Elise Noble's Blog

The Girl with the Emerald Ring




Alaric's story will start on August 31st!

Here's a sneak peek...

“Fuck, Cinders—could you have found a more inappropriate surveillance vehicle?”

Alaric McLain watched in the rear-view mirror as Emmy Black closed up behind him in a sleek black Aston Martin. Even with his windows shut, he heard her approach.

“I’m sorry, okay?” Emmy’s voice came through the speakers in his rented Honda SUV. “I’ve had two hours’ sleep, and I’m barely functioning. I could’ve sworn there were more cars in the garage, but all that was left was this and a motorbike.”

“Why didn’t you bring the motorbike?”

“You want me to wear leathers in this temperature? I’d sweat like a pig.” Granted, she had a point there. Early May, and the weather in London had gone haywire. The last two days had been like a cheerleader’s pool party—wet and hot. “Plus there was nowhere to put my rifle.”

Alaric didn’t even try to hide his groan. “You brought a rifle? We’re chasing an art thief, not a bunch of terrorists.”

“You told me that terrorists steal art to finance their activities. ‘It’s not like in the movies,’” she mimicked. “‘Forget Ocean’s Twelve and The Thomas Crown Affair.’”

That was true. Many people shared a romanticised image of art thieves, fostered in no small part by Hollywood. In real life, men who took masterpieces didn’t do it for the challenge or a bet—more often than not, they were hardened criminals after cold, hard cash, and paintings made easier targets than, say, a bank or an armoured truck. Narcotics dealers used them as trading cards. Thieves sold them through fences for a fraction of their true value. Or occasionally, they were stolen to order for people who ran roughshod over others to satisfy their selfish desires.

The police didn’t tend to take art theft seriously either. As long as nobody got hurt and the insurance companies paid up, cultural crimes got put on the back burner. Despite the vast sums of money involved, museum heists got handled by the same squad as a common or garden burglary, and those cops didn’t have the knowledge or the resources to recover stolen paintings.

How did Alaric know all this? Because he’d once been a member of the FBI’s Art Crime Team, a small band of investigators and undercover agents who specialised in recovering treasures that would otherwise be lost forever. It had been a surprise transfer, a promotion, and it made a change from dealing with plain ol’ RICO violations. Although the Art Crime Team worked out of Washington, DC, he’d spent much of his time overseas, skulking through the underbelly of society in search of missing cultural artifacts. Many of them made their way to the United States—it was the biggest market in the world for stolen treasures.

One day, Alaric might have masqueraded as a thief, the next, as a middleman or a buyer. Undercover work was his speciality, the ability to hide in plain sight a skill he’d been perfecting since childhood. Colleagues called him a chameleon. His father was a diplomat, and moving from country to country had meant Alaric learned to fit in quickly. He’d lived everywhere from England to Italy to Tanzania to Poland, and as a result, he’d learned more about people than an entire anthropology department. It had been only natural for him to join the CIA after college and take his hobby of being places where he shouldn’t to a whole other level. Bureaucracy and a boss he couldn’t stand led him to quit after four years, but the FBI had welcomed him with open arms. At least, they had until they’d fired him.

Hence today’s little excursion.

The Girl with the Emerald Ring is available to pre-order now:
Amazon
iBooks
Kobo
Barnes & Noble
Google Play

Another month, another book released... This time, it's the tenth instalment of the Blackwood Security Series, The Scarlet Affair.

Reluctant spy Evie puts the espionage on hold to take care of Scarlet, only for the little girl’s father to turn her life upside-down. There's a bunch of bikers, an abandoned child, a morally defective computer hacker, and - of course - Emmy all rolled up into what some readers are calling the best Blackwood book yet.

More details on my website
Buy on Amazon
Buy on iBooks
Buy on Kobo
Buy on Google Play

If you'd like to win some Blackwood swag, just leave me a comment below saying whether you're Team Harley or Team Ducati, and I'll pick a winner at the end of August :)

So, I have a new Blackwood UK book out, and although I loved writing all the books in that series, I have to confess to having a weak spot for Zander. The dialogue between him and Dove still makes me laugh when I read it! Plus I enjoyed coming up with the mystery plot in this one too.

