Wednesday, September 21, 2016

DAMNED IF HE DOES by Marcella Burnard


The mornings are getting darker, the days are getting shorter, what better time to hanker down and do a little reading in front of a fire. If you have a fire. Or maybe you want a fire but that could mean a whole lot of things and we'd better not get into that here. But it's hard not to, when we've got books like this getting us all sizzled up.

 I know you'd like to know what Marcella's book is about, so here's the lo-down:
Rejected by heaven, twisted by hell, what’s a damned dead man to do when he stumbles upon a life and love worth fighting for?

Though damned for his earthly sins, Darsorin Incarri likes being an incubus. Prowling women’s dreams to siphon off their sexual energy for Satan's consumption has its perks: an array of infernal power and a modicum of freedom. Sure, Ole Scratch holds Dar’s soul in thrall, and Dar has to spend a few hours recharging in Hell every day, but it could be much worse. All he has to do is hold up his end of his damnation contract – five women seduced, satisfied and siphoned per night for eternity. So when he encounters gorgeous, bright, and funny Fiona Renee, it’s business as usual. Deploy the infernal charm and rack up another score. Except it doesn’t work. She’s immune. He has to find out what’s gone wrong or face Lucifer's wrath.
Fiona Renee has the life she’d always wanted: a career, a home, a cat with a bad attitude, and peace. Fiona’s dated. Had boyfriends. And hated every minute of it. She’s reconciled to being lonely. So when a man shows up in her bedroom in the middle of the night demanding to know why her dreams turn to nightmares every time he tries to seduce her from within them, Fiona winds up negotiating a contract with a demon that allows him access to her life. She never anticipated that it would also give him access to her heart. If she's going to fall in love at all, something she never thought would happen, shouldn’t it be with someone who’s alive? If Fiona wants to hang on to Darsorin, she has to find his true name—the one he’d been given at his birth over a thousand years ago. But Satan, himself, stands in her way. Even if Fiona can dodge Lucifer, she and Darsorin have to face the question neither of them can answer: What happens to a dead man if you manage to wrest his soul from the Devil?

We here at Supernatural Central are wondering if there's such a thing as a cat without a bad attitude. We wonder about a lot of things.


Marcella dropped by Supernatural Central to answer a few questions for us. (Sorry about the weird spacing here, Blogger is giving me grief today. Scroll down.)


SC:. Tell me a little bit about your main character in this book.

MB: Damned If He Does is really Darsorin Incarri's book. He's been dead and damned for a thousand years. While he likes being an incubus, getting to seduce women in their dreams, he's wondered for all that time why he was damned for lechery when his best friend (who'd seduced as many, if not more, women in life than Darsorin had) wasn't. When the story opens, Darsorin is a demon who has it all - the Devil's favor, a coveted position as an incubus, and the freedom to wander the world. He has just one sore spot - he's lonely. Not that he'd admit it. All he knows is that mortals can't look him in the eye - don't really seem to want to see him at all except as a means to assuage unfulfilled desires. After all this time, it takes meeting a pharmacist named Fiona who seems immune to his powers as an incubus to make him realize that he's being used. Falling for her when he cannot possibly have her, drives him to look for a loophole in his contract with Hell.
SC:  Do you believe in the paranormal and if so, do you have an experience you can share?

MB: I do. I'd really hate to think we as a species have every last mystery explained. One of my paranormal stories: I'm a crazy cat lady. When my husband and I adopted our first set of kittens, they were rescue cats. They'd been born to a feral mom cat in a lady's back yard. When the kittens were about 5 weeks old, a freak storm moved through the area bringing unseasonably cold temps, raging wind, and incredibly heavy rain. Mom cat vanished. The lady went out in the storm to check on the kittens. She found them all in the nest, cold and crying. Two of the kittens had (she thought) already died. After she rushed the live kittens to the vet, she came back to bury the two dead kittens. One of them moved. He lived and was one of the two kittens we adopted. (Copernicus and Eretosthanes) For years after, I'd be looking in a mirror and a white cat would walk past behind me. . . thing is my two white cats would be in the room with me. We figured it was the sister who died and that she'd attached to Copernicus, who had so nearly died with her. She even moved when we did, following us to two different places to live. I never spotted her unless I was looking in a mirror. And she'd always walk past behind me. After about six years, she faded away. I stopped seeing her. Two years later, when he was eight years old, Copernicus faded away, too. I lost him to aspiration pneumonia. The other sister, Eretosthanes, lived to 18 and a half before she, too, joined her siblings. Now we live on a sailboat and I have no mirrors to see whether or not any of them come back to visit any place other than in my dreams.
SC:. That's quite the story. I'm kind of envious that you're living on a boat. What titles are you working on now that you can tell us about?

MB: The current WIP is a historical fantasy. Sort of. I'm not actually sure what it is, except weird. The series title is The Artifacts of the Aegean. The book itself is, as yet, untitled (titles are not my strong suit and are often the very last thing I manage to get.) This is set at the very beginning of the Civil War. It's spy versus spy versus the supernatural with a few bits of cursed gold thrown in for good measure. Those bits of gold could tip the balance of the war. My Union spy and her Confederate counterpart are each tasked with acquiring the powerful trinkets. Because I'm still in the middle of drafting this one, there is absolutely no slick marketing description of it.
Fair enough.
 
Marcella Burnard graduated from Cornish College of the Arts with a degree in acting. She writes science fiction romance for Berkley Sensation. Her first book, Enemy Within won the Romantic Times Reviewer’s Choice award for Best Futuristic of 2010. The second book in the series, Enemy Games, released on May 3, 2011. An erotica novella, Enemy Mine, set in the same world as the novels was released as an e-special edition by Berkley in April 2012. Emissary, a sword and sorcery short story released in the two volume Thunder on the Battlefield Anthology in the second half of 2013. Nightmare Ink, an Urban Fantasy novel from Intermix came out in April of 2014 and the second in that Living Ink series, Bound by Ink, came out in November 2014. Damned If He Does, a light paranormal romance came out in July 2016.
She lives aboard a sailboat in Seattle where she and her husband are outnumbered by cats.


FB: https://www.facebook.com/Marcella-Burnard-312302197270/

Twitter: @marcellaburnard

Instagram: @marcellaburnard

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3409619.Marcella_Burnard

If you'd like to buy a copy of this book: GET IT HERE . Marcella came to us today via Betwitching Book Tours. We'd didn't receive any compensation for this post, we just like to spread the supernatural word. Talk to you soon!

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