12 Days and Wild Ride Booty!

We have a winner for Karen Kendall's Take Me For a Ride. Because that post appeared during our 12 Bandita Days of Christmas, the winner also receives the special holiday rooster booty. And the winner is . . .

Pam P!

Pam, please send your contact info to Nancy via the link at the top of the blog, with "for Nancy and Karen" in the subject line.

Congratulations, Pam, and thank you to everyone else for stopping by. We hope you all have a fabulous holiday season!

A Wild Ride

Today, we welcome romantic suspense author Karen Kendall back to the lair to chat about the third in her ARTemis, Inc., art recovery series.

Welcome back, Karen! What have you been doing since you were last here?

Thanks! It’s good to be here. What have I been doing . . . well, promo and proposals and a Blaze manuscript and more. Always something!

Tell us about the hero and heroine of Take Me For a Ride.

I had a lot of fun with these two. Eric McDougal is the hero, and the book is really his story. Some readers may recognize him from the previous two books in the series (TAKE ME IF YOU CAN and TAKE ME TWO TIMES.) He’s known around the office as “McManWhore,” since he’s been, um, rather active with the ladies. LOL. But McD has some unusual reasons for being the way he is, and I think they make him sort of loveable.

Natalie Rosen is the heroine of TAKE ME FOR A RIDE. She’s a restoration artist who works on old tapestries. Nat’s a little shy until you get a couple of whiskies in her, when a whole new side of her personality reveals itself. She also happens to be an accidental thief. You see, she borrows something to show to her grandmother, who then refuses to give it back—which is what kicks off the action in the story.

The hero, in particular, is keeping secrets in this book. Can you tell us a little about that?

McDougal is definitely keeping secrets! He’s an art recovery agent who targets Natalie from the first scene in RIDE. She’s his mark, and he’s tracked her to a local bar in order to find out what she may have done with the missing and very valuable St. George necklace, a piece that used to belong to Catherine the Great.

But it turns out that Natalie is honest, and she’s gotten herself into a whole lot of trouble. And it also turns out that McDougal may have a well-hidden and completely inconvenient conscience.

You also have a quest story going here. What's the quest?

Well, the ostensible quest is to recover the necklace. But there’s also a quest for justice, since the St. George necklace was originally stolen from Natalie’s great-grandparents during World War II. Avy and Liam (main characters from TAKE ME IF YOU CAN) are working that particular angle of the book.

McDougal and Natalie must also find her grandmother before some nasty Russian thugs find the old lady first. And in a further twist, granny goes on a quest of her own for other family belongings still hidden deep inside a cathedral in Moscow.

Let’s see: how many quests is that? LOL. Four, I think.

How do you research the art recovery and restoration angles for this series?

I find the art recovery angles to be the most interesting. I’ve tracked down articles and books on various art recovery specialists—the most colorful of whom seem to be Robert Volpe, who worked with NYPD in the ‘seventies, Thomas McShane of the FBI and Charley Hill of Scotland Yard. Those guys had some adventures!

There are also big databases on stolen art such as the international Art Loss Register. Art crime is a fast growing, scary business. The old stereotype of the ‘gentleman thief’ no longer applies—it’s gotten rough and ugly out there. There truly are mob ties and drug cartel ties and terrorist ties and money-laundering angles . . . it’s unbelievable. I couldn’t make this stuff up.


Can we have a look inside Take Me For a Ride?

Sure! Here’s an excerpt.

From TAKE ME FOR A RIDE by Karen Kendall, Signet, copyright 2009. All rights reserved.
#

Natalie Rosen was McDougal’s mark this evening. An art restorer and probable thief, she lurched left on the crowded Manhattan sidewalk between 92nd and 1st. The door of Reif’s opened and swallowed her.

Reif’s? She didn’t look the type for a seedy old neighborhood bar run by three generations of Irish. Reif’s was a blue-collar place in a now affluent neighborhood. North of 96th got dicey as it eased into Spanish Harlem, but south of 96th had become gentrified. Still, there were a few old hold-outs like Reif’s, where electricians and plumbers mingled with white collar yuppies and argued politics in a haze of dust mingled with decades of lingering, stale cigarette smoke. The Yankees, the Mets, the mayor, the weather . . . those were typical topics.

Reif’s was situated on the ground floor of a six-story apartment building. It smelled beer-sodden and mildewy but it was also homey and offered a sort of tobacco-stained comfort that suited McDougal . . . just not a girl like Natalie Rosen.

