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Shasha's Team #1
The Coupling
An ancient demon, thriving on human death is unleashed from an artifact found in South Dakota. An archeological technician, Rhonda Steppe, bonds with it and learns how intoxicating it can be to kill. The demon, Night Warrior, can only appear in the darkness. Together they begin a bloody trip west to a home that Night Warrior is called to.
Shasha Harrings and her specialized team try to run Rhonda to ground to end their killing spree. They follow Rhonda and demon into a complex series of caves. The demon is going home, and Shasha can only speculate on its intentions.
Shasha is mixed race with jet black hair and pale skin, she has her mother's dark oriental eyes. She comes from money is the leader in any group situation.
David Seskin is a Special Agent with the FBI. He is physically imposing and keeps his dark hair in a square crewcut. He's often compare to Wesley Snipes. When he's not chasing bad guys, he likes to dress in a clown suit and entertain children in the hospital. David has an ability few people know about. He can read a person's emotions.
Graciella (Grace) Ortiz is undercover with the DEA when her lover, Barbara, is killed by Rhonda and the demon. She's tall for a Puerto Rican. She, despite her sexuality, is devoted to the Blessed Mother Mary. While she talks like a street kid, she's well educated and despite her small stature, is ferocious when something needs doing.
Merle Huegenot is a trans woman who talked her CIA supervisor into paying for her transition surgery when she discovered the woman he was having an affair with was really an Egyptian spy. She is tall, blond, with dark eyes and a kind disposition. Her contacts and analytic skills round out the team charged with discovering and stopping harmful paranormal activities.
The Coupling is book 1 of the Shasha's Team series.
Shasha Harrings and her specialized team try to run Rhonda to ground to end their killing spree. They follow Rhonda and demon into a complex series of caves. The demon is going home, and Shasha can only speculate on its intentions.
Shasha is mixed race with jet black hair and pale skin, she has her mother's dark oriental eyes. She comes from money is the leader in any group situation.
David Seskin is a Special Agent with the FBI. He is physically imposing and keeps his dark hair in a square crewcut. He's often compare to Wesley Snipes. When he's not chasing bad guys, he likes to dress in a clown suit and entertain children in the hospital. David has an ability few people know about. He can read a person's emotions.
Graciella (Grace) Ortiz is undercover with the DEA when her lover, Barbara, is killed by Rhonda and the demon. She's tall for a Puerto Rican. She, despite her sexuality, is devoted to the Blessed Mother Mary. While she talks like a street kid, she's well educated and despite her small stature, is ferocious when something needs doing.
Merle Huegenot is a trans woman who talked her CIA supervisor into paying for her transition surgery when she discovered the woman he was having an affair with was really an Egyptian spy. She is tall, blond, with dark eyes and a kind disposition. Her contacts and analytic skills round out the team charged with discovering and stopping harmful paranormal activities.
The Coupling is book 1 of the Shasha's Team series.
392 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 5, 2021
24 people are currently reading
43 people want to read
About the author
M.J. Fitzmaurice
7 books6 followersBorn in New Hampshire, came of age in Alaska, got married and went to college in Eastern Washington, raised a family in Northern California, was a truck driver living in Texas, now residing in Idaho. MJ has many 'home towns' but the constants in his life have always been family, forests, and fiction.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
January 5, 2022
Fun story, murder, mayhem, demons. Very modern X-files vibes with a dash of relegion. LGBTQ+ positive. I appreciate the author didn't fill the pages with character set up and personal history. There are enough details to keep it engaging while maintaining the pace of the book. Worth a read, looking forward to continuing the series.
I feel over all this could have gone through another round of editing, as there were a few context errors. Bonus, I learned you can report those in the Kindle App.
I feel over all this could have gone through another round of editing, as there were a few context errors. Bonus, I learned you can report those in the Kindle App.
April 25, 2022
An imaginative story with an arguably very eclectic cast - almost comically so - that despite having an interesting horror story at its core is ultimately doomed by poor execution, overly wild plot changes and unconvincing performances by almost all players.
"The Coupling" in itself is not a bad book per se and I'd like to say there are some parts in here to enjoy reading. But at the same time, I will warn you that you're going to have to really pick through this rather messy book to find those bits. For example, I particularly liked the kind of back and forth that Fitzmaurice used in some parts to describe a given situation from at least two points of view, especially when someone faces very obvious mortal danger (or the results thereof). In fact, it's a real shame that this wasn't the format used throughout the book! However, at the end of the day, my impression will remain that the execution was just not good at all which ultimately made for very rough and distracting reading.
She handed him a brown sealed “You still seeing your shrink?”
Perhaps most damning is that the prose is at best uneven and quite obviously insufficiently proofed. The bulk of the writing is presented in a short, choppy style and comes across as more than just a bit stilted. Overall, this makes the book read a LOT quicker than the page numbers indicate it should (I can't remember being able to read a nearly 400 page book in one afternoon session like this). Still, there were other times it manages to be much fuller and more illustrative, which did give me hope that things were looking up… though any optimism towards same was usually quickly dashed. Obviously, the form is overall very inconsistent and spotty.
