This Chicks #RT17 update (Day 2 and 3)

What a fun week at the RT Convention! My week is winding down and I am exhausted. The RT scene is a lot of waiting in line to get into an event with your favorite authors, chat, play games and just be a part of an old fashioned signing event, but it’s totally worth it. There have been a lot of really fun events like Books! Chocolate! and Authors! with some inspirational romance authors like Tamara Alexander and Sarah London Tomas. These authors also held a breakfast Friday morning and sat at the tables with us and signed books. These were some of the prettiest ladies at the convention, as well as the most beautiful book covers! I will be having an Inspirational book giveaway in the future, which I hope you will enjoy!


I enjoyed last year’s Tattoo’s and ‘Tini’s because it was my chance to fangirl over one of my favorite authors, Kristen Ashley, who was promoting her newest Erotica novel in the Honey series. I have the novel on my kindle, but am slightly wary of reading it. Her stuff was on the border erotica already! Will I like her real erotica book? Meeting her again made me want to pick it up and read it! If you’ve read it, I’d love to hear if you liked it!


I was really excited to run over to the Sourcebooks seminar. I learned some great things about the company, the books that are coming out, and got a surprise cover reveal! You all know I am a HUGE fan of Amanda Bouchet’s Kingmaker series, and have reviewed both books on my blog. That series is one of the best series in 2016. Well, the third book will be out soon, and here is the cover! I can’t wait to read this book.


The Kensington Peaches and Cream event had some great authors signing books, like Mary Ann Marlow who wrote Some Kind of Magic which I gave 5 stars, Rebecca Zanetti promoting her Scorpius and Blood Brothers series (also reviewed on my blog!), and some great historical authors like Joanna Shupe and Ella Quinn. It was packed but I was able to pick up a ton of books!  See below for my Thursday haul of 52 books and swag.


Friday I played Kiss Me, Kill Me with authors Skye Warren, Celia Aaron and others, but really wanted to save my strength for the Entangled Candy & Spoons event. Now, if you’ve ever played this game you’ll know it is cutthroat and ruthless! You have a banquet sized table with up to 10 players and one dealer. The dealer gives each player four cards then deals out one at a time and you try to catch and realease one card to the players on your left and right until one person in the group gets four of a kind. When you do, you grab that spoon and everyone else drops there cards ato get the other spoons. Blood was drawn, spoons were stolen out of people’s hands. It’s such fun! It probably wasn’t the smartest game for me to play two and a half weeks after wrist surgery, but my inner evil came out and I won the prize at our table! It was a stack of twelve YA novels! ( In my excitement I forgot to take the picture, sorry.)

To recover, I decided to head over to the SMP Pics and Pies, where I got to mingle with some authors and pick up a book and swag- and eat pie, lol.. The book I chose was The Star Touched Queen by Roshani Chokshi. I was so excited to get her to sign it in person. Isn’t she the loveliest lady ever? She complimented me on my hair, and I thought she was crazy, I mean, she was gorgeous!


The big event of the day was the Avon Presents Spectacle of Lights. The crowds for this event was nuts, but they had some VERY big names that were going to make this worth the lines! Jennifer L. Armentrout! Laura Kaye! Beverly Jenkins! Julia Quinn and lots of others, but the pair I was most excited to see were Ilona Andrews! They never come out to events and they signed copies of their next novel White Hot in their Hidden Legacy series. Here are some photos from this kind of crazy, jam packed event.

The Swag Bag!

 
The Lines!
 



This year I also went to the RT Reviewers Awards Show and learned that Marrying Winterbourne by Lisa Kleypas (reviewed on my blog) received the coveted book of the year award! Do you think those two days were packed or what? It was a blast! I have the Giant Book Fair to look forward to tomorrow, and I hope to stalk Kristen Ashley- I mean see what books she’s selling, as well as see if I can pick up autographed copies of the first two Amanda Bouchet books in the Kingmaker series. 

I’ll let you know how it goes!

I’ll leave you with my Friday book haul photo. I didn’t include all the swag, because I was, well, exhausted. But there was some great stuff!


I believe my total book count for Tu-Fri is around 130! Do you think I’ve added enough to my TBR list? Lol. I will be doing some future giveaways to share some of my loot with you all so please keep an eye out.

Was there anything you liked hearing about the best? Authors that I should include on my stalk through the book fair tomorrow? Let me know!

Deb

This Chick Read: Hard as it Gets (A Hard Ink novel) by Laura Kaye

I am definitely in summer beach read mode.  I keep hovering over mysteries and fantasy novels, but keep picking up some romances that I’ve had on the back burner.  It is that time of year for fun, love and adventure.  Laura Kaye is always a must read, as her romances have grit and their men have issues that just need a good woman to help them overcome.  Nick Rixey is exactly that man.  He is ex military and his last mission went bad and half his squad died.  He was leading that mission and blamed himself for those men dying.  When Becca Merritt seeks him out, he doesn’t want anything to do with her, after all, it was her father who served over him, and who led them into that trap where his men died.  Becca, not knowing his feelings over her father, and actually not knowing that truth, needs help finding her brother, who has disappeared.  The last time she and her brother had talked, he had mentioned that he’d found information that led him to believe that her father was not the man that they thought he was, and she refused to listen.  Now, she has come to Nick, to help her on her search.

Nick reaches out to his old team, who even though they separated on bad terms, come to he and Becca’s aid.  The interaction between he and his team was tense with unresolved emotions and the scenes between those guys were very well written.  As this is the first in the series, I look forward to reading a book about each of them. Nick tried so hard to be ambivalent to Becca, but his protective instincts overcame any other instinct he had to shut down what he was feeling for her.  His character was dark, his voice raspy, his psyche injured, and he needed a little light in his world.  Becca became his light.  Becca was a layered character, not just a woman in need, although she certainly was that.  Her elder brother died from a drug overdose, her father was dead, and her surviving brother had disappeared.  She was a nurse, so was a nurturer, and even with her brothers disappearance, she could see that there was something special about Nick, beyond the intense attraction she had to him, and she wanted to help him heal.

I picked up Hard as it Gets looking for a light romance and got a well crafted, layered romantic action adventure. There are a lot of books in this series, so I’m looking forward to picking up the next one!

❤️❤️❤️❤️
Buy it on Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Kobo!

Copyright 2016 Deborah Kehoe A Chick Who Reads All Rights Reserved

 

This Chick Read: Ride Hard by Laura Kaye

There is a fascination in the romance industry for the hard living, hard drinking, lawless, overly tattooed man’s man, who finds himself tamed by either the lawful girl next door or the beautiful buxom damsel in distress.  This novel gives us a heroine, Haven, who is a bit of both.  The MC Biker hero is Dare Kenyon, also all of the above, but mixed in with the tattoo’s and hard living is a decent guy Continue reading “This Chick Read: Ride Hard by Laura Kaye”