Natalie had dark, glossy, straight hair and dark, serious eyes that looked a little at odds with her snub, lightly freckled nose. She was cute in a repressed, academic sort of way. Not tweedy or preppy—more earnest and artsy. The chick wore a lot of black, but there was a difference between severe New York black and sultry Miami black.

New York black covered while Miami black revealed. New York black involved tights, turtlenecks, scarves and coats. Miami black involved thongs, skirt lengths just shy of illegal, spike heels and fishnets—particularly on some of those little Brazilian hotties, with their bras clearly showing under skimpy tops . . . oh, yeah. McDougal was a big fan of Miami black.

Focus. He frowned. What in the hell was a girl with an art degree from Carnegie Mellon doing in a beer-soaked joint like Reif’s? Surely not unloading a two-million dollar necklace that had once belonged to Catherine the Great.

It was his job to find out, but he needed to hang back for a few. Let her get settled. Have a drink or two. He pegged her for the type that would walk into a dusty place like Reif’s and order, say, white wine. A little naïve. A little out of touch with reality.

***

Twenty minutes later, McDougal shoved his hands into his pockets, crossed the street and entered Reif’s. He glimpsed her immediately: Natalie perched on one of the old, wooden, backless bar-stools, staring sightlessly into the dregs of a short glass of whiskey, rocks.

His opinion of her went up a notch—at least she hadn’t ordered a white Zinfandel in an Irish pub. Of course, his opinion of her didn’t matter much—he’d get what he came for, regardless. He always did.

In all that black, Natalie looked as if she’d smell of sulphur or mothballs, but as she dug into her nylon messenger bag for a tissue he caught a waft of fresh laundry detergent and a tinge of 4711, a cologne his sisters used to wear.

Over the bar hung a four foot by eight foot mirror, which reflected among other things Natalie’s drawn, downcast face. Something was on the lady’s mind.

McDougal nodded at the bartender and mounted the stool next to hers. It was covered in cheap green vinyl and had seen better days, but the upside of worn was comfortable. It announced his presence by creaking under his solid one hundred eighty pounds, but Natalie didn’t look at him.

Didn’t matter. She would. Women always did, eventually—not that in every case they liked what they saw. Some of the smarter ones summed him up as a player in one glance and dismissed him. Others focused on the bare fourth finger of his left hand. The fun ones started shoveling verbal shit at him immediately. Which type was she?

As Eric casually ordered a Guinness, he watched her in the mirror. Watched as her pointed little chin came up, she pushed some hair out of her face and cut her eyes towards him, her lashes at half mast.

Then came her first impression, the under-cover evaluation of his six-foot two frame, muscular forearms sprinkled with freckles and golden hair, his denim-clad legs. She took in the brown leather jacket and the reddish-brown stubble on his chin; then the grin that widened as he watched her.

That was when she realized that he’d seen her inspecting him in the mirror. Her gaze flew to his in the reflected surface and froze. A slow blush crept up her neck—a blush so fierce he could see it even in the dim light of Reif’s.

“Hi,” McDougal said, turning to face her with the full wattage of his grin.
She blinked, stared, then looked away as the blush intensified. She put a hand up to her neck as if to cool the skin off. “H-hi.”

She was a babe in the woods . . . without mosquito repellent. He prepared to feast on her tender young naiveté.

“I didn’t mean to embarrass you,” McDougal said, taking his grin down a few notches, from wolfish to disarming.

She seemed to have no adequate response to that.

“It’s very normal to check out the guy sitting next to you. He could be a vagrant, a pervert, or a serial killer.”

She laughed reluctantly at that, and it transformed her face from mildly pretty to dazzling. She’d gone from librarian to . . . to . . . Carla Bruni in half a second flat. It was McDougal’s turn to stare. The French First Lady had nothing on her.

“So which one are you?” she asked, evidently emboldened.

“Me? I’m just a tourist, sweetheart. The only cereal killing I do involves a bowl of raisin bran or corn flakes.”

That got a smile. “Where are you from?”

“Miami.”

“Florida,” she said, sounding wistful. “I’d love to be on a beach right now, not in the city.”

“You work here?”

Natalie nodded. “I’m a restoration artist.”

“A restoration artist,” McDougal repeated. “As in, they call you to touch up the Sistine Chapel?” He nodded at the bartender and pointed at her glass.

“Something like that. But I specialize in rugs and tapestries, not painting.” A wary expression crossed her face as the drink was set in front of her. “Um, I didn’t order—”

“It’s on me,” McDougal said.