Shallow Graves is available from all retailers, and you can find the buy links HERE as well as entering my giveaway to win a signed copy of the book and other goodies.

Plus, as a little experiment, I thought I'd run a separate giveaway here - just comment on this post with your favourite character in Shallow Graves, and I'll pick a random winner to send some Blackwood swag at the end of June :)

[image error]

The blurb:

At thirty thousand feet, assassins invade the first class cabin and put a knife to my throat. Then one of the passengers hurls them aside like they're nothing. The gorgeous, gruff giant who saves me is Garrett Buchanan, a former Marine. When we uncover a conspiracy to murder me, he becomes the only one I can trust. To stay alive, we must go on the run together.

He's nothing like the men back home. He's as big and rugged as the Texas landscape. He might call me “Your Highness” but those blue eyes burn the clothes right off my body. I have to swap my dress and tiara for jeans and a plaid shirt and he shows me an America full of horses and sunsets and kisses in the rain. But the conspiracy goes further than we dreamed. To save my country, I must return home and take the throne long before I'm ready. And to protect me, Garrett must put on a suit and become a palace guard, forbidden to touch me, let alone kiss me.

I know we can't be together. I know princesses don't get to fall in love. So what do I do? Because I've completely fallen for this man.

My thoughts:

I love Helena Newbury's books. I haven't read a bad one yet, and Saving the Princess was no exception. The story starts with Kristina, princess of Lakovia, a small European country, almost getting sucked out of an aeroplane. The action never really lets up from there. Garrett, a giant Texan and former Marine, becomes her de-facto bodyguard after he saves her from splattering her pretty self all over the ground in California, and along with three of her staff, they start on a crazy journey to root out a traitor in their midst and get the princess home, all while outrunning a highly trained band of assassins.

It's the kind of book where you have to suspend disbelief a little, with a number of made-up countries and a heavy dose of insta-love, but the writing's superb and the characters have definite chemistry. In a way, it reminded me of the TV show Designated Survivor, where every time they recover from one disaster, something even worse happens. High-octane from start to end.

I would offer one suggestion, though – skip the prologue. It's basically lifted from a later chapter in the book, and I found it acted as somewhat of a spoiler.

[image error]

Join Amazon Kindle Unlimited 30-Day Free Trial [image error]

There's no escaping Amazon, is there? They sell everything from beds to ink cartridges to falafel mix. And eBooks. There are undoubtedly a lot of good things about the mighty ‘Zon, but with the good comes bad. They sell at great prices, yes, but their profit margins are low and rather than using people to run things, they seem to be turning more and more to automated bots.

[image error]

In the past few months, the rise of the bots has been causing more and more problems for the author community. First came their ineffective fight against Kindle Unlimited scammers. Do you know how the main KU scam works? It starts when the person behind the operation (and it is an operation) uploads a book. At best, this is a badly ghostwritten bad-boy romance, at worst, three thousand pages of gobbledegook. Then their click farmers go to work.

What's a click farm? Exactly what it sounds like. Some poor sod on minimum wage sitting in front of a bank of Kindles, flipping through pages to earn the half cent or so for each page of the “author's” book they turn. As KU payments come out of one big pool of money, basically the total amount in the pot divided by all the pages read that month, pages “read” in this way take money away from genuine authors who write real books.

As if that wasn't bad enough, Amazon made a half-hearted attempt to crack down on the click farms by closing accounts of authors where they identified, presumably by tracking IP addresses, books being read in this way. So, in an effort to cover their tracks, the people running the click farms began picking legitimate books at random and “reading” them too. And yes, you've guessed it, Amazon shut the innocent authors' accounts down as well. No discussion, no recourse.

How does this affect readers?

Authors wary of losing their Amazon accounts no longer put their books in KU.
Click farms push “their” books up the Amazon charts, meaning the hotlists are populated by sub-standard books and it's hard to find good stuff to read.

