A New Day At Midnight, by Michelle Hiscox: Mini-Review/Excerpt/Giveaway!!

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A New Day At Midnight,

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A New Day At Midnight

(The Hearne Family Saga, Book 1)

Michelle Hiscox

Trade Paperback, 264 pages

Bookhus Publishing

February 14, 2015
Cover Artist: William Yatscoff,
Bookhus Publishing

Fantasy, Historical Fiction, 
Paranormal Romance 

When Merik Hearne finally lays claim to the woman that betrayed him, she inspires much more than his need for revenge—but is her love worth dying for again?
Condemned to play host to a demon, scarred Romani leader Merik Hearne has amassed a fortune with only one goal in mind—to possess Hannah Worthington, the traitorous beauty that has eluded him for over a decade. With an exchange of coin, everything he has been striving for is within reach but nothing is as he imagined. The tender, sharp-tongued woman he encounters tests the bounds of his convictions and he is torn between the promise of reckoning and longing for a love that once destroyed him.

Exchanged for a purse of gold and informed she is to be a slave, Hannah vows she has not survived a lifetime of loss only to wither under the likes of Merik Hearne. And she will do everything she can to make sure he knows it. Despite his overbearing manner, his fierce scars, and her own determination to escape him, she begins to see that something beautiful might lie beneath…something that belongs only to her. She must discover the angle from which the great lord plays before his dark desires consume them both.

As they struggle to find truth amid pasts marred by sorrow and secrecy, they are unaware that a vengeful apostle orchestrates the rise of a forgotten god—and the end of their chance at a life together.

Amazon US/Amazon UK
Amazon CA
Barnes & Noble
The Book Depository

Based on the excerpt below, I can see that this will be a truly exciting PNR novel! The author has set the scene well; the heroine, Hannah, has obviously been staying in some mysterious place, and hears the voice of the man she loves, who is in pain. 

I really like the way Hiscox builds up the suspense; at  the beginning of this scene, Hannah is staring at the fire, seeing the color of her boyfriend's eyes in the flickering flames, while debating whether to stay or leave, and then, hearing his cries of pain, she ventures forth through the dark hall to find where they're coming from.....

The author has made this whole scene so vivid, with all the small details she describes. She has also given the reader very significant hints about Merik's true nature. In short, this excerpt has totally intrigued me, and I know this book will be a page-turning read! 

Hannah realized Merik had left her doors unlocked. Again. Did he believe she would stay now that she knew his true name and nature? She dare not utter the real question plaguing her, but it invaded her mind nonetheless.

Is he right? A large ember escaped from the iron latticework in front of the fire, landing on the rug at her feet. She watched it smoulder.

Smoke curled up in delicate tendrils, disappearing before reaching the high ceiling. She stared for several long moments, willing the flame to grow, to consume her. It held the colour of Merik’s eyes, burning gold and crimson. A small flame flickered to life, hungry for progress until she stamped it out with the heel of her foot.

Rising from the fire to flop on her bed, she stopped short as an echo rang through the hall. Certain her battered senses played tricks on her, she pulled back her covers to lie down but heard it again.

Whether it was a call of rage, grief, or agony she could not distinguish. It came from Merik’s quarters, echoing deep within the shadows of the hall. Padding to her door, she warred between anger over his treatment of her and the desire to ease his pain.

She could not ignore the fact he’d told her the truth. Pulling a robe about her shoulders, she kicked off her charred slipper. Without consulting her mind, she made the decision with her heart. She rested her hand on the door, opening the barrier between her and the unknown.

“What am I doing? I can stay in my rooms. There is hardly any need to go out there.”

Another tortured cry rose in the air, strengthening her resolve to help Merik.

Lighting a candle, she forced herself to go into the hall. Another cry rang through the air, and as she got closer to Merik’s chamber, she finally understood what he was saying. Her name.

“I’m coming, Merik.” Running to his room, she entered through the open door to see an empty chamber. Desperation overrode the fear hammering her heart against her chest. The room smelled of blood, of sickness. Could Vetala even get sick? Could they die?

“No, please no, not again. Merik? Merik, please call my name.”

He groaned. As she followed the source of the noise, the candle shook in her hand. The hot wax stung her flesh when she stopped several steps in front of a half-open door set in the wall.

“Merik?” The smell of death clung to the entrance and she gagged. The candle wobbled in her hand. She steadied it, saying a quick thanks to God it did not go out. She could not bear to go forth in the darkness without light. Setting the candle on the floor, she swung the door wide. The candle flickered as she picked it up. Fear twisted her guts and no matter how she tried, she could not stop her hands from shaking. She took another step.

