Just visiting

Today I'm being interviewed over at Taryn Blackthorne's blog. This was set up a looooong time ago as part of my publicity for the Heart of Flame release, but it's more about making me go "Eeek! How do I answer that?" and not actually anything about the book. A fun interview - I wish they were all like that!

So, hence the Arabesque gentleman in the illustration here. But there's also a connection to another of my novels entirely. The Visitor is a vampire anthology released by Mischief tomorrow, and my contribution is a story called Amuse-Bouche, which is a tie-in to Red Grow the Roses.

You wouldn't have thought there'd be any common ground between my romantic Arabian Nights tale and my hardcore contemporary vampires, but .... one of the central characters in Roses is boss-vampire Reynauld :

And this is Reynauld, the Good Shepherd, whose authority over the other five is held by dint of careful planning and the minute application of brute force when necessary. He’s not the oldest of them, because that distinction belongs to Roisin, but he’s hardly young even by vampire standards. His name is French but he isn’t, although should he choose to speak the language his grasp of it is perfect, and - just as in English – he has an aristocratic accent. He speaks Spanish too and Portuguese –  Old World style, not American – as well as Arabic, Farsi, Old Syriac, Italian, Latin and Greek, all with equal fluency, along with many others on a less familiar basis. He always did have a facility with languages. He was thirty-four years old and a translator and scribe in the House of Wisdom in Baghdad when he died, in the year 218 after Hijra, which was the year 833 Anno Domini in the Roman reckoning. Both calendars were ones he was quite familiar with, being a man of sublime education.

 His name then was not Reynauld of course; it was Kerim ibn Zarad al-Razi, but he abandoned his Arabic name when he gave up his religion. There is no place in Islam for vampires, whose very sustenance is harram: forbidden.

And he looks a bit like that picture too :-)

There will be an excerpt from Amuse-Bouche later this week. Oh yes. There will be blood.