Eiizabeth Joyce's Historical Romance "The Turbulent Years Trilogy"

The Turbulent Years ia an epic trilogy of a sister's love of her brother - and a woman's love for her man – set against the turbulent background of World War II.

Book I: Trudie's Way: Trudie loved her brother Karl more than anyone else in the world. But it was the middle of the Great Depression jobs were hard to come by and Karl's only choice was to join the Army. No one worried, America was at peace. Then Pearl Harbor was bombed, American went to war - and Karl was reported missing in action. Suddenly, for Trudy, beauty school, dating, movies and her social life were no longer enough. Trudie determined find Karl no matter what it cost. But first, she would have to join the military and get posted overseas to start her search. But the position she was offered was one of the most dangerous in the Army. Take intelligence training and go to Europe as a spy. Without Karl, the only one who had ever understood her, life didn't seem worth living. Soon Trudie was commissioned as an officer and intelligence operative. Then she met Chuck, who also understood her, and Trudie began to feel something for him she had never believed she could experience. Now both the men she loved were in danger - and her heart was torn in two. Assigned to her first mission, Trudie left for the European Theater of war praying for both men. Fear for her own safety as a spy operating behind the German lines never occurred to her.

The Turbulent Years Trilogy
I. Trudie's Way
II. Trudie's War
III Trudie's Men

Did You Know? (Ep 002) Weird Facts - #2 - Mima Mounds



As a very special celebration of the release of M. Christian's book Welcome to WeirdsvilleRenaissance E Books/PageTurner Editions are pleased to present the second in a five part series Did You Know? written by our publisher Jean Marie Stine and produced by by our resident magnificent media master, and great guy, Bill Mills.


"A wonderful compendium of interesting subjects and fascinating topics. Will keep you reading just to found out what's going to be covered next. Highly recommended for all lovers of weird & wonderful this side of the Universe." -Avi Abrams, Dark Roasted Blend.  
Peek under the rugs, open more than a few drawers, peek in the back shelves and you'll find that ... well, Lord Byron himself said it best: "Truth is always strange, stranger than fiction." Lakes that explode, parasites that can literally change your mind, The New Motor, a noble Word War 1 German pirate, the odd nature of ducks, the War Magician, the City of Fire, men and their too big guns, a few misplaces nuclear weapons, an iceberg aircraft carrier, the sad death of Big Mary, the all-consuming hunger of the Bucklands, the giggling genius of Brian G. Hughes, the Kashasha laughter epidemic.... Ponder that in a world that holds things like kudzu, ophiocordyceps unilateralis, The Antikythera Device, The Yellow Kid, Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, Alfred Jarry, Joseph Pujol, and suicide-bombing ants ... who knows what other kinds of wonders as well as horrors may be out there?
Welcome to Weirdsville 
M. Christian
$9.99
PageTurner Editions
183 Pages
Available where all ebooks are found 

Did You Know? Weird Facts #1: The Hellfire Club


As a very special celebration of the release of M. Christian's book Welcome to WeirdsvilleRenaissance E Books/PageTurner Editions are pleased to present the first in a five part series Did You Know? written by our publisher Jean Marie Stine and produced by by our resident magnificent media master, and great guy, Bill Mills.



"A wonderful compendium of interesting subjects and fascinating topics. Will keep you reading just to found out what's going to be covered next. Highly recommended for all lovers of weird & wonderful this side of the Universe." -Avi Abrams, Dark Roasted Blend.  
Peek under the rugs, open more than a few drawers, peek in the back shelves and you'll find that ... well, Lord Byron himself said it best: "Truth is always strange, stranger than fiction." Lakes that explode, parasites that can literally change your mind, The New Motor, a noble Word War 1 German pirate, the odd nature of ducks, the War Magician, the City of Fire, men and their too big guns, a few misplaces nuclear weapons, an iceberg aircraft carrier, the sad death of Big Mary, the all-consuming hunger of the Bucklands, the giggling genius of Brian G. Hughes, the Kashasha laughter epidemic.... Ponder that in a world that holds things like kudzu, ophiocordyceps unilateralis, The Antikythera Device, The Yellow Kid, Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, Alfred Jarry, Joseph Pujol, and suicide-bombing ants ... who knows what other kinds of wonders as well as horrors may be out there?
Welcome to Weirdsville 
M. Christian
$9.99
PageTurner Editions
183 Pages
Available where all ebooks are found 

