Shadows & Dreams Blog Tour!

By now, we're all pretty familiar with me and my penchant for Riptide. And so it's not exactly a surprise that I would bring you a new blog tour from Riptide: this time for Shadows & Dreams by Alexis Hall!

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Hello, and welcome to my second ever blog tour, celebrating Riptide Publishing’s release of Shadows & Dreams, the sequel to Iron & Velvet. Yay! Thank you so much to The Saucy Wenches Book club for hosting me. And, to you, dear reader, for stopping by. If you’d like to come with me and keep me company on my virtual wanderings, you can find a full listing of when and where I am.







There’s also some kind of contest type thing happening. I had a bit of trouble choosing a prize for this one because most of the things Kate likes (booze, cigarettes, knives, women) are illegal to ship internationally. I thought about a fedora, but then I remembered people had differently shaped heads and there was no point sending somebody an item of clothing they wouldn’t be able to wear. So, basically, that leaves coffee and Bovril and nobody likes Bovril except people from the North East of England. I’m therefore going offer 250g of Jamaican Blue Mountain, the nicest coffee in the known universe, purchased from a wonderful specialty shop, ground or beaned to your specification. If you don’t like coffee, I’ll replace it with an equivalently lovely tea. I’ll also throw in a hard copy of Iron & Velvet (or the other thing I wrote) if that’s the sort of thing you’d like. I can even scribble stuff in it, thus reducing its re-sale value … or, y’know, not do that. I’ll announce the winner a handful of days after the end of the tour.

About AJH

Alexis Hall was born in the early 1980s and still thinks the twenty-first century is the future. To this day, he feels cheated that he lived through a fin de siècle but inexplicably failed to drink a single glass of absinthe, dance with a single courtesan, or stay in a single garret. He can neither cook nor sing, but he can handle a seventeenth century smallsword, punts from the proper end, and knows how to hotwire a car. He lives in southeast England, with no cats and no children, and fully intends to keep it that way.
You can also find him all over the internet, on his website, Facebook, Twitter, BookLikes, and Goodreads.

About Shadows & Dreams

Second rule in this line of business: be careful who you kill.
My name’s Kate Kane. And right now, I don’t know which is more dangerous: my job, or my girlfriend. My job makes me the go-to girl for every supernatural mystery in London. My girlfriend’s an eight-hundred-year-old vampire prince. Honestly, I think it’s probably a tie.
A few weeks ago, I was hired for a simple missing person case. Next thing I know, I’m being arrested for murder, a vampire army is tearing up London, and even my dreams are out to get me. Something ancient, evil, and scary as hell is on the loose and looking for payback. The vampires are in chaos, the werewolves are culling everything, and the Witch Queen can’t protect everyone.
Which means it’s down to me. And all I’ve got to hold back the shadows is a stiff drink, a quirky sidekick, my creepy ex-boyfriend, and the woman who left me for a tech startup. It’s going to be another interesting day.

You can read an excerpt and, y’know, cough, buy the book, if you want, at Riptide Publishing.

Review:

This, I think, marks the first time I've read something from Riptide that I didn't absolutely love. This was not, by any stretch, a bad book. However, it didn't grab me the way most titles I review do. I'm not sure if it's just that I didn't connect well with the characters, or if I was off-put by the vernacular, but something just didn't click. Now, as far as plot goes, the story itself was excellent. The turns were well executed, and the characters were well-developed (except where they weren't supposed to be!).

There were quite a few elements in play, and all of them dovetailed well into the final scenes, but I found I had a hard time caring about the outcome. I wanted to know how it went, yes, but not due to any desire to see any specific ending for any particular character. I suspect for many people this will be a spectacular book, a great addition to the series, and they will be anxiously waiting for the next release from Mr Hall. Sadly, I'm not one of those people. However, to help you understand how surprised I was that this didn't grab me, and how excellent the mechanics of the book are, let me say this: I'm going to give it another try. I haven't had time to pick it up yet, largely because I've been research gal recently, but Kate Kane is heading right to the front my re-reads, and I'm going to give it another go, this time with a better understanding of what the world is about, and how things work. For now, however...
Wench Rating: