Tour Hosted by Pump Up Your Book Book Tours
“Blood and Whiskey”
A Cowboy and Vampire
Thriller
by Clark Hays and
Kathleen McFall
Publication date: May
1, 2012
Fiction, Trade
Paperback (362 pages) $14.95; e-book $4.99
Genre: Fiction/Paranormal/Mystery
Wanted: Lizzie Vaughan, Dead or Alive
Relationships are always hard, but for a broke cowboy and a newly turned Vampire, true love may be lethal.
After barely surviving an undead apocalypse in The Cowboy and the Vampire, Tucker and Lizzie hightail it back to quirky LonePine, Wyoming (population 438), to start a family. But she’s got a growing thirst for blood and he’s realizing that mortality ain’t all it’s cracked up to be when your girlfriend may live forever. With a scheming Vampire nation hot on their boot heels and a price on her head, how far will Lizzie and Tucker go to protect their unlikely love?
Blending evolution, religion and an overly sensitive cow dog named Rex, Blood and Whiskey drags the Vampire myth into the modern west, delivering double-barreled action, heart-pounding passion and wicked humor.
Wanted: Lizzie Vaughan, Dead or Alive
Relationships are always hard, but for a broke cowboy and a newly turned Vampire, true love may be lethal.
After barely surviving an undead apocalypse in The Cowboy and the Vampire, Tucker and Lizzie hightail it back to quirky LonePine, Wyoming (population 438), to start a family. But she’s got a growing thirst for blood and he’s realizing that mortality ain’t all it’s cracked up to be when your girlfriend may live forever. With a scheming Vampire nation hot on their boot heels and a price on her head, how far will Lizzie and Tucker go to protect their unlikely love?
Blending evolution, religion and an overly sensitive cow dog named Rex, Blood and Whiskey drags the Vampire myth into the modern west, delivering double-barreled action, heart-pounding passion and wicked humor.
Where to Purchase:
Amazon:
Barnes & Noble:
Indie Bound:
Guest Post:
What Character Most Prompted You To Write "Blood and
Whiskey" and Keeps Your "Blood" Inspired?
Blood and Whiskey: Inspired by Paranoia
How one character, in particular, sets the tone for the blood- and
romance-drenched second book in The
Cowboy and Vampire Thriller Series.
Blood and Whiskey is an opposites-attract love story. It’s
hard to get more opposite than the salt-of-the-earth cowboy, Tucker, who falls
irreversibly, hat over heels in love with Lizzie, the queen of the undead.
She’s nuts about him too, and she wasn’t always a vampire — when she met Tucker
she was a big city girl who thought the handsome, undereducated stranger would
make for a memorable drunken mistake.
A lot can
change in a few months. Now they’re pregnant, for starters.
The book captures
the magic and chaos of their very different worlds colliding in a love affair
for the ages. Like any new lovers, they have plenty of stuff to work through.
She favors martinis and piano bars; he likes camping. He flosses too loudly;
she needs human blood to survive. And that’s just the easy stuff. They are also
being pursued by vampire assassins, and the world of the night walkers is
teetering on the edge of civil war which could spell disaster for the human
race. Plenty of action, sizzling romance and dark humor swirl around them.
With all the
chemistry and passion and heartaches between them, it would be easy to assume Tucker
or Lizzie provided the impetus for Blood
and Whiskey. Easy, but not entirely correct. And no, it’s not Elita either,
the sexy two thousand year old vampire forever taking out her boredom on
unsuspecting victims in an orgy of blood and kinky sex. She demands attention, it’s
true, but the secret source of paranoid energy powering Blood and Whiskey comes courtesy of Lenny.
Lenny is Tucker’s
best friend and a way-off-the-grid survivalist. He once designed weapons for
the military, but exposure to hazardous chemicals and dark deeds in the name of
national security earned him a medical discharge.
Lenny has
never met a conspiracy theory he didn’t like, from Roswell to the JFK
assassination, from black helicopters to cattle mutilators. He lives in a
bunker in LonePine with his wife June surrounded by enough dried meals and
stockpiled weapons to last through any apocalypse. Little did he know it would spill
out of a musty coffin.
In The Cowboy and the Vampire, when the evil
vampire hordes threaten Lizzie’s life, Tucker turns to Lenny for help. With
weapons Lenny designed and some “wet work,” they survive the worst the undead
could throw at them. In Blood and Whiskey,
it’s Lenny who needs help. His niece Rose, an orphan and runaway, is kidnapped
from the streets of Portland, Oregon, but not before she has time to make one
panicked phone call to her uncle.