“Merik?” It took her eyes several moments to see more than a foot from her face. When she saw him in the dim light, she gasped. He now stood in front of her. It took her several more moments to realize he was not standing of his own volition, but rather restrained by chains embedded in the stone wall. When he lifted his head, she covered her mouth to stifle a scream.

Eyes of molten gold and crimson stared back at her. His jaw and facial bones were distended, his hands curled into claws. The changes were much more severe than the few instances she attributed to the loss of her mind.

“I…I…” Stepping back toward the entrance, her gaze never left Merik’s. She turned her back on him to commence a rather spineless retreat, but could not get her feet to cooperate.

“Hannah?” The voice held much more than pain. What? Desperation? Hope? She could not move as her heart and mind waged war. Despite his appearance, she knew beneath the angled bone protruding from his flesh, his distorted face, and the fangs visible in his mouth, Merik stood in front of her. The man she met a decade before. The man looking at her with the same single focused intensity with which he always did. The man she loved.

Taking another step and hearing nothing but her own harsh breathing, she took one more.

Michelle Hiscox is a Paranormal Romance fan and author who hails from Drumheller, Alberta. The dinosaur bones buried in the hills of her hometown inspired the first stories she ever wrote, and she feels blessed to walk those same hills with her daughter today. Crocus flowers and dust bowls full of cactus never fail to inspire.

While her little girl and husband provide many welcome distractions to writing, it's something she always finds her way back to. Michelle is the proud, and slightly crazy, owner of two dogs and three cats, all animals she loves more than she reasonably should. She's been reading voraciously since she was a child and, one night, pulled her nose from a book to start writing her own.

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Goodreads/Amazon

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Shelf Candy Saturday #152: To Ride A White Horse, by Pamela Ford

Welcome to Shelf Candy Saturday!

This is my weekly feature

showcasing beautiful covers!

It also provides information, if available,

on their very talented creators!

For more information

about Shelf Candy Saturday,

simply go HERE.

Here's my choice for this week!

To Ride A White Horse
Pamela Ford
Trade Paperback, 363 pages
Pamela Ford, Publisher
January 3, 2015
Historical Fiction, Romance

My Thoughts About This Cover

This is certainly a very striking cover! What I love about it is the juxtaposition of the horse, which is composed entirely of sea water, with the faces floating above it in the stormy sky. This juxtaposition gives the cover a very haunting, eerie feeling which is very much in keeping with the background of Irish fairy lore in the book. While this is not a supernatural story, there are references to such things as the banshee, which is a female spirit in Irish mythology that begins to wail when someone is about to die. Other magical Irish creatures are also mentioned.

I love the dynamism in the horse's action of rearing up out of the raging ocean, which is a nice counterpoint to the two unmoving faces in the upper background of the cover. I think of this horse as a ghostly stallion.

As for the font, it very definitely stands out with the bluish white foam as background, but I would have preferred another one. This one is just too classical-looking (even though the lower part of the letter "R" is extended, thus breaking the classical mold). I think a more ornate, or perhaps stylized, font would have been better, especially since the story does have some magical overtones. This is still a stunning cover, however!

When I checked the credits page in the Amazon reader, I discovered that the cover design and digital formatting were done by damonza.com. This is a cover design company founded by Damon Freeman, who is also the Creative Director. The rest of the main staff is made up of two other people -- Benjamin Carrancho, who is the Formatting and Book Trailer Expert, and Alisha Moore, who is the Client Service Manager. Working with these three is a team of highly talented designers. Since its founding in 2012, Damonza has created well over 2,000 book covers!

For Further Information

Damonza Website 

About the Main Staff

Facebook

Damon Freeman Twitter 

What do you think of this 
week's cover?
Please leave a comment 
and let me know!

Feature & Follow Friday #3: Which book character would you like to be?

Welcome to Feature & Follow Friday!!

This weekly hop is hosted by  

Rachel @ Parajunkee's View, and 

Alison @ Alison Can Read!!

You can find the rules at the links above.

Join in the fun and make new blogging friends!

Every week, 1 or 2 new blogs 
are featured!

This week, there are no
featured blogs, but
there are character interviews,
so check them out above!

Here is this week's question:

If you could step into one
character's shoes (in a book),
and be that person for 
a day, who would it be, and why?
Also, if you want to be 
creative, what scene would 
you pick?

Contributed by

There are two characters that instantly came to mind in answer to this question: Jane Eyre and Hermione Granger. I'd love to be either one of them for a day!

I picked Jane Eyre because I greatly admire her determination, courage, and passionate nature. I also greatly admire her firm adherence to her values and principles, even in the face of great temptation to go against them.