[image error]

After the click farm issues came the pre-order problems. When an author puts a book on pre-order with Amazon, on release day, everyone who pre-ordered gets the book for the lowest price it was offered at during the pre-order period. This means if an author initially prices the book at $4.99, then reduces it to $0.99 for even a day, everyone gets the book for $0.99. So no author ever does that. It's common sense, right?

The problem arises because of Amazon's price promise. If they find the book for sale on another eBook retailer at a lower price, they lower the price on Amazon to match it. Irritating, especially when Google Play's pricing is a law unto itself, but we work with it. But this price checking is done by – you've guessed it – bots. And what happens when the bot matches another book with a similar title, by another author, with yours? Yup, they reduce the price on the pre-order without even informing the author, and the author loses thousands of dollars. At best, the author notices in time and cancels the pre-order, and as a final kick in the teeth, Amazon revokes their pre-order privileges for a year for doing so.

How does this affect readers?

Worried authors no longer offer pre-orders on Amazon.
Authors who have lost thousands of dollars (and yes, this has happened), can no longer afford to write as they have to take a different job instead.

[image error]

That brings us to the third problem, the pièce de résistance, which appears to be Amazon's response to the bipartisan SESTA-FOSTA bill currently going through the US Senate. Originally written to help prevent online sex-trafficking, it has good intentions but is written in such vague language that it's implications are far wider reaching. Just to be on the safe side, eh?

Basically, it means that website owners are responsible for the content of their users, and could be prosecuted if they host any content that promotes or enables sex-trafficking. How are companies responding? Well, Craigslist has already removed its personals section. Reddit has removed several sub-Reddits. And Amazon has turned its bots on erotica titles in a seemingly scattergun approach. Erotica titles have now been removed from the main sales ranking list and hidden from search results. Aw, you like reading sexy books? Good luck with finding them in the future.

Even that might not be quite so bad if the bots actually knew how to identify an erotica book. So far, we've seen SciFi, Christian fiction, sweet romance, and thrillers confined to the “Adult dungeon,” never to be seen again. No amount of pleading with the limited number of human Amazon reps who actually exist will get these books out of prison.

Of course, because Amazon doesn't like to keep authors informed, they won't confirm the cause of the recent problems. We just see the effects, which are concerning for a large number of authors.

How does this affect readers?

Fans of steamy romance won't easily be able to find new books to read by using Amazon's search facility anymore. Even if you type in the author's name and book title, it still doesn't appear.
Some romance/erotica books will be placed in the wrong categories in an effort to get around the ban. As I type this, E.L. James's Grey has been classified as a “Holiday Romance.”
Authors are removing 18+ and trigger warnings from their blurbs in an attempt to stay under the radar.
Romance books are likely to have more conservative covers in the future.
Expect a lot of “love truncheons” and “velvet gloves” if we're not allowed to say cock or pussy anymore.
Some authors may quit Amazon or even stop writing altogether.

[image error]

If Amazon persists with this heavy-handed, misplaced censorship, authors will have to get more creative. I write romantic thrillers, and several of them touch on sex-trafficking – not to promote it, but to show how trafficking networks can be brought down. So, what options do I have?

I'll be selling books direct from my website. Because the processing fees are less than Amazon's fees, I'll even be able to do this at a small discount, as well as giving early access to new titles. The books will be delivered by BookFunnel, and you can find my new eBook store HERE.
This is still all shaking out. If, in the future, it seems the bots are triggered by keywords and we can work out what these are, I'll consider misspelling certain words deliberately. So far, it seems that any mention of kidnapping, trafficking, menage, reverse harem, or particular body parts appear to send a book to the dungeon. I'd rather have “traficcing” and get dinged in a review for a “spelling error” than have my books vanish into obscurity.
Other web stores, such as iBooks and Kobo, use people rather than bots to review their titles, and as such, they don't appear to be taking such a draconian approach. The next two books in my Blackwood Security series will touch on the darker side of the sex trade, and so current events in the Amazon world are making me a little nervous. I may have to offer a censored version of these books on Amazon if their bots/reviewers can't tell the difference between a thriller novel and some sick freak promoting trafficking.