Shasha said picked up her umbrella-draped, nuclear-red drink.
Sure, one could argue that it is passable for a self-published horror novel and I've definitely come across worse. But the end effect is that it makes this offer only slightly better than decidedly ordinary, if even that. Sadly, the whole effect is hurt owing to A LOT of punctuation errors as well as wrong, missing and/or misspelled words. My impression is that from one edit pass to the next a lot of changes were made - or perhaps better said, were intended to have been made - and these hiccups were ultimately overlooked. And that's not even counting the rather extreme formatting change at Chapter 7 and again at Episode 13.
She touched the and her workspace disappeared.
The plot looked at as a whole has a fairly good main thread but the asides don't seem to fit into any pattern or particular usage. Parts of the overall story seem to have been quickly cobbled together after the book was - or should have been - finished. The characters themselves aren't entirely disastrous but their odd complexities - as well as lack of any shock whatsoever to what happens around them, from "normal" events to those of a more supernatural sort - makes them seem far too cartoonish to be taken seriously. As a result, none of the main players struck me as being all that interesting or admirable.
In addition, some rather dramatic changes occur in the story itself without much transition (badly sprained ankles healing almost instantly being just one minor example). There are also occasionally mixed up names and confused placements - with people being present in a scene in one chapter and then inexplicably gone the next - which left me more and more non-plussed as the end of the book neared. The author definitely could have used some much better editing from his team of beta- or advanced-readers (or even anyone who bothered to read this out loud prior to publication). I know writing is a tough gig but such a team SHOULD have picked up on a lot of what ultimately led this to being a very disappointing experience. Shame.
Oh well, we tried. Moving on… but not with this series…
"The Coupling" in itself is not a bad book per se and I'd like to say there are some parts in here to enjoy reading. But at the same time, I will warn you that you're going to have to really pick through this rather messy book to find those bits. For example, I particularly liked the kind of back and forth that Fitzmaurice used in some parts to describe a given situation from at least two points of view, especially when someone faces very obvious mortal danger (or the results thereof). In fact, it's a real shame that this wasn't the format used throughout the book! However, at the end of the day, my impression will remain that the execution was just not good at all which ultimately made for very rough and distracting reading.
She handed him a brown sealed “You still seeing your shrink?”
Perhaps most damning is that the prose is at best uneven and quite obviously insufficiently proofed. The bulk of the writing is presented in a short, choppy style and comes across as more than just a bit stilted. Overall, this makes the book read a LOT quicker than the page numbers indicate it should (I can't remember being able to read a nearly 400 page book in one afternoon session like this). Still, there were other times it manages to be much fuller and more illustrative, which did give me hope that things were looking up… though any optimism towards same was usually quickly dashed. Obviously, the form is overall very inconsistent and spotty.
Shasha said picked up her umbrella-draped, nuclear-red drink.
Sure, one could argue that it is passable for a self-published horror novel and I've definitely come across worse. But the end effect is that it makes this offer only slightly better than decidedly ordinary, if even that. Sadly, the whole effect is hurt owing to A LOT of punctuation errors as well as wrong, missing and/or misspelled words. My impression is that from one edit pass to the next a lot of changes were made - or perhaps better said, were intended to have been made - and these hiccups were ultimately overlooked. And that's not even counting the rather extreme formatting change at Chapter 7 and again at Episode 13.
She touched the and her workspace disappeared.
The plot looked at as a whole has a fairly good main thread but the asides don't seem to fit into any pattern or particular usage. Parts of the overall story seem to have been quickly cobbled together after the book was - or should have been - finished. The characters themselves aren't entirely disastrous but their odd complexities - as well as lack of any shock whatsoever to what happens around them, from "normal" events to those of a more supernatural sort - makes them seem far too cartoonish to be taken seriously. As a result, none of the main players struck me as being all that interesting or admirable.
In addition, some rather dramatic changes occur in the story itself without much transition (badly sprained ankles healing almost instantly being just one minor example). There are also occasionally mixed up names and confused placements - with people being present in a scene in one chapter and then inexplicably gone the next - which left me more and more non-plussed as the end of the book neared. The author definitely could have used some much better editing from his team of beta- or advanced-readers (or even anyone who bothered to read this out loud prior to publication). I know writing is a tough gig but such a team SHOULD have picked up on a lot of what ultimately led this to being a very disappointing experience. Shame.
Oh well, we tried. Moving on… but not with this series…
January 21, 2022
Great story
I absolutely loved the suspense and the demon! Rhonda was an excellent character, but not sure what her outcome was. The entire crew going to clown suits at the end was a bit much, but still a good ending.
I absolutely loved the suspense and the demon! Rhonda was an excellent character, but not sure what her outcome was. The entire crew going to clown suits at the end was a bit much, but still a good ending.
October 8, 2021
Pretty terrific story, but grammar errors and wrong names made me rate it 3 stars.
January 26, 2022
I tried to like this book
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews