the books I did read, Roxy, the oldest Chosen alive, she's such a cool chick! The Chosen are humans who have the Belladonna antigen that allows them to turn into vampires. In general, vampires are compelled to protect the Chosen and they can feel their pain and distress. But the Chosen are now being used to attract all vampires to their death!
This book had enough action, humor and sexiness to keep me very interested! I would definetely recommend it!
An Enchanted Season (Psy Changeling #3.5 & Murphy Sisters #1)
by Nalini Singh, Erin McCarthy, Maggie Shayne & Jean Johnston
Anthology-Paranormal Romance & Contemporary
Find it on Goodreads!
Overall Anthology Score:
I thought two of the stories in here were great I loved them, but the other two not so much. But I think likeing 50% is pretty good so I definately don't regret buying this anthology
Melting Frosty by Maggie Shayne
Holly and Matthew both had tradegy strike when they were 12 years old around the Christmas holidays. They both reacted completely differently though, Matthew has become a Scrooge who hates everything about Christmas and Holly who loves it and sees it as a chance to celebrate her happy childhood.
I didn't like this story that much, I found Holly really irritating, I don't like to think of myself as miserable, but bloody hell I hate it when characters are all happy-happy-joy-joy, does it make me a bitch if it makes me wanna slap and tell them to stop smiling all the damn time?! Matthew was okay, he was meant to be ruthless and icy, but he soon melted under the glare of all that Christmas cheer.
It was a quick read and it did have some funny and sweet moments but it just wasn't for me.
Charlottes Web by Erin McCarthy (Murphy Sisters #1)
Charlotte has loved for 8 years. 8 years of lusting and yearning for him. But what she doesn't know is that Will loves her right back, has done for years. With a little bit of witchery will they finally get together this year?
I LOVED this story. I have never read Erin McCarthy before although I have had Flat-Out Sexy on my TBR mountain for quite a while! I think now that I have had a taste of EM's writing it is going to be bumped up a bit! The story was funny, sexy and a little mischevious and it definately left me gagging for more.
Beat of Temptation by Nalini Singh (Psy-Changeling #3.5)
This is novella is the reason I got this book and I am so glad I did! It is about Tamsyn the DarkRiver packs healer and Nate one of the packs Senitals. If you have read the Psy Changeling books you will recognize them, they have been together for a long time and this book lets us see just how they got together. Like all NS's book it was fabulous, I loved both Nate and Tamsyn and I think together they make a great couple.
If you are a fan of the Psy Changeling series then this is a great little story about two of the recurring characters, if Psy Changeling is new to you then this gives you a glimpse in to the amazingness of this series!
Gifts of the Magi by Jean Johnston
A couple are running a Bed & Breakfast but it has hit hard times, a mortgage payment is due and a massive snow storm has just started meaning that all the guests booked into the Inn for Christmas have had to cancel. But when a Buddist, a Jew and a Muslim (yes I know the start of a bad joke lol!) unexpectedly walk through the door it all starts to look up.
A really sweet story about looking on the brightside and the virtues of hardwork. It was nice, it was cute, but it wasn't for me. I found it a little boring and there wasn't much of a story going on, just a series of unfortunate events that turn in to a series of miracles. It wasn't bad, but maybe I would have apprciated it more if I read it at Christmas time!!