Lenny calls
in his favor with Tucker and they drive to Portland, then on to a deranged meat
packing plant in Plush where Rose is being held.
Along the
way, Lenny:
- uses military grade amphetamines to try and stay awake — they seem to have the opposite effect and Tucker has to do all of the driving
- admits that his engine modifications allow his car, an old Pontiac LeMans, to run for thousands of miles on a single tank, but worries that OPEC will kill him to suppress the invention
- threatens to “pop” an evil cowboy with a special deep sea diver’s knife designed to puff a ball of compressed air into sharks
- acknowledges that the U.S. government killed Michael Jackson with propofol
- admits that he’s seen aliens
And that’s
just in the first third of the book. Things really heat up from there.
Lenny might
not be one of the star-crossed main characters, and he may not be sexy or
plagued by world-shaking issues of good and evil, but he knows the world “ain’t
what it seems.” He always knew an Illuminati was pulling the strings, he just
didn’t know the mysterious overlords were terminally allergic to sunlight.
While the love
between Tucker and Lizzie anchors The
Cowboy and Vampire Thriller Series, Lenny is the one who insisted this
story to be told. Because Lenny knows that reality — when you look it straight
in the eye and don’t flinch — is darker than we could ever dream and that
humans are not at the top of the food chain.
About the books
Blood and Whiskey (Pumpjack Press, May 2012), by Kathleen McFall and Clark Hays, is the second book in the Cowboy and Vampire Thriller Series. It’s a wickedly funny tale of love, loyalty and sacrifice in the modern west.
Blood and Whiskey (Pumpjack Press, May 2012), by Kathleen McFall and Clark Hays, is the second book in the Cowboy and Vampire Thriller Series. It’s a wickedly funny tale of love, loyalty and sacrifice in the modern west.
Find out more about The Cowboy and the Vampire Thriller Series:
@cowboyvamp
#bloodandwhiskey
About the Authors:
Clark Hays grew up in Montana
in the shadow of the Tobacco Root Mountains. In addition to his fiction work,
he is a cowboy, a published poet and occasional food critic. Recently, he was
nominated for Pushcart Prize for short fiction and not so recently for a
Rhysling award for poetry. Clark brings a deep knowledge about the modern west,
weaponry, country music and existentialism to his writing.
Kathleen McFall grew up in
the heart of Washington, D.C. She worked as a petroleum geologist and, later,
as a journalist, and has published hundreds of articles about scientific
research, energy and natural resources. An interest in the overlap of science
and mysticism are an essential aspect of her fiction writing. She received an
Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship for fiction writing.
Learn more at
http://cowboyandvampire.com/ and www.facebook.com/cowboyandvampire
Visit McFall and
Hay’s Website at: http://pumpjackpress.com
National Review:
BLOOD AND
WHISKEY (reviewed on
April 15, 2012)
Lizzie, Elita and
the rest of the gang are back for blood in the second book of Hays and McFall’s
(The Cowboy and the Vampire, 2010) series.
Following the
climactic events of the first book, Lizzie Vaughan doesn’t get much of a
breather. When a friend’s niece disappears, her Adamite (read: full-blooded
human) boyfriend, Tucker, is still coming to terms with the fact that his woman
is a vampire. While he leaves town to investigate, Lizzie is having trouble
resisting the urge to kill, as the baby she carries—the one no one thought was
possible—makes her hunger unbearable. Meanwhile, powerful elders are arriving
in the western town of LonePine to decide if the prophecy has come true. Is
Lizzie really their new queen, the one who can save vampirekind—or at least their
own Messianic bloodline? Introducing racial issues isn’t the only adjustment
the authors have made to the vampire mythos, but it’s more than just the
details that set this series apart. Rather, it’s the way the authors utilize
those details to create meaningful conflicts and world-altering choices for the
characters. While a number of existentialist underpinnings give the series some
depth, the book is first and foremost a thriller, upping the ante in every
chapter as bullets fly and relationships strain under the weight of old
loyalties and new revelations. In a way, it’s a shame more time isn’t spent
exploring the existence of this meta world where consciousnesses wait out the
daylight hours and immortality has all sorts of ramifications for human spirituality.
But with strong writing, funny characters (no irony is lost on one vampiress
who takes to sporting a “Future Farmers of America” jacket) and plenty of
action, it’s hard to fault the authors for keeping the focus on a story this
riveting.
Those who missed
out on the first book will really have to hang on if they want to follow what’s
happening, but it’s worth it for this tale of love and blood in the modern West. Kirkus
Reviews
Thanks for letting us talk about one of our favorite characters, Lenny, and the motivating force of paranoia!
ReplyDelete