“Oh, but . . .”

“What’s your name?”

She hesitated. “Natalie.”

“Natalie, it’s just a drink. Not a big deal. ‘Kay?”

“Thank you,” she said after a long pause. She curled her small but competent hand around the glass. “Actually, you have no idea how much I need this.”

Yes I do. First heist, honey? It always shreds your nerves. But all McDougal said was, “You’re welcome. I’m Eric.” And he proceeded to chat her up while she got lusciously tipsy on her second whiskey.

Really, he should be ashamed of himself.

Natalie Rosen’s eyes had gone just a little fuzzy, her gestures loose and her posture relaxed. She’d also gotten wittier. “So you said you’re a tourist. Are you an accidental one?”

He smiled. “Nope. I do have a purpose. Are you an accidental bar-fly?”

“No.” She averted her gaze, then looked down into her whiskey and murmured, “I’m an accidental thief.”

“Do tell,” McDougal said, showing his teeth and signaling the bartender again. If he had his wicked way, she’d soon be a naked thief.

#

(McDougal seems very sure of himself, doesn’t he? LOL. Just wait. He gets taken down a notch or two! )

Yes, and I don't want to spoil the fun for other readers, but I will say that part of the book, where all his sins come home to roost, was fabulous. What's next for you?

Well, I’m contracted for a Blaze trilogy, so I’ll be working on that. And I have an interesting new project up my sleeve! But I’m not ready to talk about that, yet. I’ll be taking a hiatus from the art recovery business for a while, though—even though I love it!

Characters from the other two books appear in this one, and the different plot threads come together. Can you give us a hint how all that works? And where Avy and Liam, in particular, are?

Avy and Liam, oddly enough, turn up in Moscow along with Natalie’s renegade granny and everyone else! Remember the quest for justice I mentioned earlier? Well, they’re there to recover something most unusual . . . something that Liam’s never dared to try recovering before. And Liam is no coward—if you’ve read the previous TAKE ME books, you know that he’s got a set of real brass ones! LOL.

This recovery will strain not only his nerves and his ingenuity, but Avy’s patience and her trust in him . . . which has been a bit shaky lately. Will their relationship survive? It’s anyone’s guess.

I hope you enjoy TAKE ME FOR A RIDE! And here’s wishing very happy holidays to everyone.

Karen is giving away a copy of Take Me for A Ride to one commenter today, so tell us: Is there a story involving art theft that you especially like? What's your favorite story of a bad boy doing penance after he's reformed by love? Who's your favorite bad boy hero?

To Take a Thief

by Nancy Northcott

Today, we welcome Karen Kendall to the Lair. Some of you may remember Karen from last year, when we discussed the video for her first romantic suspense novel, Take Me If You Can. On April 6th her new book, Take Me Two Times, will be released. It’s the sequel to Take Me If You Can, and several characters from that prior book will reappear. Karen joins us today to discuss the joys and pitfalls of sequels and series.

The joy part is easy: as the author, you get to revisit favorite characters that you’ve already developed. Though Take Me Two Times is Gwen’s story (secondary character from TMIYC) it was great fun to bring back Avy (an art recovery agent for the company ARTemis, Inc.) and Liam (the sexy and incorrigible British master thief) in Take Me Two Times. I also delighted in keeping Sheila, the obnoxious office manager for ARTemis, alive on the page and torturing Gwen. And crazy rock star Sid Thresher is back, too! I have such a soft spot for Sid, disgusting as he is . . .

Now for those sequel/series pitfalls.


One of the dangers of bringing popular characters back is their tendency to try to steal the show from the hero/heroine of the new book. This is hard to avoid, because the author has already spent a lot of time fleshing out the former characters—and if the author is like me, she’s banging her head against the keyboard while trying to get a handle on the new ones! Oh, how tempting it was to let Avy and Liam have extra chapters instead of diving deep into the old hurts and conflicts of Gwen and Quinn, her old lover. I had to rap my own knuckles several times.

Another difficulty in developing a sequel and working with former characters is keeping those characters’ conflicts alive . . . you know, the same conflicts that you slaved to resolve in the prior book. Or you can invent a whole new set of conflicts that spin off from the old ones—but again, this is hard work. And then how do you engineer the plot so that the subplot connects properly with it? Believe me, that was an issue that led to further head-banging on my keyboard. In fact, I’m pretty sure that the “t” key and the “y” key are still embedded in my forehead and will one day have to be surgically removed.

