Smugglers Stash

Smugglers Weekly Stash and News

Posted on June 14, 2008

A Couple of Announcements:

Stay tuned for our event A Long Weekend with Loretta Chase. It starts this Thursday 19th (my birthday tee hee) with a review of Your Scandalous Ways. Then on Friday we will have a most amazing collaborative post : I asked other awesome reviewers/bloggers which is their favourite Loretta Chase book and why, and on the 20th we will hear what they have to say. And on Saturday, an exclusive interview with the one and only Loretta Chase herself!

And more: we have THREE copies of Your Scandalous Ways to give away – you only need to comment on our post on Saturday 21st and I will randomly pick the winners by Monday.

And the fun continues! A few weeks ago a group of bloggers (including us) started a Desert Island discussion about which books we would take with us if ever stranded on an island. We expanded the discussion by taking turns to pick the heroes we would like to bring along. It was fun. It was madness. It was too good to let it go – so this week, it has been decided that the show must go on. A special blog has been created and we will again, take turns to review our choices, explain the reasons why we are taking each hero while sipping our drink of choice and laughing manically at the obsession frenzy this is likely to cause. Plus: we will have guest authors coming by to talk about their favourite books too! So far, we have ANN AGUIRRE, NALINI SINGH, MELJEAN BROOK, SHILOH WALKER, JOSH LANYON, MICHELE LANG, JAMES BUCHANAN, JACKI FRANK and others, lined up.

We are right here: DIK Ladies.

Free ebook:

You can download from Tor . I had never heard of this book before, but upon receiving the email from Tor, I looked it up and it sounds intriguing. Here is a summary from Amazon:

In 16th-century Spain, everybody expects the Spanish Inquisition, as they have a well-known tendency to cart people off to their dungeons on trumped-up charges. What 5-year-old Mendoza, on the brink of being tortured as a Jew, is totally unprepared for is to be rescued by the Company–the ultimate bureaucracy of the 24th century–and made immortal. In return, all she has to do is travel through time on a series of assignments for the Company and collect endangered botanical specimens. The wisecracking, mildly misanthropic Mendoza wants nothing to do with historical humans, but her first assignment is to travel to England in 1553–uncomfortably close to those damn Inquisitors–with Joseph and Nefer, two other Company operatives. Their intent is to gather herb samples from the garden of Sir Walter Iden, a foolish though generous country squire. (Kage Baker knows her Shakespeare: Sir Walter is the descendant of Alexander Iden, loyal subject of Henry IV, who slew the hungry rebel Jack Cade in that very garden in Kent.)
The cyborg trio poses as Doctor Ruy Lopez, his daughter Rosa (the irrepressible Mendoza, now grown), and her duenna, Doña Marguerita; Sir Walter’s hospitality and discretion are bought for the promise of restored youth. (There are hilarious moments that call to mind the Coneheads, who claimed to be from France when caught doing anything peculiar.) Sir Walter’s secretary, Nicholas Harpole, is immediately suspicious of and hostile towards the strange “Spanish” visitors, which prompts Mendoza to fall in love with him. Nicholas has his own badly kept secret: he’s proudly Protestant at a time when Queen Mary and Philip of Spain are on a Catholicizing rampage. Mendoza knows Nicholas is probably doomed, and that as a Company operative she cannot meddle with his fate, but love makes people do desperate things
And that’s all for today, folks!

Ana Grilo is a Brazilian who moved to the UK because of the weather. No, seriously. She works with translations in RL and hopes one day The Book Smugglers will be her day job. When she’s not here at The Book Smugglers, she is hogging our Twitter feed.

4 Comments

  • Kerry
    June 14, 2008 at 11:55 pm

    “In the Garden of Iden” is the start of a great series. I got totally hooked once I started it, so I highly recommend giving it a go.

  • Carolyn Jean
    June 15, 2008 at 9:30 am

    Yay Loretta Chase Weekend!

  • Heather
    June 15, 2008 at 7:56 pm

    I heard good things about Kage Baker recently. I look forward to reading her work.

  • Aymless
    June 15, 2008 at 9:19 pm

    Thanks for the free book.

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