Okay, so I was puzzling over what to write today. For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Mina Carter and I write tales of hot alpha men, and the women stubborn enough to tame them. I hover between paranormal and sci-fi a lot of the time but when I write paranormal, I do like a shifter or a gargoyle (or two 
).
I’m British so we don’t really have the same thing with Halloween as other parts of the world, although the parties and costumes are catching on here now. As a kid, trick or treating was the exception rather than the norm. (I grew up in a sleepy English village so all that ‘mucking about’ was more likely to get you a chat with the village bobby than any treat)
But I do have more than a passing acquaintance with all things spooky and paranormal, and this, I am afraid, is where it gets gruesome (bear with me, I’m gonna plug a book with the Grim Reaper so I have to go all dark first…).
I’m part gipsy. It’s from way back when but it seems the look or aura or whatever you want to call it, never leaves a bloodline. Even though my great-grandmother stopped travelling the early part of last century and settled down (to open an ice-cream parlour of all things), whatever that intrinsic thing that made her a gipsy was passed down through the maternal line. Although we occasionally have trouble with gipsys where I live…I never do. The neighbors do, but one look at me and more than one family have moved on or been very, very polite. (Apparently I have the ‘evil eye’ but, trust me, I have NO clue I’m doing it!)
This also extends to palm-reading, fortune telling and tarot cards. Several times I’ve been refused a reading by people, who won’t go into any more details than I ‘block’ the reading. Go figure. I’m a bit skeptical about stuff like that so I never bothered to get more details and just went along with it.
So when a woman at the place I was working at brought some tarot cards in and offered to do everyone a reading, I thought why not? She did a couple of others and it was the usual stuff…journeys and decisions and whatnot. Then she gets to me and we started out well. Again, the stuff I’d expected…vague hints of waiting for something and making a decision. Then we get to the last card.
It was the hanged man.
Okay, cool. She explained it didn’t mean a real hanged man but something else (which I can’t remember right now). Nothing sinister. Everyone was happy and we all went home.
Except over that weekend, I KEPT seeing hanged men. That night there was a documentary on the TV about the last Hangman in Britain, the night after a re-run of a cop show with a hanged victim. The night after that a forensic type show in which the victims were hung. It didn’t stop there, all through the weekend, little things like seeing a hangman image in a shop (it was nowhere near Halloween), someone wanted to play a word game to pass half hour and chose hangman.
By Sunday, I was a little freaked out.
Monday got worse. At dinnertime my mom called me. My mom never calls me in the work day so I went outside to call her back. A member of my family had been found. Hung.
It was a shock but a long time ago. And since then, I have always had a healthy respect for anything out of the ordinary but now, if anyone wants to do a tarot reading, you can’t see me for dust!
The heroine of my upcoming release, Reaper, has a similar problem with tarot readings. In a world where everything that goes bump in the night walks the Earth, Andy is something unique. Death made reality, she is the grim reaper in flesh and blood, continually called to dispatch those whose number is up to the afterlife. Some go easy, some make it more…interesting for her.
The World after the End of the World will never be the same again…
Sanctuary. Clichéd name, but the sentiment is still the same. Ten years after the end of the world, ex-soldier Mason and a small group of humans defend their fortified town against creatures of myth and legend made real. But with dwindling game to hunt and a lycan pack in the area looking for an easy meal, just surviving is getting harder every day.
Andy has a few screws loose, and she knows it. She’s been on the road since the bombs fell and changed humanity forever. Driven by inhuman instincts, she tracks the newly and soon-to-be dead and dispatches their souls to the afterlife. Sometimes they go quietly, most put up a fight. She doesn’t care either way. Her ambition in life is to find her next hit of coffee and one day, maybe, sleep in a real bed again.
Then Andy’s instincts bring her to Sanctuary and its enigmatic leader, Mason, and even the world after the end of the world will never be the same again…
Product Warnings:Contains a snarky female Reaper with a hair-trigger temper and a caffeine addiction, a hot ex-commando with an attitude and a twisted sense of humour and a happily ever after that defies death itself.
Available for Pre-order from Samhain Publishing | Amazon UK | Amazon
