Soul of Dust by @adammillard with #excerpt, guest post and #giveaway @RoanePublishing #urbanfantasy

Hello and welcome. We have a blog tour today for Soul of Dust by Adam Millard. There's also an excerpt of this urban fantasy, a guest post by the author, and a giveaway. Enjoy!

Soul of Dust

By Adam Millard

Genre: Urban Fantasy

Release Date: December 7, 2015

Publisher: Roane Publishing

Keywords: Urban Fantasy, Sleuth, Paranormal, Investigator, Wizard, Demons, magic, Gritty

Sometimes being semi-immortal just isn’t enough.

Jack Bridge is having a very bad day.

Life as a private investigator is tough, but it’s even worse when you’re a semi-immortal wizard private investigator whose tolerance for humans grows thinner by the day. Just when he thinks things can’t get worse, in she walks.

Kate West, beautiful and complex in equal measure, with a problem only Jack can solve. Daemons, magic, voodoo, and vamps; it’s all very real, and Jack Bridge is the last line of defense against the creatures of Elsewhere.

Sometimes being semi-immortal just isn’t enough.

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Excerpt 

Doing what I do, I tend not to carry too much money around with me. When you deal with the types of people I have to deal with, it’s best not to make yourself too attractive to them—in other words, no phone, no wallet, no jewellery, and if you really want to come across as unappealing—I do, it’s how I’ve survived this long—no soul. Sure, a pocketful of change isn’t going to put you on anyone’s hit list, but I’d just spent my last tenner on ginger beer and two cheeseburgers, and this guy, this jobsworth pushing his way through the compacted commuters, was about to make a scene, something I could ill afford. Even though I couldn’t see my mark, he was still here somewhere. Any sudden kerfuffle could draw his attention, and then what? The last thing I wanted was the lunatic going off on a tram piled to the brim with innocents.

The shit was about to hit the proverbial fan, one way or the other.

“Tickets, please,” the conductor said when he finally reached me a minute or two later. He had the kind of face only a mother could love, and I wouldn’t be surprised if even she’d ostracised him. The stifling heat in the carriage had given him an odd hue. He looked like something that only sprouted in the summertime. To be honest, if circumstances had been different, I would have found it difficult not to start laughing.

“Oh, erm, yeah…” I made a big deal of searching my pockets. I had to at least give the illusion I wasn’t trying to hitch a free ride.

As I rummaged, the man regarded me warily, as if he already knew where this was going. When I came out with a handful of fluff and a few pennies, his sigh was probably audible from the front of the carriage. Hell, I’d put money—if I had any—that the driver in the cockpit heard the ticket-master’s disappointed exhalation.

“Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to step off the tram at the next station.” He pressed a few buttons on his little keypad, buttons that meant trouble for me. The next station was what? Ferndale? And you could bet your boots there’d be a team of burly guards waiting for me, ready to drag me off to whatever punishment they considered apposite for fare-dodgers in this day and age.

Those people within earshot all hissed in unison, as if they knew something I didn’t. Was it possible that this three pound journey was going to cost me more than just a slap on the wrists? Was I about to get waterboarded to within an inch of my life?

Shit, I should have never bought the cheeseburgers.

What people are saying about this title:

“Adam Millard does it again with this thrilling, suspenseful book. I received an arc for an honest review and I can tell you that I could not put this book down. It was really awesome. Tangle weave of complete awesomeness in this story. I recommend that you read it. You will not be disappointed.” - Tammie’s Reviews

“I found this book to be full of suspense and thrilling to the end. I will be looking into other books by this author.” - Kelly, Goodreads Review

The State of Horror – Adam Millard

As a writer, part of my job is to read as much as I can get my grubby little mitts on. I read as
widely as possible, in as many different genres as I can, but the one genre which has always been there for me—from the age of eleven, in fact—is horror. Over the years I have seen trends come and go in this genre, from the pulp creature-features of the 1980s to the vampire explosion of the 90s (Anne Rice, Laurell K. Hamilton, L.J. Smith, et al). Eventually, things come full-circle; vamps become popular again, cosmic horror once again fills up the Amazon charts, and zombies… well, you can’t move for rotting corpses, shambling about the genre, wondering how much longer they’re going to be flavor of the month.

