Shortly after the Jack the Ripper killings came to an abrupt stop, more killings start to occur in the streets of Victorian London, but this time the victims are left with two small puncture marks on their necks. Scotland Yard has no choice but to bring back their best investigator, Special Agent Phaeton Black, who was recently fired.

During his break from Scotland Yard, Phaeton has spent many of days seducing the prostitutes as he lives under a brothel. He eagerly takes on the case, which he believes a vampire is responsible for the killings. While hunting for the night creature, a beautiful woman named Miss America Jones, a half Cajun witch, runs into him as a gang of ruthless pirates, who stole her father’s shipping company, are chasing her. With no other choice, Phaeton helps America escape the pirates.

America is a smart, strong-headed young woman, unlike many of the other women Phaeton has seduced, and she may be just what he needs to catch the killer. He always shuts off his emotions when it comes to women, but there is something about America that sends his heart a racing. Could it be that he has feelings for her? On the other hand, is she just using him for her own gain?

HOME FIRES
Written by: JANA RICHARDS
Published by:  The Wild Rose Press, Inc
ISBN: 978-1-61217-240-8
Pages: 100
Pub Date: 2012

A young British woman, Anne Wakefield, who served as a nurse during WWII, arrives in Emerald, Saskatchewan, a tiny village on the Canadian prairies to meet up with her fiancé, Anders Gustafson, a soldier whom she met during the war. To her surprise Anders doesn’t pick her up at the train station, but instead his older brother Erik, was also a solider and has a bad limp to prove it, does. He basically keeps quiet and takes her to the family farm where she meets his mother, Astrid, and his sister, Ingrid. But there is no sign of her dear Anders, all except for a letter that would change her life.

    It seems when Anders returned home, he married a local girl, Signe, and took a job in another city. Anne is embarrassed, but not as much as the Gustafson’s family, whom are left to cleanup Anders's mess.

Open publication - Free publishing - More authors

I love to write and to create. There are a thousand parts in the process of creating a novel between having great ideas, feeling them out, plotting, writing, editing and then running the gamut of publishing (which is saying nothing about learning the art of the craft, which takes years and many classes). The process of a making book is incredible, even if you look at the creation side of the work and not the publishing (which is Amazing and involves a team of editors, copy editors, line editors, proofers, cover designers, marketing teams, media specialists, etc.).

 Much of the time, a writer is alone in their little world sitting at their desk, tapping away at their keyboard. One of my favorite quotes when I explain my work is: “Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.” It’s absolutely true. I have people talking in my head all the time, telling me what they want to do, where they want to go, and how they want their voices to sound. I’m just the messenger for my characters.

There is a viral outbreak across the United States causing people to literally eat their selves, followed by uncontrollable seizures; spasms, and Tourette’s. Your heart will race like crazy until it finally explodes, but your body won’t die as you’ll become one of the undead or more commonly known as a zombie. 

The infected are sent to White Hall, where doctors and nurses attend to the victims. Eventually, they turn into zombies and chaos occurs, but not just inside White Hall. Planes drop nuclear bombs upon the United States. Is this our own government or an enemy country? They may never know exactly how it happens, but for one doctor, Lucy, all she cares about is finding her family. With the help of Knock-Out, a non-violent man, Lucy makes it to her home where she finds that her husband has turned. She finds her ten-year-old son, Gus, has survived.

It’s not safe staying at Lucy's home, so they leave, mostly on foot due to the nuclear bomb knocked out most electrical devices. They come upon a small band of military men, whose crooked leaders has just fallen. There’s no hope for survival or a future, until the young Gus comes up with the idea to build their own city, or more like a fortress around a bridge in Arkansas.