A Blog Visit and a Giveaway of Suburban Dangers

Marianne Evans is hosting me and highlighting Suburban Dangers over on her blog, A Minute with Marianne.

I'm also offering a giveaway of an e-book of Suburban Dangers. Head over to her blog to enter. She will announce the winner Friday, May 26th.

Here is what people are saying about Suburban Dangers:

"This book is a page-turner that defies a reader’s ability to stop once the book is begun. Lee is quickly becoming one of my go-to authors for a good read." —Edie Melson, author and blogger

"Megan Whitson Lee has written a book that should be on the “must read” list for all teens, boys and girls, as well as their parents and grandparents."--Amazon Review

"A fast paced, eye opening, well written novel, depicting a problem that may be closer to home than you think. When you start it you will have a hard time putting it down!"--Amazon Review

Featured Book: FATEFUL FALL--New Romantic Suspense by Erin Unger

Erin Unger's new book Fateful Fall just came this week. It is book one of the Worthington Detective Agency trilogy. I'm also privileged to call Erin Unger a friend, so it is my joy to feature her book today.

Here is the blurb from Goodreads: Christian Romantic Suspense by Erin Unger. Fateful Fall is book 1 of the ‘Worthington Detective Agency’ series.

Ava's life starts over today.

Ava Worthington had been employed by her dad, but he never appreciated her work. She’s striving to build a private detective agency with friends, and they are about to start their first murder investigation. In the rural Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, farmer John Connell wants Ava to discover who killed his son, and he’s assigned cowboy Cory Mortel to be Ava’s liaison.

Cory has retreated to the seclusion of the mountains after a personal disaster. The last thing he needs is to babysit a beautiful amateur detective and her girl friends. But when Ava seems to attract danger, he has to step in and protect her.

How will she solve the murder in the reclusive area before she gets herself killed? And will she be willing to court a man she hardly knows?

Fateful Fall is a fast-paced adventure where not everyone is what they seem, and family relationships can be the most difficult connection of all.

My thoughts:

A murder or two, an all-female private investigation agency, and the Blue Ridge Mountains. What's not to like?

Fateful Fall is a great story. The setting is rich in atmosphere and intrigue—the perfect place for a murder mystery. The characters are interesting and well-developed, and I look forward to meeting them again in the second book.

Unger is an excellent writer with a strong grasp of craft essentials. She is especially adept with setting details and characterization (colloquialisms and interesting character quirks) and uses them masterfully throughout.  There is a lot going on in this mystery, and I mean that in the best possible way. There are no lag points. The story moves on a continuum that builds strength and momentum right up to the end. This is not dark, graphically violent chiller-thriller fare, nor is it overly preachy Christian fiction; instead, it is an engaging mystery with a dash of romance and an intriguing cast of characters.

If you are a fan of romantic suspense, I would highly recommend Fateful Fall.

Review of CAPTIVES

Head on over this evening to A Bench with a View to check out a review of Captives.

Betty, my blogger buddy, was kind enough to feature Captives today on her wonderful blog, A Bench with a View. It's a great review, and she also features a new suspense novel by Chris Fey, 30 Seconds.

Check out the review and Betty's blog HERE.

Meet the Characters of CAPTIVES

Three very different people--all of them on a journey where their lives intersect...

Blaise Timothy is a world-renowned cellist who has made her living traveling all over the United States and Europe, but her success in her professional life is in direct contrast to the failure in her love life. Moving from man to man, she is easily sucked into romantic relationships that are toxic and ill-fated. When her sister, Amy, goes missing, Blaise puts her life on hold to search for her younger sister. In the process, she learns more than she ever wanted to know about human trafficking as well as the darkness of her own heart.

Andrew Victor lives across the street from where Amy’s body is found and witnesses her covered body being carried out of the ravine. By profession he is an artist, but at thirty-one he has returned home from New York City without any money or direction. Andrew must live with his parents as he struggles to gain control over his life and an ever-increasing and dangerous addiction to pornography.