As a reader, I'll be voting with my feet and my wallet. Today, I cancelled my Kindle Unlimited membership and installed the Kobo app on my iPad. I'm sure there'll still be a few Amazon exclusive books I want to buy, but from now on, when a book's available elsewhere, I'll buy it from iBooks or Kobo.

Ever wondered what it’s like to be an author? It’s not all moleskin notepads and brunch, you know. Here are a few things I’ve done in the name of writing:

– Googled “what does a fresh body smell like?”

– Asked a nice ex-soldier for his email address so I can contact him *for research purposes*

– Learned how to swear in at least six different languages.

– Tried windsurfing (“tried” being the operative word).

[image error]

Fuck, this is cold.

– Crawled around in the back of an Aston Martin Rapide while a bemused salesman looked on.

– Shot an AR-15 (yes, I hit the target).

– Taken an impromptu trip to Jordan to see what the desert looked like.

– Run two miles uphill and climbed over a security barrier to check out the pit lane at Le Mans.

[image error]

Fuck, this is wobbly.

– Sat in my kitchen making different facial expressions to see if they feel the way I described them.

– Bought forty pens in one shopping trip when I do most of my writing on my iPad.

– Apologised to my mother for yet another sex scene.

– Started reading a scene out loud only to realise I’m in public and people are watching.

– Yelled at my other half for breathing too loudly while I’m trying to concentrate (sorry).

[image error]

I'm standing up!

– Made up stories about random people sitting in coffee shops.

– Named characters I don’t like very much after people I don’t like very much.

– Done a whole hour’s research for what amounts to two lines in a book.

– Worn my pyjamas for a week straight when I was on a deadline.

[image error]

Crashing into a boat.

– Texted my dad in the middle of the night to ask how to make a car’s brakes fail.

– Lived on coffee and pizza for an entire week.

– Watched enough porn that I want to bleach my fucking eyes out.

– Sort of regretted that I’ve never dated a complete dick because it would have been an “interesting experience.”

– Driven around the M25 in the wrong direction without noticing because I was too busy thinking about a scene.

[image error]

Crashing into a different boat.

– Visited a mixing desk factory to learn how they work.

– Vacuumed the entire house because it’s more fun than editing.

– Paid attention during anti-money laundering training so I could use the information in a book.

– Borrowed a small child for the day. It was exhausting.

– Actually written stuff.

[image error]

Woohoo! This is kinda fun after all.

[image error]

The blurb:

Are you stressed out, overbooked and underwhelmed by life? Fed up with pleasing everyone else before you please yourself? Then it's time to stop giving a f**k.

This irreverent and practical book explains how to rid yourself of unwanted obligations, shame, and guilt – and give your f**ks instead to people and things that make you happy.

With a bonus section on how to save your sanity over the holiday season, the simple ‘NotSorry Method' for mental decluttering will help you unleash the power of not giving a f**k and will free you to spend your time, energy and money on the things that really matter.

My thoughts:

I found that I naturally started doing a lot of the stuff suggested a few years back when I was sick, but the book did reassure me that at least I'm not the only person to allocate my f**ks carefully. I'd recommend reading it if you find yourself getting overwhelmed by the sheer number of things you have to do. Plus it's hilarious, and if you're a naturally sweary person like me, you'll appreciate the sheer number of F-words the author manages to squeeze into 200 pages!

[image error]

[image error]

The blurb:

I'm Payton Blake. Just another successful twenty-something woman living the dream…

OK, that's a lie.

But I could be those things, if I had friends outside of work. If I didn't treat watermelon slushies like a food group.

Maybe if I'd had sex in the last year… 

Even if I wanted a relationship and my 24/7 work or family issues didn't get in the way? Max Donovan is the last guy for the job.

Sure, he made the indie video game that broke the internet.