Welcome to Weirdsville: The Benevolent Sea-Devil


Here's an rollicking sample article from M.Christian's new collection of what Avi Abrams of Dark Roasted Blend called "A wonderful compendium of interesting subjects and fascinating topics:"  Welcome to Weirdsville

Peek under the rugs, open more than a few drawers, peek in the back shelves and you'll find that ... well, Lord Byron himself said it best: "Truth is always strange, stranger than fiction." Lakes that explode, parasites that can literally change your mind, The New Motor, a noble Word War 1 German pirate, the odd nature of ducks, the War Magician, the City of Fire, men and their too big guns, a few misplaced nuclear weapons, an iceberg aircraft carrier, the sad death of Big Mary, the all-consuming hunger of the Bucklands, the giggling genius of Brian G. Hughes, the Kashasha laughter epidemic.... Ponder that in a world that holds things like kudzu, ophiocordyceps unilateralis, The Antikythera Device, The Yellow Kid, Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, Alfred Jarry, Joseph Pujol, and suicide-bombing ants ... who knows what other kinds of wonders as well as horrors may be out there?



The Benevolent Sea-Devil

The year: 1917, the height of the War To End All Wars, sadly now referred to as World War 1.  The Place: The Atlantic Ocean.  You: the captain of an allied merchant ship carrying coal from Cardiff to Buenos Aires. 
Then, like a ghost from the distant past, a ship appears: a beautiful three mastered windjammer flying a Norwegian flag.  Staggered by this hauntingly lovely anachronism you think nothing of it coming alongside – it was common, after all, for friendly ships to want to synchronize their chronometers – until, that is, the ship's Norwegian flag is quickly replaced by the German eagle and the captain, in amazingly polite terms, backed up by guns that have mysteriously appeared in the windjammer's gunwales, explains that your ship is now his.
And so you have been captured by the Seeadler ("Sea Eagle" in German), captained by Felix von Luckner, or, as he was known by both enemies as all as allies, the Benevolent Sea-Devil.
Some people's lives are so broad, so wild, so amazing that they simply don't seem real.  The stuff of Saturday Matinees?  Sure.  But real, authentic, true?  Never!  But if even half of Felix von Luckner's life is true – and there's no reason to really doubt any of it – then he was truly a broad, wild, and utterly amazing fellow.
Born in 1881, in Dresden, Felix ran away from home at 13.  Stowing away on a Russian trawler, he fell overboard – rescued, so the story goes, by grabbing hold of an albatross, the bird's flapping wings acting as a signal to a rescue party. 
Making his way to Australia, Felix tried a number of – to put it politely – odd jobs: boxer, circus acrobat, bartender, fisherman, lighthouse keeper (until discovered with the daughter of a hotel owner), railway worker, kangaroo hunter, and even had a stint in the Mexican army.  During all this Felix also became a notable magician and a favorite entertainer to no less than Kaiser Wilhelm himself.
Making his way back to Germany he passed his navigation exams and served aboard a steamer before getting called to serve in the Navy on the SMS Panther. 
Which brings us to that War That Was Supposedly The End To All Wars.  Even though it was fought with steel and oil, the German's outfitted a number of older ships as raiders – hidden guns, more powerful engines and the like – and sent them out to harass allied shipping.  Most of them were, to put it politely, a failure.  But then there was the Seeadler, under the command of Felix von Luckner.
During the course of the war Felix sank or captured no less that 16 ships – a staggering amount.  What's even more staggering is how Felix did it, and that he did it with grace, honor, and even a certain kindness.  You see, while the Seeadler took out those ships it, during its entire campaign, did it at the cost of only single human life.  Most of the time the scenario went just as it did with your merchant ship carrying coal from Cardiff to Buenos Aries: the Seeadler would approach a target, raise its German eagle and that would be that: the crew and cargo would be captured and the ship scuttled.  Sometimes she'd fire a shot to two to get her pint across that she was serious, but it wasn't until the British ship, Horngarth, that anyone had actually been killed.  Tricked into thinking they were investigating a stricken ship – Felix had actually used a smoke generator – the captured Horngarth had refused to stop broadcasting a distress signal.  A single shot took out the radio but unfortunately killed the operator.  Felix von Luckner, though, gave the man a full military funeral at sea and even went as far as to write the poor man's family telling them that he had died with honor.
