COVER REVEAL! TROUBLE IN MIND by DONNA S. FRELICK

She couldn’t get him out of her mind—

and that’s when the trouble started.

FBI Special Agent Alana Matheson is good at her job, despite a past that would make even a seasoned agent cringe. She has no time for the outside help the victim’s family has brought in on a kidnapping case, no matter how good looking he is.

But galactic tracker Gabriel Cruz is no ordinary private investigator, and the skills he brings to the job will save both their lives. Because Lana and Gabriel are not the only ones seeking an unusual little boy and his mother. Their rivals in the chase are not of this world, and only an alliance built on the bonds of love can ensure that Lana and Gabriel beat the alien hunters to their prey.

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The second in Donna S. Frelick's Interstellar Rescue series, Trouble in Mind, launches February 16, 2016. The science fiction suspense romance is a sexy, romantic thriller full of alien bad guys and unexpected allies. You can pre-order your copy from Amazon starting November 17. But if you can't wait that long, COMMENT below or on Donna's Facebook page for a chance to win an Advance Reader Copy (ARC) of the book!

 EXCERPT:

 

The teacher turned to him, a glint in his gray eyes.  “I say we owe the galaxy a civilized Thrane to make up for the butcher that is his father.  What is your name, boy?”

“Gabriel Cruz, sir.  And I am human, not Thrane.”

Lana sat bolt upright in the unmoving vehicle, her eyes seeking light, her lungs gasping for breath in the airless void of night.  The child that Gabriel had been had stood up for the part of him that was human, but Lana saw what the others that day had seen—part of him was not of this Earth.  His father was Thrane, his brothers were Thrane, and his memories in her mind showed her everything that meant—the cruelty, the conquests, the centuries of war.  The bloodlines, the psi talents, the laws that held them in check.

Then, more proof, if any had been necessary:  the image she had first seen when she’d touched his scars, of the fight on the dark side of Azreeni VI.  Just one of so many fights on so many exotic planets, the creature dying beneath him just one of so many other unimaginable, inhuman creatures he had seen in his lifetime.  Image after image, place after place, memory after memory flooded her consciousness until she was shaking and weak.  Was she crazy or was he?  Aliens?  Other planets?

And . . . holy mother of God, she had . . .

She clawed open the car door and stumbled out of the vehicle.  It was all she could do to keep her feet—and the contents of her stomach—as she gulped in huge breaths of cold desert air.  They were pulled just off a secondary road onto a flat stretch of hardpan, and she was alone.  Stars wheeled overhead.  God, it was quiet!  Her heart was like thunder in her chest.

A flashlight winked a few paces away and began to bob in her direction.  “Lana?”

Oh, Jesus!  She wanted to run.  She wanted to fight.  She wanted to do anything but talk to Gabriel Cruz.  Who wasn’t human.

Donna S. Frelick is a charter member of the SFR Brigade. The first book in her Interstellar Rescue series, Unchained Memory, was published in February, 2015. She lives on 44 beautiful mountain acres in Marshall NC, with her husband and two talkative cats.

 

"HEARTH AND HOME" SFR: EARTH AS ANCHOR FOR A WIDER UNIVERSE

Look familiar? Think again.

One of the most exciting things about writing science fiction romance is the broad, unbounded field on which we can play.  As SFR writers we can--and do—travel to other planets, visit neighboring galaxies, live among alien cultures, have friends and enemies in alternate universes, in the past, in the future.

So why would anyone stay home?  That is, why would anyone write a science fiction romance set on Earth, here and now?

My science fiction suspense romance Unchained Memory, just out from INK’d Press, is such a story, set (mostly) on the Earth of today, an environment familiar to any reader who picks up the book. The book has no steampunk past, no dystopian future, no tentacle love, no battlestars.

But very quickly, my human hero and heroine discover the world they live in is not as benign as it seems. They are forced to recognize that the stuff of science fiction nightmare—alien abduction, mind control, interstellar slavery—is a very real part of the world they thought they knew.  They have to adjust their world view to include this new perception.  And so do my readers.

Like any SFR story, Unchained Memory opens the door to a new universe and asks readers to leave their current beliefs about things as they are at the doorstep. The Earth of my novel is at the center of a hidden battle between an interstellar slave-trading empire and the organization of abolitionists dedicated to fighting that empire. This is the universe of my Interstellar Rescue series, about the brave (and sexy!) men and women, some of them human, some of them not, who defend the Earth from those who would exploit it.  

In creating my universe I had to determine all of the same things other SFR writers do—how do we travel among the stars, what kind of economic and cultural circumstances would allow for the slave-trading Minertsan Consortium, what other alien races might we encounter, what would the mining or agricultural planets look like, and so on. Once that worldbuilding was accomplished, I could set my stories anywhere within the universe. I chose to begin on Earth, closest to home, before I set my readers off into their new, expanded cosmos.

It doesn’t take long before the readers of Unchained Memory are asked to buy into the basic assumptions of the Interstellar Rescue universe. What happens to my heroine, Asia Burdette—and what she uncovers with her hero, Ethan Roberts—challenges all her old assumptions about the world and replaces them with features of the new one. This revelation is not only an explanation for Asia and Ethan, it’s also an introduction to the vast, unexplored universe of the series.

Of course, I can’t say too much about how I do this in the book. I will say in future books in the series (Book Two, Trouble in Mind, launches in Fall, 2015; Book Three, Fools Rush In, in early 2016) we’ll spend more time off-planet, taking a close-up look at the villainous, slave-trading Grays and even engaging in a few space battles!

All the while, defending “hearth and home”, fighting the threat to Earth and to innocent victims of the Grays everywhere, will be a recurring theme.

Donna S. Frelick was an RWA® Golden Heart® Double Finalist in 2012 in the Paranormal category for the first two novels in her SFR Interstellar Rescue series. She currently lives in Virginia with her husband and two talkative cats.  Find her at http://donnasfrelick.com; blogging at http://spacefreighters.blogspot.com; and on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/DonnaSFrelickAuthor.