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Formerly A Different Kind of Fire.
Ruby Schmidt has the talent, the drive, even the guts to enroll in art school, leaving behind her childhood home and the beau she always expected to marry. Her life at the Academy seems heavenly at first, but she soon learns that societal norms in the East are as restrictive as those back home in West Texas. Rebelling against the insipid imagery woman are expected to produce, Ruby embraces bohemian life. Her burgeoning sexuality drives her into a life-long love affair with another woman and into the arms of an Italian baron. With the Panic of 1893, the nation spirals into a depression, and Ruby's career takes a similar downward trajectory. After thinking she could have it all, Ruby, now pregnant and broke, returns to Texas rather than join the queues at the neighborhood soup kitchen. She discovers her life back home is as challenging as that in Philadelphia.
Passion & Paint depicts one woman's battle to balance husband, family, career, and ambition. Torn between her childhood sweetheart, her forbidden passion for another woman, the nobleman she had to marry, and becoming a renowned painter, Ruby's choices mold her in ways she could never have foreseen.
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The eBook was FREE at all retailers from April 7th - July 15th, 2024 to commemorate the hundred days of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide. #NeverForget
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"There’s plenty of sharp, suspenseful action to savor here in this impressively poignant, hauntingly realistic, and searingly moving tale. Schafer intensively explores themes of racism, violence, war, and human welfare. Vivid, boldly written, life-affirming historical fiction drawn from the horrors of the Rwandan genocide crisis." —Kirkus Reviews
In response to the worldwide epidemic of genocides and to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide, Suanne Schafer has issued a second edition of Hunting the Devil, revised and with a new Author’s Note. The electronic edition will be free from April 7 through July 15, 2024, the hundred days the 1994 genocide lasted.
When biracial physician Jessica Hemings volunteers for a medical mission in Rwanda, she becomes entrapped in the maelstrom of Rwandan politics and the enmity between Hutu and Tutsi. Her US passport doesn’t afford the security she’d hoped for as her Tutsi-like features plunge her into horrors of the Rwandan Genocide. Dr. Cyprien Gatera, Jess's superior and a Hutu militant, commandeers her clinic, forces her to treat his wounded, and then slaughters her patients and her adopted sons. She escapes and finds refuge at Benaco refugee camp in Tanzania.
There, beset by grief, hatred, and PTSD, Jess vows revenge. With the help of Michel Fournier, a French lawyer-turned-war-correspondent, and Dr. Tom Powell, her ex-lover, she searches for Gatera who has fled Rwanda to escape post-genocide reprisals. When an unknown informant passes information to Jess about her nemesis, she returns to Rwanda, despite warnings from the Belgian Secret Service that Gatera plans to assassinate her. In their final showdown, Jess must decide if revenge is best served cold or not at all.
Part medical procedural, part global political thriller, part vigilante novel, and part fractured romance, Hunting the Devil moves from the dusty washboard roads of Rwanda to an inner-city hospital in America to the Natural History Museum of Belgium to the halls of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, Tanzania as it deftly traces one woman’s journey toward justice.
Edited by James Burnham
Genres: Anthology, Literature & Fiction, Short Stories
Release Date: June 6, 2017
Format: eBook & Paperback
Pages: 114
You’ll enjoy other stories by these authors: James Burnham, Diane Byington, Luanne Castle, Victoria Grant, Kristine Mietzner, Linda Moore, Suanne Schafer, Stacey Swann, Robin Taylor, Wendy Nelson Tokunaga, and Kenton Yee.
James Burnham edited this wide variety of well-written short stories from the students and faculty of Stanford University’s on-line creative writing program.
Geminid Press, LLC
Genres: Anthology, Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction, Short Stories
Release Date: February 15, 2016
Format: eBook & Paperback
Pages: 330
There’s more too, and in each tale, the characters’ struggles will stretch your imagination and sense of reality, while posing profound questions about morality, society and justice, and raising uncertainties of the unknown and unchecked technological evolution.
With 21 original stories from talented, new authors about extraterrestrials, conspiracies, and space exploration, Night Lights is full of moments that will make you gasp, shudder, laugh, and wonder.
A Note from Suanne: This collection contains my short story, “Suite for the Lady in Red,” which is quite a departure from my usual women’s fiction. An aging impotent spy falls in love with the woman he’s assigned to assassinate—with dramatic and unforeseen results…
House of Erotica
Genres: Short Stories, Gay & Lesbian, Literature & Fiction, Erotica
Release Date: December 3, 2015
Format: eBook
Pages: 90
Edited by Jillian Boyd (Spy Games – Flappers, Jazz and Valentino) Licked is a tribute to the act of oral sex – to the intimacy, trust and the taste of your lover, the scent, the feelings the act invokes in both the giver and receiver. With stories from the likes of Rob Rosen, Jessica Taylor and Dale Cameron Lowry, Licked is a sizzling fictional exploration of some of the many ways oral sex can inspire so much more than just a hot flash of arousal.