But, wait! There are even more problems in series. Have you planted the characters for the next book solidly in the previous one? And have you developed a series “arc”? And what if you made a character an only child in one book but then desperately need to give him a brother in the next? Ooops. What if you’ve made a character a villain in an early book but then decide you’d like to redeem him and bring him back as a hero in a later one? Everything an author does in those early books of the series affects what she can do in later ones. (Does anyone remember the sequel to National Velvet? Was I the only person who noticed that the horse in NV was a gelding, and therefore couldn’t possibly have produced the foal that stars in International Velvet? Again, oooops.)

I’m still developing the third book in my TAKE ME series, Take Me For a Ride (to be released in November ’09) and due to something I mentioned in the April book (Take Me Two Times) I had to set it in a city that I’ve never set foot in! I could have kicked myself as I bought stacks of guide books and looked at Google images and studied maps and did research on the internet. Yep, I had to take off like a rocket on my armchair travels . . .

I hope very much that I’ll get to write more books in the TAKE ME series. But I’m sure that those books will bring their own sets of problems, many of them generated by what I wrote in the first three. Of course a lot of these problems end up being enjoyable puzzles to solve, but I’ll never admit that publicly. What’s that you say? I just did? And on the internet, too. I guess we just discovered yet another pitfall of series and sequels: the art of keeping certain things hidden throughout the books until you’re able to reveal the Big Secret in the end.

Yes, I do have a big secret in the TAKE ME series—and that’s the identity of Kelso, the silent partner in ARTemis, Inc. (Well, sometimes he’s not so silent, but nobody has ever seen him and believe me, they’ve tried.) Who do you think he is? If you want to take a guess, go ahead!

And please feel free to ask me any questions about the characters and books in this series, which revolves around an agency that recovers stolen art. Thanks! Happy reading.

When you read series, do you find yourself becoming interested, as Karen did, in different places? Have you ever read a series in which a character who initially looked like trouble turned out ot be a hero or heroine you loved? Do you have a favorite series with an plot or character question that isn't resolved until the end?

For more about Karen and her books, visit her website, where you can also read an excerpt from Take Me Two Times.

Late Booty Call

Those of you who commented during Karen Kendall's and Patricia Rice's visits may be wondering who won the booty. The month has flown by, and I forgot to post either of them. Apologies to all concerned! Drum roll, please . . .

The winner of Karen Kendall's Take Me If You Can is Natalie Hatch. Natalie, please email Karen via her website: Karen AT KarenKendall DOT com.

The winner of Patricia Rice's Mystic Guardian is Buffie! Buffie, please mail Pat through her website, readers2 AT patriciarice DOT com.

They're both at RWA and may or may not have computer access, so don't worry if you don't hear back right away.

Thanks to everyone who stopped by, both for your comments and for your patience. Have a great week, everyone!

From Gripping Pages to Hot Video: The Story of a Trailer

by Nancy

Today's guests are here because a cool trailer on YouTube for a sizzling romantic suspense novel, Take Me If You Can, created so much buzz in the lair that we wanted to explore the subject in more depth. We welcome the trailer's creators, author and web designer Liz Bemis (pictured at left) and author Karen Kendall, (pictured at right) today.

To view the trailer, click on this link:


NANCY: What gave you the idea of doing this trailer?

LIZ: Uh... Karen called me and said, "Hey Liz. I need a trailer." :D (I'll actually let Karen cover this one!)

KAREN: LOL. Well, it all started with the web site, really. I had these preliminary pages for a new site geared towards the new direction I was taking in my writing career. But they weren’t quite “there” and I asked Liz for help. What she came up with was brilliant. So that was the start of our working relationship. Then we did book-marks and postcards and I wasn’t having much luck contacting the person who’d done my first and only other trailer . . . so I said, hey, how about it?

Right from the start Liz had great ideas about live actors and voice-overs, not just images with superimposed words. I was very impressed! Plus Liz was able to make me laugh while I was both on deadline and in promo hell—and that was quite an achievement!


NANCY: How did you go about putting it together?

LIZ: We had a couple of false starts, actually. We'd initially planned to do a trailer with a scene directly out of the book. Karen sent me an excerpt and I cut it down to the bare bones, and then recorded the audio. I did the part of Avy and Quinn, an incredibly gifted voice guy (and fortunately a friend) did the part of the narrator and Liam. It was... well, not very good, really. But I learned a lesson. Full scenes of dialogue don't really belong in a trailer. So we went back to the drawing board. Karen provided a different kind of script and I massaged it a bit and cut it down. We were really trying to keep the trailer to about 60 seconds. Anything longer than that and I think the message gets lost.