He's brilliant. Gorgeous.

Oh yeah. And pierced.

But he's also cocky and way more jaded than any guy that rich has a right to be.

Staying away should be easy. We might be the same age, but we have nothing in common. Travel in totally different social circles, and…

What do you mean Max Donovan just became my biggest client?

My thoughts:

Newly promoted Payton, christened “The Dick Whisperer” by her best friend, Charlie, has one chance to land a big new client, and she screws it up, first by walking into a door and they by mistaking said client for a prankster. Turns out Max Donovan is anything but. The only way she can salvage the situation, and her career, is by learning to play Max's games, starting with his RPG bestseller, Oasis.

Max was a bit of an asshole to start with, too used to getting his own way and obsessed with gaming above all else. But he needs Payton's help, and as the two learn to work together, the chemistry between them is off the charts. I loved both characters, and parts of this book made me laugh out loud, which earned me some strange looks!

The supporting characters were great too – Riley the lawyer and especially Charlie, Payton's assistant. At the moment, I'm not keen on Avery, Payton's rival at work, but since the next book in this series follows him and Charlie, I'm hoping he'll grow on me.

[image error]

Join Amazon Kindle Unlimited 30-Day Free Trial [image error]

[image error]

The blurb:

In COMA GIRL, a victim of a tragic event lies in a hospital bed, at the mercy of friends and relatives who think she can't hear them. But she SO can.

My thoughts:

Coma Girl was billed as “family drama, suspense, comedy, and romance.” I wasn't entirely sure how that would happen, seeing as the main character, Marigold Kemp, was unconscious and confined to one room in a hospital – the “vegetable patch” – but somehow, Coma Girl managed to be all that and more.

The book is written diary-style, with a chapter for each day over six months. Marigold ends up in a coma when her car is hit head-on by a famous footballer, an accident her sister walks away from. The twist? Marigold becomes a social media sensation, and while she can't see anything, she can hear every word her visitors say, and her memory works pretty well too.

From her fame-hungry sister, her fighting parents, and her wannabe psychic aunt to her ex-boyfriend, a renegade doctor, and an orderly who can't keep it in his pants, Marigold's certainly got a lot to think about. And then there's the sports-obsessed detective and the mysterious stranger who reads her poetry, plus the other three occupants she shares her room with. All of their stories twine together in Marigold's head, and it's amazing the secrets people tell when they think nobody can hear them.

There are plenty of twists in Coma Girl's story, and the bite-sized chapters means it's easy to pick up and put down again if you don't get obsessed like me – once I started on this series, I binge-read all six books in the series in one day (they're quite short, around a hundred pages each) and finished, exhausted, at two o'clock in the morning.

Coma Girl is Amazon exclusive, and is available via Kindle Unlimited.

[image error]

Join Amazon Kindle Unlimited 30-Day Free Trial [image error]

Wearable words from Litographs

Litographs sell clothing and scarves printed with words from over 200 classic books. Would you like to wear words from The Great Gatsby or Sherlock Holmes? Some garments incorporate pictures too. If you're a writer, you can even upload your own story and have it made into a scarf or a T-shirt.

Click HERE to visit the website.

Chocolate from The Amazing Chocolate Workshop

Okay, so this one isn't strictly book-related, but some of my books have horses and guns and skulls in the, so I'm claiming it. The Amazing Chocolate Workshop is based in the UK, but they do ship internationally, and their creations taste as good as they look – yes, I even sampled the box above for you! You can buy everything from a fried egg to a corkscrew, all made out of chocolate, and they do look super-realistic. Perfect for the chocolate-lover in your life!

Click HERE to visit the website.

Handmade lace bookmarks from Tatania Rosa

While I was looking for prizes for my Roses are Dead giveaway, I came across these beautiful tatting lace bookmarks. They're so delicate and beautiful, and handmade too. A great present for the bookworm in your life!

Click HERE to visit the website.

Blackwood goodies

Did you know that all my books are available in paperback? They make a great gift and look pretty on the bookshelf too