Come in. Have a taste.
SEZ Publishing
Genres: Anthology, Literature & Fiction, Short Stories
Release Date: August 17, 2016
Format: eBook & Paperback
Pages: 312
Dark Opus Press
Genres: Literature & Fiction, Short Stories & Anthologies
Release Date: August 21, 2013
Format: eBook & Paperback
Pages: 70
Suanne’s short story, “Morrigan,” a retelling of the headless horseman, appeared in this issue, which you can order on Amazon. Also, you can order back issues of this magazine here.
Weyward is a lovely three point-of-view debut novel about three women who exist four centuries apart (Altha in 1619, Violet in 1942, and Kate in 2019). Their timelines and lives are intertwined and connected by their common family history, their struggle with evil in...
Afraid to Let Grow is the second in the Marriage Survivors Club series, but it can easily be read as a standalone novel without having read the prequel (In the Beginning) or the first in the series (Do Over Daughter). The series involves the intertwined stories of a...
The Whip is a fictionalized biography of a famous Wells Fargo stagecoach driver in California. Charlotte Parkhurst (1812-1879) is dropped at an orphanage as an infant. She soon bonds with a boy named Lee Colton who assumes the role of her protector and best friend,...
The Stolen Queen is a dual-time line story split between Egypt in 1936 and New York in 1978. In the earlier timeline, Charlotte Cross, a budding archeologist, falls in love with a fellow Egyptologist then faces an horrific tragedy that upends her life. She returns to...
I have read the short story prequel (“Witch City Rift”) and Rifted Hearts, the first installment of this fantasy/paranormal/LGBTQ romance, which helps clarify this book and introduces some of the characters, but On a Rift’s Edge is easily read as a standalone novel....
Give me a good thriller or mystery, and I can generally just rip right through it. Saltwater started off so slowly that I had to drag myself to finish it. The characters, for the most part, were entirely despicable, spoiled, and unrelatable. Helen, whose mother died...
Valorie (Val) Dawes, a rookie cop, has been on duty less than two years and has already fired her weapon multiple times—with two fatalities. As a rookie, she faces the usual harassment of any younger cop by older policemen as well as the rampant sexism in her...
In The Shadowy Horses, author Kearsley weaves together past and present in a dark gothic mystery. Archaeologist Verity Grey is in Scotland for a job interview and ends up staying, though her boss—Peter Quinnell, an infamous archaeologist—is eccentric, if not crazy,...
I have to admit that I was sucked into this by the title alone: I Got Abducted by Aliens and Now I'm Trapped in a Rom-Com. I don’t read much erotica because much of it contains what I’ve heard termed “IKEA sex” where one “inserts tab A into slot B” without much...
Helena Echlin’s Clever Little Thing is a devourable psychological thriller full of plot twist after plot twist, lie after lie. Echlin keeps the tension up through tight prose that reveal the main character, Charlotte’s, state of mind, a woman walking on the edge yet...
I recently read The Bastard Brigade: The True Story of the Renegade Scientists and Spies Who Sabotaged the Nazi Atomic Bomb, a nonfiction book that deals with with America’s part in the race towards atomic weaponry across the US and Europe but doesn’t handle the human...
I had so much fun doing a big, beautiful, artsy bookish giveaway haul last month, I've decided to do it again! This time, I'm upping the ante by including a $10 Amazon gift card in one of the prize combos. It's only on for eight days, so enter while you can... Good...
Weyward is a lovely three point-of-view debut novel about three women who exist four centuries apart (Altha in 1619, Violet in 1942, and Kate in 2019). Their timelines and lives are intertwined and connected by their common family history, their struggle with evil in...
Afraid to Let Grow is the second in the Marriage Survivors Club series, but it can easily be read as a standalone novel without having read the prequel (In the Beginning) or the first in the series (Do Over Daughter). The series involves the intertwined stories of a...
The Whip is a fictionalized biography of a famous Wells Fargo stagecoach driver in California. Charlotte Parkhurst (1812-1879) is dropped at an orphanage as an infant. She soon bonds with a boy named Lee Colton who assumes the role of her protector and best friend,...
The Stolen Queen is a dual-time line story split between Egypt in 1936 and New York in 1978. In the earlier timeline, Charlotte Cross, a budding archeologist, falls in love with a fellow Egyptologist then faces an horrific tragedy that upends her life. She returns to...
I have read the short story prequel (“Witch City Rift”) and Rifted Hearts, the first installment of this fantasy/paranormal/LGBTQ romance, which helps clarify this book and introduces some of the characters, but On a Rift’s Edge is easily read as a standalone novel....
Give me a good thriller or mystery, and I can generally just rip right through it. Saltwater started off so slowly that I had to drag myself to finish it. The characters, for the most part, were entirely despicable, spoiled, and unrelatable. Helen, whose mother died...
If you love literature, art, photography, exclusive sneek peaks, author giveaways, and things that light up the soul, you will want to sign up for Suanne's low-volume newsletter...