After that we went through about 42,847 songs trying to find the perfect one. I give Karen full props for picking the music she did! It works perfectly! Karen made suggestions for the kind of images she wanted to see and I hunted and gathered in places like istockphoto.com. Then Quinn and I recorded the new audio about a thousand times until we had exactly what we needed and I then matched the audio track to the music, and then the pictures to the audio track and... voila!

KAREN: Liz is modest—she makes it all sound so easy. And she’s also patient—not to mention non-violent. LOL. I felt like Simon Cowell when we talked about the first “false start” as she puts it. There’s nothing worse than telling someone as talented and creative as she is that, well, ah, oops, um, here’s-the-deal-but-our-visions-aren’t-gelling-here and, oh, by the way, I’m the one who probably screwed you up by sending you a terrible script which is much better read silently than aloud.

Liz handled that like a pro (me, I was almost in tears on the phone, not so pro, heh) and all she said was, “Okay. Can you explain to me more clearly what your vision is?” Wow! And she even omitted any serious cursing or threats!
So I said, hell-no, I can’t explain it—what, do you think I’m a creative or something?

Liz took a deep breath (really, I think she keeps a tank of patience right next to her desk and regularly inhales from it when dealing with idiot clients—I won’t speculate on Xanax).

LIZ: No Xanex. But there's a bottle of good Cabernet and a wine opener on hand at all times. In case of emergency... break fill glass. Repeat if necessary.

KAREN: Then she asked somewhat plaintively (can you imagine the nerve?) for just a single, solitary, flea-sized clue.
Okay, I said. Take this capsule summary of the book, this sketch of hero and heroine and go watch the trailer for the Thomas Crown Affair re-make . . . never mind that we don’t have a Hollywood budget, I know you’re brilliant. You can do this, Liz!

Even then, she didn’t come after me with a knife. Amazing. She just pulled it off. And to this day I don’t think she’s told anyone what a pain in the patooty I was—I figure that’s my job.


NANCY: Karen, Take Me If You Can is a departure from the romantic comedies that launched your career. What motivated you to move in this direction?

KAREN: I’ve been fascinated with art crime for a long time and I have an art background. But when I conceived the idea for this series, romantic comedy wasn’t doing so well in the market. And when my agent, editor and I talked about the story concept of TAKE ME IF YOU CAN, we all agreed that we didn’t want it to devolve into farce or a complete caper (though I love those old art caper movies like To Catch a Thief and How To Steal a Million). I can’t entirely repress my warped sense of humor, but art crime is a very serious subject with growing repercussions for our world. I wanted to delve into the danger of it, the suspense, and it seemed to fit.


NANCY: Will you continue to write romantic comedy, or are you taking a break from that?

KAREN: Any time I make plans, especially plans in the publishing world, God laughs and derails them, so I can’t speculate on that. There are still comic touches in these books, though.


NANCY: You have several recovery agents in Take Me If You Can. May we assume they're set up to appear in a series of such books?

KAREN: Yes! So far there will be at least three. I’m revising the sequel, Gwen’s story, right now and have written the proposal for book three. Avy, Liam, Sheila and even Sid will be back in book two, which is fun.


NANCY: Liz, how did you become interested in doing websites? What's your foremost consideration in author promotion?

LIZ: Web design is a pretty natural fit for me, actually. I've been a computer programmer since the early nineties, and before that, I did a lot of graphic design. It ties in both the creative (making it pretty) and the technical (making it work fast and have lots of bells and whistles). As for my foremost consideration, I'd have to say the author's personal brand. I want to create a site that's not only functional and visually appealing, but also one that really tells a story about who the author is and what kind of books she writes.


NANCY: When you set out to do a new website, what factors do you consider?

LIZ: First, what (visually) appeals to the client's tastes? I want to find a design that the client will love, so I make them look at a gazillion different sites and find about five that they love and five (professionally designed!) sites that they... well, don't love, and to tell me what they do and don't love about them. That gives me a really good indication of what works for that particular client.

Next, what is the author's writing style and brand? There are a lot of great sites out there that absolutely do not belong to the author whose name is at the top of the page! I never want a visitor to be confused about what kind of book an author writes when he/she hits a site that I designed.

Finally, I work with the author to develop content that will bring visitors back and then put it all together.

NANCY: Was any redesign of Karen's site necessary to launch Take Me If You Can.