Asha Edgewater and her husband live in Washington, DC and work as missionaries. As a girl in Nepal, Asha was sold into sexual slavery—a bondage she didn’t escape until she was well into her twenties. Haunted by her past, Asha attempts to help others who have fallen victim to the enslavement of prostitution, and she feels a particular connection to Amy Timothy—the young girl whose life is snuffed out too soon. But for the grace of God that fate could have been hers…

Who are some of your favorite characters in literature?

An Excerpt from CAPTIVES

Okay, folks! Here’s a short excerpt from the opening of Captives…

 

A

my’s coffin had been closed for over an hour, but Douglas Timothy still couldn’t get the image of his daughter’s dead body out of his mind. The girl in that box looked nothing like the Amy he had known—the Amy he had loved and raised. Instead, the girl in the coffin was an emaciated skeleton with sunken-in cheeks and eyes, pierced and tattooed beyond recognition. It had been difficult for them to dress and make her up in a fashion that hid signs of the life she had been leading before her death.

When they identified the body, Anne, his wife, had even gone so far as to say, “That’s not Amy. That can’t be Amy. It doesn’t look anything like her!” In his own desire to believe that Amy might still be alive, Douglas had been swayed momentarily. Maybe it wasn’t her. Maybe she was still out there and they just needed to keep looking. But he knew it wouldn’t do them any good to deny the truth. It might not have looked like Amy, but there was good reason for that.

Amy had been seventeen when they last saw her, a junior in high school preparing for college. Although hospitalized briefly when she was sixteen for an eating disorder, she had always appeared to be a strong-minded girl who filled her life with all sorts of activities. Amy was a member of the school’s swim team, drama club, and her church’s youth group. She was, by most accounts, a typical seventeen-year-old. The girl on the slab in the morgue was twenty, a prostitute shot full of drugs, a victim of sex trafficking.

A Glimpse into Captives

So what is Captives about?

Captives is a novel that explores the consequences of a society demanding, distributing, and enslaving through sexual exploitation, but offers a message of hope, recovery, and redemption through God’s saving grace.

Here's the summary:

When seventeen-year-old Amy Timothy disappears from a rural Virginia truck stop, world-renowned cellist Blaise Timothy puts her life on hold to join the search for her sister. While conducting her own investigation into Amy’s disappearance, Blaise seeks solace in addictive and destructive relationships.

Three years later, the search for Amy becomes a homicide investigation and catches the attention of national media and sex trafficking activists. Less than a mile from where Amy’s body is recovered, Andrew Victor attempts to manage a failing career in art, an addiction to pornography, and a family secret that links him to the murder investigation. In Washington, DC, Asha Edgewater knows first-hand the horrors of sex slavery and lends support to the Timothy family even as she comes to terms with her own past. As all three lives intersect in their search for redemption and healing, they find it is only possible through God’s saving grace.

Captives is available on Amazon Kindle and will release in paperback by next week.


Have a blessed weekend!

Captives Released!

It's out! Well, at least it's out on Kindle. The paperback version should be available by next week.


For the next few days, I plan to post on Captives, its characters, and its inception. I will also have a few posts on the very real problem of sex trafficking.


This novel has a long history that starts in 2006 with a paragraph I wrote as a brainstorming exercise. I’d wanted to write about human trafficking for some time, but the right story never surfaced. At the time, a good friend of mine was the sexual trafficking liaison at the Salvation Army, and she had supplied me with tons of good material, case studies, and statistics. It was grim reading, but I realized then that this was something important that people needed to know about (and a lot of people really didn’t know about it).


I started with Blaise’s narration telling the background of her sister’s disappearance via trafficking; I later added Asha’s story to show the international side; once I realized that pornography and prostitution were linked, Andrew’s narrative came into play.

The novel originally came out in 2009 and was titled All that is Right and Holy. That year it won second place in the Christian Choice Book Awards through Xulon Press.

In 2015, a lot has changed in both the spectrum and spread of trafficking, especially within the United States. With that in mind, I decided to update the novel and re-release it under a different title. My husband designed the new cover. I love it! What do you think?

When did you first become aware of human trafficking?

Christian Fiction Writers Conference--July 25!

On Saturday, July 25, in Woodbridge, Virginia (Northern Virginia, Metro DC), the Virginia Chapter of the American Christian Fiction Writers (ACFW) will be holding their first annual Christian Writer's Conference!

