July 2006 Releases

My Shadow, My Love - Sharon Horton (Contemporary Romance)
Hanchart Land - Becky Barker (Contemporary Romance)
Desert Wind - Charlotte Boyett-Compo (Futuristic Romance)
Shadow of a Doubt - Karen McCullough (Romantic Suspense)

Upcoming August 2006 Releases

(Release schedule subject to change)
At Her Command - Marcia James  (Romantic Suspense)
Beloved Stranger - Patricia Crossley  (Paranormal Romance)
The Dream - Jaycee Clark  (Contemporary Romance)
Heaven and Lace - Linda Bleser  (Romantic Comedy)
Hundred Dollar Bill - Sherry Morris (Historical romance - 20th century)  

Marie Bellevaux
http://www.mariebellevaux.com/

It’s always a good sign when an author is also a voracious reader, and that’s how Marie Bellevaux describes herself. Her romance addiction started with historical teenage romance novels. “My mom introduced me to Johanna Lindsey’s Captive Bride,” says Marie, “and I was hooked.” Her love of fiction led her to get a BA degree in English Literature, and her love of romance led her to start a romance review web site called Love Romances.

But she didn’t start writing until 2003, after working as Licensed Practical Nurse. It was a tough job. “I worked on the cardiac unit of a hospital,” she said. “It’s life and death there all the time an it can be quite heart-pumping. What I do now is so much more happy; I don’t have to take anti-anxiety drugs. I get my heart pumping now from sex and romance.”

Actually, these days she gets her heart pumping by chasing after her twin 4-year-old daughters. But they’re starting school soon, and Marie is looking forward to getting back to writing romance.

Marie has four books with Ellora’s Cave under the name Mari LaCroix, but To Tempt an Angel is her first book with Cerridwen. It’s also her first Regency and her first vampire book.

Her own real-life romance has a bit of the love-at-first-sight, happily-ever-after quality that romance readers love. She met the man she’s been married to for 12 years in a bar in Philadelphia. When I met him, it was just right,” she says. “I got him to teach me to play darts. We got engaged two weeks later. That’s why a lot of my books have that instant attraction. The night I met him, I had told my mom I was going out to find a date for a party that was coming up. I didn’t just get a date; I got a mate.”

Sharon Horton
http://www.sharonhorton.com

Sharon Horton gets a charge out of a good scare. “I love scary movies,” she says, “and I’m a big fan of Stephen King.”

As a child, she sought out the otherworldly with a girlfriend who grew up to be a shaman high priestess. “We used to go to this old Spanish mansion on a hill. There were rumors it was haunted. My friend and I poked around, and we saw some stuff.” It takes some prodding to get details from her, but she gives some—with caveats.

“Maybe it was just a kid’s imagination, but we saw a man in an upstairs window hammering. But when we got closer, he wasn’t there.” More prodding. “There was a fountain with a lion’s face, and one day, the water coming out was red. But I guess it could have been rust.”

But there’s one experience Sharon can’t attribute to her active imagination. She and her friend were playing with a Ouija Board and they asked the spirit to lift up the window blind. It did. Her friend was intrigued, but Sharon was scared for real. “I’ve never touched a Ouija Board since,” she says.

Since then, she’s had some ghostly encounters. She has felt a presence in the 76-year-old house she lives in now and heard party noises, but it doesn’t scare her. “It’s a nice feeling,” she says. “Like you’re not alone.”

After learning of Sharon’s ghostly experiences, you might be surprised to learn her first book for Cerridwen is not a ghost story, though it does have plenty of suspense. My Shadow My Love is actually about a young woman who falls in love with a man whose job is to protect her from a murderer.

The book is set in a horse-racing facility, which reflects another of Sharon’s real-life passions: She loves horses. “I love animals. I used to have a horse, and I’d love to have another one.” For now, she contents herself with collecting model horses—she has more than 100—and with keeping smaller animals, a German Shepard and an 11-year-old, foot-long goldfish. “He was just a little feeder fish I bought for a quarter. He just kept growing, and I kept buying larger tanks. He’s in a 30-gallon tank now.”