LIZ: Actually, Karen's website was the first step in the promotion of Take Me If You Can, in addition to launching a new MySpace design and a lot of printed items (bookmarks, postcards, excerpt booklets, etc). Her old site worked well for her romantic comedy, but didn't really speak to her new "brand" as a writer of romantic suspense.

KAREN: Yes, as I mentioned, the new site was the first project that Liz and I worked on. Then the printed materials, the My Space site and the fabulous, high-octane trailer. I highly recommend her!

NANCY: Liz, in addition to your promotions business, you also write. Tell us a little about your work.

LIZ: I am currently in the final editing stages of the first book in a Romantic Suspense series. The entire series focuses on the Cincinnati FBI Field Office and each member of the office gets their own book. I'm pretty excited about it! This is the first true Romantic Suspense that I've ever written. It's a lot darker, deeper, and more emotional than my previous fifteen books which were all Romantic Comedy (though a few of them had light suspense-y elements). Quite hopefully, this will be the one that sells, because after sixteen books and two Golden Heart finals, I'm ready for it. :)

I've done a video trailer to my most recent book. (To continue the shameless self promotion.)


Liz Bemis is the owner and creative director of Bemis Promotions (http://www.bemispromotions.com/). She has worked in the Graphic Design and Information Technology fields for more than fifteen years and is responsible for all creative aspects of all projects produced by Bemis Promotions. Liz is also a two-time Golden Heart Finalist (http://www.elizabethbemis.com/) which gives her unique insight into the business, branding and promotional requirements of marketing books.

Karen Kendall is the author of sixteen romantic comedies and many disasters. Awards she’s received include the Maggie, the Write Touch, the Book Buyer’s Best and R.T. Magazine’s Best Blaze of 2005. She launched her romantic suspense career in April 2008 with TAKE ME IF YOU CAN, the first in a series about an agency that recovers stolen art. TAKE ME TWO TIMES (working title) will be released by Signet in April of 2009, with a third TAKE ME book to follow. Please visit http://www.karenkendall.com/ for more information or excerpts.

Karen will be giving away a copy of Take Me If You Can to one commenter chosen at random.

What do you think of these cool trailers? What kind of book promotion do you most enjoy? What sort of web page features do you like? Is there anything else you'd like to share about reading or book promotion?

Approved for all Audiences...Preview of Coming Attractions...

by Jeanne Adams

It's JUNE!! We have SUCH a month for you!

On June 4 our own Bandita, Donna MacMeans is throwing HER launch party for her newest fantastic read, The Trouble with Moonlight. It's bound to be another rowdy day in the Lair! Shield sliding, anyone? If you loved Mrs. Brimley, you'll adore Donna's next offering as well.

In addition to our other wonderful Banditas nd their scintillating posts, we have a number of really interesting, amazingly prolific guests.

Jane Graves is here on June 3, to talk about her latest book, Tall Tales and Wedding Veils. Jane writes both series and single titles, so bring your questions about writing in multiple areas!

Debut Avon Regency Historical Author Olivia Parker is with us on June 5. Her first book The Bride Hunt Ball received a 4 Star Review from Romantic Times! She will be giving away a signed copy of her book to one lucky commenter.

On June 9, be sure to come visit with beloved NY Times Bestselling author Loretta Chase. Library Journal has called her the "Long-awaited successor to Georgette Heyer." What else needs to be said?

Award winning author Susan Crandall will be with us on June 12, sharing her unique wit and wisdom.

NY Times and USA Today Bestselling Historical author Lorraine Heath is visiting on June 17.

And hot, hot, hot erotic, historical and romantic suspense author Karin Tabke is with us on June 19. Karen writes for three - count them, THREE - different publishers and is going to talk to us about her latest release, Master Of Surrender, the first book in her Blood Sword Legacy series.

Another debut author, Anna Louise Lucia will be in the Lair on June 22nd to celebrate the launch of her book Run Among Thorns; out this month from Medallion Press. Romantic Times gave her 4-1/2 stars!

Last, but certainly not least, check out author Karen Kendall and web guru Liz Bemis of Bemis Promotions on June 26th. These two fine women both create the book trailers which are becoming more and more popular on websites today. They'll discuss the creation of the trailer for Take Me If You Can and answer questions about book trailers.

It's going to be a FAB-U-LOUS month! So check back every day for amazing stories, rowdy parties, and the usual level of Romance Bandit fun!

So, what's your favorite among these awesome authors? Who are you looking forward to "meeting" the most? And if you could be a fan-girl-or-guy and meet an author, living or dead, who would it be?