Authorpreneur Dashboard – Jenni Wiltz
A Vampire in Versailles
Romance
A thousand-year-old curse. An unstoppable revolution. A love fated to live forever. Jean-Gabriel de Bourbon is a vampire, brother of the first King of France. An ancient curse and his brother's treachery have linked his survival to the monarchy itself. As long as a king sits on the throne of France, he remains alive. Marguerite de Clermont-Prince is an orphan and heiress in the court of Louis XVI. She dreams of a life on the stage, where she can escape the fortune hunters who prowl the halls of Versailles...especially Etienne, brother of the king's troublemaking cousin, Louis-Philippe d'Orleans. When an accident gives Jean-Gabriel a taste of Marguerite's blood, they discover that it carries her thoughts and emotions to him, even when they're apart. This mystical attraction proves difficult to resist, even as a jealous Etienne manipulates Louis-Philippe d'Orleans and Louis XVI to keep the lovers apart. But Etienne's actions only bring the revolution closer, endangering everyone and everything they love. To survive, Jean-Gabriel and Marguerite face duels, assassins, marriages, murders, revolution, and an immortal evil that lurks at the heart of the French monarchy. Combining paranormal romance and historical fiction, A Vampire in Versailles is a dark fantasy that pits an immortal creature against a force even greater than his own: destiny.
Book Bubbles from A Vampire in Versailles
Her Blood, His Desire
There's something about Jean-Gabriel de Bourbon that Marguerite can't ignore. An orphan and an heiress, she's used to men pretending to love her. But this is different. He is different. His eyes, his face, his lips -- they hint at something dangerous. She can't turn away, even though she knows it isn't normal for a man to kiss her hand and scoop blood out of a cut with his tongue. This is the moment that bonds them together for the rest of the book. After this moment, their fate is sealed. I love the idea of Marguerite's blood holding power over Jean-Gabriel. He's a powerful eight-hundred-year-old vampire. The last thing he'd expect is for a misfit orphan girl's blood to call to him. As if their mutual attraction weren't troublesome enough, now there's some blood-borne magic at work between them. Best of luck to anyone who wants to try and fight that kind of power...
A Vampire's Fate
Vampire Jean-Gabriel de Bourbon is eight hundred years old. In 987, his older brother, Hugh Capet, betrayed him to win the crown of France for himself. Hugh's pact with a renegade Gnostic priest -- and the priest's blood ritual -- turned Jean-Gabriel into a vampire whose survival is tied to the crown. As long as one of Hugh's descendants sits on the throne, Jean-Gabriel remains alive. Now, in 1788, Jean-Gabriel is tired and bored. He cannot remember what food tastes like. He is tired of the blood hunger that forces him to kill, but it doesn't stop him from toying with his prey. In this scene, we see Jean-Gabriel struggling with his fate. You and I might take a good meal for granted, but all Jean-Gabriel wants is to be able to taste his chef's amazing delicacies. Sometimes it's good to be human. Until Jean-Gabriel gets hungry, that is...
I Never Arkansas It Coming
Mystery, Thriller & Suspense
Red state. Red blooded. Ready for trouble. Brett Sargent isn't adapting to life in Arkansas very well. A native New Yorker, she's whisked away to Little Falls in the Witness Protection Program after testifying against her former high school lab partner, now a Mafia up-and-comer. Her only friend is a happy-go-lucky guard dog named Dude. While moonlighting as a detective to pay the rent, Brett is hired by Elaine Scrubbs and her smokin’ hot redneck brother, Jake. They ask her to find Elaine’s missing husband. But when Hank Scrubbs turns up dead with a Mafia calling card stabbed to his chest, Brett knows she's next on their hit list. To stay alive, Brett tangles with a liar, a truck driver, a flesh-eating Mafia lawyer, a one-eyed repairman, a shotgun-wielding racist, a vindictive Kroger clerk, a Bible thumper, and a shoplifter named Rick James who just might be the best friend she's been waiting for. A fast-paced comic mystery, I Never Arkansas It Coming takes one private investigator for the ride of her life in a place she never wanted to call home.
Book Bubbles from I Never Arkansas It Coming
Dead Body #1
This is where Brett goes from the frying pan to the fire. The man she's been hired to find, Hank Tubbs, has clearly been murdered. What's worse...she'll find out there's a vital connection between her situation and Hank's. This scene was fun to write. I wanted to make sure Brett felt the full horror of walking into a murder scene without losing her trademark sense of humor. That's where the Lady Gaga reference came from. (I was thinking of "Pokerface" at the time.) Part of the fun of writing this book was mixing life-and-death situations with humorous wise-cracking characters. I love Janet Evanovich books, and I hope I captured a similar feel in this story.
Meet Brett Sargent
Some people know how to find the bright side in any situation. My heroine, Brett, isn't one of them. As a writer, I can be pretty anti-social, which is how I came up with one of my favorite lines of the book. Brett compares her longing to be social to passing a kidney stone. I know it's not cool to laugh at your own jokes, but this line still makes me smile every time I read it. Introverts of the world, you can probably sympathize! Of course, I'm not in the Witness Protection Program, so being social won't hurt me. It might hurt Brett, who is about to realize that the mafia up-and-comer she helped send to prison is about to re-enter her life...in a way she never dreamed of.