To give you even more evidence that Felix von Luckner more than deserved the "benevolent" in his "Benevolent Sea-Devil" nickname he treated everyone he captured with dignity and respect: captured sailors were paid for their time while on his ship and officers ate with him at his captain's table.  When the Seeadler got too packed with prisoners, by this time more than 300, Felix captured the Cambronne, a little French ship, cut down her masts and let all his prisoners go with the understanding that if they happened to get picked up before making land they wouldn't tell where the Seeadler was going.  Respecting Felix's honor they didn't.
Alas, the Seeadler's rule of the Atlantic had to end sometime – but even that just adds to the broad, wild, and utterly amazing life of Felix von Luckner.  With the British – and now the Americans – hot on her tail, Felix decided to take a quick barnacle-scraping break from piracy by putting the Seeadler into a bay on Mopelia, a tiny coral atoll.  Now stories here conflict a bit – Felix always claimed that a rogue tsunami was to blame – but I think the more-standard explanation that the crew and prisoners of the Sealer were simply having a picnic on the island when their windjammer drifted aground.
Taking a few of his men in some long boats, Felix sailed off towards Fiji intending to steal a ship and come back for the Seeadler.  Through a series of incredible adventures – including claiming to be Dutch-Americans crossing the Atlantic on a bet – the Sea-Devil was himself tricked into surrendering by the Fijian police who threatened, after becoming suspicious of one of Felix's stories, to sink his boat with an actually-unarmed ferry.  By the way, the remaining crew and prisoners of the Seeadler had their own adventures, leading eventually to the escape of the prisoners and the capturing of the Seeadler's crew.
But even a Chilean prison camp wasn't the end for Felix, or not quite the end.  Using the cover of putting on a Christmas play, he and several other prisoners managed to steal the warden's motorboat and then seize a merchant ship.  Alas, Felix's luck ran out when they were captured again and spent the rest of the war being moved from one camp to another.
But rest assured the story doesn't end there.  Far from it: after writing a book about his various adventures, Felix von Luckner toured the world entertaining audiences about the Seeadler – as well as demonstrating his strength by tearing phone books in half and bending coins between thumb and forefinger. 
While, with the rise of Hitler, some people thought of Felix as an apologist, the captain had no love for the Nazi's – especially since the German government had frozen his assets when he refused to renounce the honorary citizenships and honors he'd received during his travels.
But the story of Felix von Luckner still isn't over.  Retiring to the German town of Halle, he was asked by the mayor to negotiate the town's surrender to the Americans.  While he did this, earning not only the respect of the Americans and the gratitude of the citizens, his reward from the Nazi's was to be sentenced to death.  Luckily, Felix managed to flee to Sweden where he lived until passing away at the age of 84.
War is horror, war is pointless death, and war is needless suffering.  But because of men like Felix von Luckner, war can also show the good, noble side of man – and that some men can remarkably earn the respect of friend and enemy alike.

Out Now: No Accounting For Danger By Laird Long


Here's a real special treat for fans of hardcore noir mysteries - with a humorous twist: No Accounting For Danger By Laird Long

When this CPA crunched the numbers, they added up to crime. After graduating from university, gun Clint Magnum, accountant-in-training, is hired by Twinkle & Winkle Chartered Accountants of Winnipeg, Manitoba. He quickly discovers many of the firms he is assigned to audit are less that squeaky clean, and that many have balance sheets that hide criminality - or worse. These include: Roadhog Trucking - a company whose corporate vision is a load of something other than clarity; a senior citizen-run crafts emporium where the blue-haired merchants are importing more than just knickknacks; the clandestine tax reclassification of the oxymoronic Democracy Foundation. Along the way, Clint and his buddies, Spud Morgan and Vanya Holden, are forced to attend a training session in the secluded hinterland of Eastern Manitoba, under the unbalanced guidance of a host of crackpot consultants and technical shamans. And as the months crawl by like wounded snails, Clint realizes the more he knows the greater a threat he becomes to his bosses and clients. When a man knows too much, he needs to be very careful. But as Clint finds out, even that may not be not be enough, because as careful as you are - there is no accounting for danger. Then comes a climax filled with emotional sparks and electrical blackout.