Jane Eyre, to me, is a perfect combination of passion and intellectual excellence. She is also a feminist. Furthermore, she is not a shallow person at all. Her love for Rochester has nothing to do with his wealth; she sincerely values him as a person, and as a man. She disagrees very strongly with him on certain points, and firmly tells him so, but her love for him remains steadfast.

As for the scene I wish I could be in, it's the famous one in the orchard, when Jane finally declares her love to him, sarcastically telling him that, just because she's "plain, little, and obscure", that doesn't mean she is not capable of as much passionate love as he is. 

I admire my second choice, Hermione Granger, just as much as Jane! She too, is courageous, but her courage is directly related to dangerous magical adventures. She is also extremely resourceful; she can think on her feet whenever she and her friends are in the middle of a dire situation. She's also a very loyal friend to Harry and Ron, and is always up for solving mysteries. In addition to all this, she's as outspoken as Jane, and not afraid to stand up for her views. 

I have always thought that she should have been  Harry's girlfriend, as they are both heroic, both equally talented in magic. They would have been ideal partners in love as well as in battling evil forces!

I can't think of any favorite scenes for Hermione, though, as I read the books some time ago. In relation to this, I sometimes think that Rowling should have created a spinoff series, entirely about Hermione's adventures!

 Which book character would you like to be for a day, and why?

Next Week's Question

If you were to get a tattoo, what 
would it say or what would the graphic be? Or if you have a tattoo, share a picture and its meaning.

Contributed by

These are my follow preferences.
The links are in my sidebar.

 Be sure to visit the rest of the
participating blogs!!
(View them, above, at the hosting 
blogs, as the Linky widget code is not
widely available this week.)

 

Book Review: The Da Vinci Myth Versus The Gospel Truth, by D. James Kennedy & Jerry Newcombe

The Da Vinci Myth Versus The Gospel Truth
D. James Kennedy, Jerry Newcombe
Mass Market Paperback, 
156 pages
Crossway Books, April 7, 2006
Christianity, Nonfiction, Religion, Theology
Source: Purchased from Christianbooks,com


Book Synopsis: Answers to the Da Vinci Code fictions. With 40 million copies sold, Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code is a cultural phenomenon, and a no-holds-barred attack on Christianity's 2,000-year-old claim that Jesus Christ is God. Authors D. James Kennedy and Jerry Newcombe offer historical evidence to dispense with The Da Vinci Code fictions, including the outrageous assertions that the New Testament is unreliable and the deity of Christ is a fourth-century invention.

A few years ago, I bought an inexpensive paperback copy of The Da Vinci Code, and began to read it. I had already encountered some negative criticism of the book, especially from Christians -- both Catholics and Protestants -- so I decided to see for myself. Ironically, however, even non-Christian negative criticisms of The Da Vinci Code have shown this novel to be a very poor defense and exposition of pagan beliefs, as many of its 'historical facts' have actually been proven to be false. This is also the major contention of the authors of The Da Vinci Myth Versus The Gospel Truth.

Kennedy and Newcombe discuss most of the errors of The Da Vinci Code in Chapter Two of their book. One crucial point they make in this chapter is that Brown's novel totally fails in its intent to prove Christianity false, and this is  due to one very glaring  error: the existence of an alleged 'secret society' -- The Priory of Sion -- that was supposedly created in 1099.
  
These two authors are not the only ones to point out that this 'secret society' is a hoax. Although several real organizations have names similar to "The Priory of Sion", the version Brown holds up as factual is indeed a hoax, founded and dissolved in France in 1956, by one Pierre Plantard, who brought it back in the 1960s. 

To quote from the Wikipedia article on the subject: "In the 1960s, Plantard created a fictitious history for that organization, describing it as a secret society founded by Godfrey of Bouillon on Mount Zion in the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1099....In Plantard's version, the priory was devoted to installing a secret bloodline of the Merovingian dynasty on the thrones of France and the rest of Europe. This myth was expanded upon and popularised by the 1982 pseudohistorical book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, and later claimed as factual in the preface of the 2003 novel, The Da Vinci Code."  

The Wikipedia article goes on to state that Plantard's purpose for inventing this tale was to prove that he, Plantard, was the Great Monarch prophesied by Nostradamus!

In Chapter One, Kennedy and Newcombe criticize Brown's heavy reliance on the Gnostic Gospels, which he considers superior to the four canonical Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Kennedy and Newcombe point out that the canonical Gospels were written in the first century, AD, when many witnesses to the life of Jesus were still alive. Thus, the canonical Gospels are far more authoritative than the Gnostic Gospels, which were produced in the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th centuries.

