Monday, February 6, 2012

Blurb Help Wanted

I’ve two blurbs I’m working on and I’m open to suggestions. The first is for A GHOST OF A SECOND CHANCE, the book I hope to share with the world soon. And the second is a novel I wrote many years ago and am now editing, rewriting, hacking and chopping into pieces. Originally, it was called A LIBRARY IN RHYME, but since I’ve decided to create the Rose Arbor series, that title no longer works. So, I’m also open to title suggestions. Feedback welcome and encouraged.

A GHOST OF A SECOND CHANCE
An eastern wind carries more than dust and ashes, it uproots secrets and everyone knows once one secret is told, no secret is safe. Laine’s included. While struggling to shelter her multiplying secrets—the estrangement from her husband—the unknown body lying in her grandfather’s coffin—the sudden and strange appearance of a cantankerous ghost—Laine also searches to answers these questions:
Is she willing--does she want--to end her eighteen year marriage?
What has become of her beloved Poppa Sid?
Is she truly being haunted? Or has she lost her mind?
Laine’s journey takes her to the tiny town of Rose Arbor, her grandfather’s hometown and the place of her grandmother’s death. As Laine unravels the mystery of her grandparents’ marriage she is forced to face two more very important questions—is there love after death? And if a love dies, can it live it again?

THE RHYME’S LIBRARY or THE LIBRARY IN THE ROSE ARBOR or SOME CLEVER SUGGESTION
Crazy Aunt Charlotte is missing again. Blair Rhyme, Rose Arbor’s young librarian, doesn’t bother to check Charlotte’s regular haunts- -the Veteran’s of Foreign Wars lodge, the Four H-Club, or the bins behind Milton’s Fish shop- -because unlike her past vanishing acts, this time Charlotte is dead. Blair has discovered Charlotte’s body amongst the boxes of what-nots and whatevers in the library’s basement. Unfortunately, when she returns to the library with the police in tow Charlotte is missing. Again.
A hooded face in a window, a shoe theft, her aunt’s disappearance- Blair needs to prove to the police, and to herself, that she doesn’t share her aunt’s dementia, but, a former love and a stranger with his own agenda seem intent on trying her sanity.
Desperate to find Aunt Charlotte, Blair tangles with a Boy Scout troop more interested in swinging each other from hooks in the slaughter house than doing good turns, Friends of the Library like Marcus Nichols, an aficionado of science fiction and devotee of all things alien, and Audrey Morris, a spinster who would rather blackmail than card catalogue. Blair also picks up a couple of unwanted allies, a half drowned cat and a feisty eighty-three year old Romeo who is spoiling for a fight. Blair tells him, “I’m just a librarian, hopefully years away from spoiling.”
But, she wonders if spoilage and madness aren’t inevitable. At first Blair dismisses the skin pricking sensation of being watched, but as small disturbances grow increasingly threatening, Blair must examine the boundaries between paranoia and truth before she falls victim to the enemies, real or imagined, that haunted and drove her aunt to madness and death in the Rose Arbor town Library.

1 comment:

  1. Kristint, I personally like your blurbs. I'm no expert, but in my opinion, you have given enough, but not too much, information to get a potential reader interested in reading the books. The only thing I would suggest is that you shorten the second one without removing the key points. The first one is a good length.

    As for the title of the second one, why not use your last part of the blurb, "Death in the Rose Arbor Town Library"?

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