For this article I was asked to come up with a few things I would like to see less of in horror, and some things I would like to see more of. What follows is a personal opinion and nothing more.

Zombies

Thanks to shows like The Walking Dead, Z Nation, and, erm, Fear the Walking Dead, zombies have never been more popular. I’ve written a few zombie novels and plenty of short stories featuring the undead—though not in recent years—and they’ve been some of my most successful books. However, how much is too much? There are so many fictional apocalypses available, I do believe it is time to do something different.

Vampires
This one is a toughie, as there are some truly great recent vampire works (Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula series, Del Toro and Chuck Hogan’s The Strain Trilogy) but there are so many Twilight rehashes, it’s hard to take vampires seriously. I would like to see less pretty-boy-vampire-falls-in-love-with-non-vampire-girl stories, but I’m fully aware that the market for them is huge, and so I don’t expect that to happen anytime soon.

Elder Gods
I’ve read the complete works of H.P. Lovecraft, as have many of us in the genre, but not a day goes by without the announcement of another cosmic horror-themed anthology, usually based around the Cthulhu mythos. I don’t know how much longer this trend will last, especially with the current controversy surrounding Lovecraft’s withdrawal as the face of the World Fantasy Awards, but with some publishers specializing in such anthologies and nothing else, we might witness R’lyeh emerging from the South Pacific before we see an end to this trend.

Ghost Stories
Whatever happened to the classic ghost story? There is nothing more comforting than sitting
down at Christmas in front of a roaring fire, a glass of brandy in one hand and an M.R. James collection in the other. The 21st century needs more ghost stories.

Real Monsters
We live in a scary world, a world filled with creatures we haven’t discovered yet, at least not
with any confirmation. Cryptozoology is something I’ve always been interested in, and there are enough real—allegedly—monsters out there for us, as writers, to take our pick. I’ll take a
Chupacabra over some stud vampire any day of the week.

Horror Technology
The world is constantly changing, with technological advances being made in great strides.
What’s more terrifying than that which we—Joe Public—have no control over? The scientists
banging particle beams together, seemingly having never watched Stargate? The robotics
divisions constantly working on AI, because that couldn’t possibly go wrong, could it?Technology is terrifying, and I think there is plenty of room for it in horror fiction.

So those are a few things I would like to see more or less of in the genre. Make of it what you
will, but remember this is just one man’s opinion. There will always be Lovecraft-themed
anthologies; there will always be vampire and zombie novels; there will always be dinosaur
erotica books.

There will always be horror, and for this writer, and others like me, that’s the best news we could ever ask for.

About the author

Adam Millard is the author of twenty novels, ten novellas, and more than a hundred short stories, which can be found in various collections and anthologies. Probably best known for his post-apocalyptic fiction, Adam also writes fantasy/horror for children. He created the character Peter Crombie, Teenage Zombie just so he had something decent to read to his son at bedtime. Adam also writes Bizarro fiction for several publishers, who enjoy his tales of flesh-eating clown-beetles and rabies-infected derrieres so much that they keep printing them. His "Dead" series has recently been the filling in a Stephen King/Bram Stoker sandwich on Amazon's bestsellers chart. Adam writes and edits for UK horror website This Is Horror, whose columnists include BC Furtney, Simon Bestwick and Simon Marshall-Jones.

Adam lives with his beautiful wife, Zoe-Ray, and their wonderful son, Phoenix Justice. There are also chickens, rabbits and cats, but the less said about that the better.

Follow Adam on Twitter @adammillard | Website

Giveaway 

A paperback copy of Soul of Dust and a $10 Amazon gift card.

a Rafflecopter giveaway