Throughout their book, Kennedy and Newcombe do a very creditable job of proving that Brown's assertions are totally ludicrous.  Another very important point they make is that Brown has failed to provide footnotes for his 'facts', something that, as a responsible author, he certainly should have done. The reader is just expected to accept these 'facts', which are then blended into the fictional sections of the book. Therefore, how can the reader know which is which?

Another very damaging criticism of this novel pointed out by Kennedy and Newcombe is Brown's false assertion that Emperor Constantine declared Jesus to be God in the 4th century, AD, all in the name of political power, since he (Constantine), had already declared Christianity to be the official religion of the Roman Empire. There is plenty of historical evidence that Jesus was worshiped as God by the early Christians. Indeed, as Kennedy and Newcombe go on to state, many of the apostles were killed because of their unflinching faith in Jesus as God. Would they have been willing to die for a myth?

In regards to the above, here's a quote from The Da Vinci Myth Versus The Gospel Truth, with very important evidence: "In the first three centuries of its existence, the Church was struggling for its very survival, as it suffered under ten intense waves of persecution from the Roman Empire....." (page 40)

I never did finish reading The Da Vinci Code, but I was already somewhat familiar with the teachings of Gnosticism, which Brown threads throughout this novel. For those who might not be aware of this religious philosophy, Gnosticism is a collection of ancient beliefs which later evolved into a heretical Christian sect, and was thus a combination of pagan and Christian ideas. It was roundly condemned by the early Church Fathers, such as Irenaeus, Hyppolitus, and Tertullian.

Gnosticism in general stresses the importance of inner knowledge, or mystical enlightenment, as the way to salvation. This knowledge involves awareness of a 'divine spark'  within human beings, and thus, the realization that we are all really gods. This belief, of course, is completely anti-Christian.

Gnosticism also extols the feminine side of God, something which is, I must admit, very appealing, especially to feminists such as myself. In his novel, Brown claims that Mary Magdalene was, according to the plans of Jesus, supposed to be the leader of the Christian movement, which later became the Roman Catholic Church. As much as I would like this to have been true, Kennedy and Newcombe state that there is no historical evidence for this, beyond certain statements found in the Gnostic Gospels.

Brown further states that Mary was also married to Jesus, and that their descendants were members of the Merovingian dynasty in 5th-century France, adding that some of them survive to the present day.  (Thus his claim that the Priory of Sion is a real secret society.)

There was also supposed to be a strong rivalry between Mary and Peter, according to the Gnostic Gospels.

Although I am writing from a Christian perspective, again I have to agree with non-Christian critics that Brown's attempt to discredit Christianity and promote a pagan religion -- that of Gnosticism and the Great Goddess -- is very poorly done. As Kennedy and Newcombe state, the main reason for the success of his spuriously historical novel is the public's ignorance of secular and Biblical history, as well as of Biblical scholarship. Brown knew this, and played upon that fact.

Kennedy and Newcombe also analyze the reasons for the popularity of Brown's novel. One of these is Brown's claim, based on Gnostic beliefs, that sex is the way to divine union with God. Kennedy and Newcombe refute this by stating that this is merely an excuse for libertine sexual practices. 

Another reason for the popularity of The Da Vinci Code, according to these authors, is society's dissatisfaction with organized religion. This is evident even within Christian circles; in fact, Kennedy and Newcombe divulge the shocking fact that there are nominally Christian professors teaching in today's seminaries. These professors have departed from certain basic Christian teachings, such as the divinity of Christ, and yet, they are preparing future Christian ministers. 

Among the general public, the recent pedophile crisis in the Catholic Church has also fostered a dislike of Western organized religion. Instead, spirituality is praised as an end in itself, with a syncretistic approach which includes Eastern spiritual practices.

There are many other excellent points made by the authors of The Da Vinci Myth Versus The Gospel Truth, but they are too numerous to mention here. I have merely touched upon the major ones. Besides, unlike Brown's novel, Kennedy and Newcombe have included many footnotes in their book, which readers can easily refer to. 

I recommend The Da Vinci Myth Versus The Gospel Truth to anyone with an open mind, willing to dig to discover the real facts of the matter. However, although this book is pretty comprehensive in its rebuttal of Brown's false claims, I do wish the authors had written a 'meatier' volume, with more references included, as well as a more thorough analysis of such topics as the status of women in Christianity. As it stands at present, this small volume seems to be merely an introduction to an analysis of this highly controversial novel.



MY RATING:  

   

For Further Information

The Da Vinci Code

The Priory of Sion

Early Christian Worship of Jesus

Gnosticism

Mary Magdalene

The Gnostic Gospels

Gnostics and Church Fathers