A unique commuter service for Indian women
By Rajeev Sethi

It's 7:45 a.m. on a suburban train in Mumbai, the business capital of India. In the second-class coach, Radha Borkar, a 43-year-old receptionist, is distributing sweets among her friends to celebrate her daughter's graduation. She spends more than three hours every day on her 160-kilometer roundtrip commute to and from work. To use her time well, she and many other commuters have formed small groups based on common factors or interests. Some ride together because they live in the same area. Others band together to sing religious bhajans (hymns) or play antakshri (a competition involving singing Hindi film songs). Still others like to exchange cooking recipes.

But all the commuters on this train have one thing in common: All are women. This is Western Railway's Ladies Special (as it is officially called), in which only women are permitted to travel. The women prefer to call it Majhi Gadi (My Train).

But why the need for a Ladies Special?

Bhagwat Dahisarkar, a representative of Western Railway, explains: "In Mumbai a majority of the working class use public transport, mainly the train, to travel. This naturally leads to overcrowding during peak hours mainly in the second class, causing great inconvenience especially to women, as they have to jostle for space in the two and a half coaches reserved for them. In order to ease this inconvenience to women, we run two Ladies Specials during peak office [morning and evening] hours."

These Majhi Gadi are immensely popular and have been running regularly without a single cancellation since May 5, 1992. How important a role Majhi Gadi has come to play in the life of women commuters, can be judged from Judy Fernandes' confession, "I have an offer for a better job, but for that, I would need to travel by the normal train since the new job's office timing doesn't suit the Ladies Special. After a round of argument with my husband and some self analysis, I have decided against shifting jobs, as I would rather earn a little less and come home smiling to my young kids, than arrive home dead tired with a frown after jostling in the normal overcrowded train."

But some are willing to jostle around on principle. Sujata, 34, a rare breed of dedicated social worker never boards the Ladies Special and never uses the coach reserved for women. "Women need no reservation. They are equal to men," she says, pushing her way into the overcrowded train.

And indeed the trains do get overcrowded, as a massive 6.1-million of the Mumbai city's 11-million people use suburban trains. In a train of 12 coaches, the seating capacity is 2,400 but during peak hours the ridership swells to 4,500-5,500 people. Trains run every three minutes during peak hours but are still so crowed that experts have estimated they hold the highest density of people per square meter in the world. Two railway divisions, Western and Central, serve this dense Mumbai crowd of commuters. Central Railway runs one Ladies Special from Kalyan to Chatrapati Shivaji Terminus, a 54-kilometer stretch.

The crowding problem is largely due to the fact that commuters are moving mainly in one direction because Mumbai is a sea coast city and is spread length wise along the coast. Adding to this problem is the faulty planning of having huge chunks of offices in the southern part of the city. So as office hour nears, a surge of people all move southward at the same time. Additionally, most commuters prefer the faster, cheaper train as a means of public transport over the bus, which takes longer and costs more. "To adequately cope with this rush," explains Central Railway spokesman Y. K. Singh, "Central Railway runs 1,198 suburban trains daily, while Western Railway runs 1,007, totaling 2,205 trains a day. Thus making it the biggest railway suburban network in India."

All this overcrowding certainly does call for some preferential treatment for women, already overburdened with household work and looking after kids (still unfortunately mainly a woman's domain). But what do the men waiting at the jam-packed platform feel on seeing the Ladies Special? "One certainly feels bad," says 43-year-old saleman Mahesh Chopra, but as an afterthought, he quickly adds, "Maybe someday my daughter would use it to travel to work. So, I feel it's good. They need it."

As I walk away on the platform, I see and hear through the Ladies Special window, women in their 30s enthusiastically volunteering to help manage an elderly lady's 50th wedding anniversary party. Indeed it seems true bonding happens among women on the Majhi Gadi.