In addition to 14 workshops, they are offering personal appointments with a Literary Agent, and also appointments with a photographer so you can get a professional head shot for your publicity efforts.

Registration includes a light breakfast, a taco salad bar lunch, beverages, all the workshops, plus access to our special guests and extras tables.

Have you registered to attend?

https://acfwvirginia.wordpress.com/acfw-virginia-writers-conference/

Favorite Things Friday: The Best Book I Read this Month, Love Defined

It's that time again! Time to name the best book I read this month for participation in February's  Cephalopod Coffeehouse!

This month, I have the pleasure of featuring a book that deals with a topic near and dear to my heart--that of the painful ordeal of infertility. During the summer, I named the first book in Elizabeth Maddrey's Remnants series, Faith Departed, as the best book of the month.

This month I'm naming the last novel in the series as the best book I've read in February.

Love Defined, the final piece of the Remnants trilogy by Elizabeth Maddrey, follows the harrowing ordeal of twin sisters' struggle with infertility and their quest to become parents. In the first book of the series, Faith Departed, June, July, and their husbands decide that now is the right time to start a family and assume that, like all the other couples around them, this plan will fall right into place according to their timing. When this doesn't happen for either of them, the sisters' faiths and marriages are shaken and tested. Their frustration and agony continues in the second book of the trilogy, Hope Deferred. In the third and final installment of the series, June and July's relationship as sisters is tried as they forge different paths, both struggling to decide what is best for their families. Do they accept and embrace a life with no children? What about adoption? What if adoption doesn't work out or they don't feel the desire to adopt? Do they seek out other possibilities? How do they trust God in the midst of so much pain, confusion, and heartache?

This is my favorite novel of the trilogy. Love Defined reveals, with such sensitivity and understanding, the heart-wrenching choices that must be made when, in the words of that great Scottish poet Robbie Burns, "the best laid plans of mice and men go awry." Not only are wives affected by the pain of infertility; husbands experience it acutely as well, but their feelings are too often minimized. Maddrey shows both sides of the coin, as June and July's husbands, Toby and Gareth, suffer differently but no less than the women.  Enduring infertility is not for the faint of heart for women or for men.

Without giving anything away, the ending is beautiful--not because it's perfect, but because honesty and reality prevail. In the real world, even happy endings aren't spotless, and it's nice to see a Christian writer addressing this issue without sugar-coating or over-simplifying the complex issues and emotions involved. Infertility affects an entire community, not just the individual couple.

I highly recommend this book (and the entire trilogy) for anyone who has ever struggled or is currently struggling with infertility. This is also a wonderful read for anyone with a friend or family member currently enduring this painful process, as it might shed light on a situation that is tough to comprehend if you haven't gone through it.

Free Giveaway of Song From the Ashes

Enter the Goodreads contest to win a free copy of Song From the Ashes!

Contest ends February 2nd!

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Song from the Ashes

by Megan Whitson Lee

Giveaway ends February 02, 2015.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

An Interview and a Giveaway!

I think I'm much happier doing virtual interviews than I ever would be if they were in person.

Check out my interview on Emilie Hendryx's site Thinking Thoughts and you can register for a free giveaway of my book!

INTERVIEW

Thank you for hosting me, Emilie!

Two Guest Blogs today!

Today I'm doubly blessed to be hosted by Crooks on Books and The Story Behind the Book! Check out my guest blog posts on both sites!

Song from the Ashes Release Day!

At long last Song from the Ashes is available for purchase!

You can purchase the Kindle version through Amazon (paperback version isn't available just yet, but coming in a few days), or you can buy the paperback or ebook directly through eLectio Publishing. If you buy the paperback through the publisher, you'll receive an ebook for free.




The link to Barnes and Noble for the Nook is also available. The paperback will be available through B&N soon.

If you enjoy Song from the Ashes, please consider leaving an honest review at Amazon, Goodreads, or Barnes and Noble.

The Lord is my strength and my shield; my heart trusts in him, and he helps me. My heart leaps for joy, and with my song I praise him. (Psalm 28:7)