Guest Blog and Giveaway with P.L. Blair

When the Characters Take Over

Before I get started, I want to thank you, Roxanne, for this week's tour and the opportunity to put a spotlight on Shadow Path and my Portals fantasy/detective series. It's been a great experience.

Next, I want to thank Kat Morales and Tevis Mac Leod, my human and elf characters, respectively, for guiding me through the writing of Shadow Path – and subsequent books – because they have been in control from the beginning.

It started with that vision of Kat, standing on a sidewalk in Corpus Christi, Texas, watching her partner (Tevis) examine the body of an ogre:

Tevis, kneeling beside the body, seemed unfazed. With his short-cropped blond hair, wearing a pale gray summer-casual suit (white shirt, no tie), he could have passed for one of the young attorneys who worked in the law offices that lined the surrounding streets. Except, of course, for the pointed ears that marked him as an Elf – Aalfar, as he called himself and his people – and the white, department-issued rubber gloves similar to those Kat wore.

"Almost done?" he asked in his strange accent that was slightly Scottish and slightly … something else.

"Almost," Kat said. Sense of duty overcame revulsion, and she raised the digicam and took two more shots, slightly different views, of the corpse. The Ogre lay face-down on the street just at the edge of the alley, its head twisted to one side. The one eye she could see was open. She slowly surveyed the kill site: North Carancahua Street, midway between Antelope and Leopard, just a few blocks from the Nueces County Courthouse Complex. The killer had nerve.

From that point, the plot seemed to take off. All I had to do was keep up with Kat and Tevis as they followed an investigation that involved diamonds … and pixies … swords inscribed with murderous runes … black magic – death magic – all of it leading back into Tevis' past, a former lover who now wanted Tevis dead …

Shadow Path seemed to write itself.

I loved watching it come together.

And I've loved this opportunity to share it.

Book Description:

The Ogre is dead, what's left of the murder weapon - a rune-inscribed sword - still in his liquefying remains.

That's just the beginning for Kat Morales, a Human detective with the Corpus Christi, Texas, police department and her Elf partner, Tevis. The two soon find themselves awash in Pixies, Magic of the Blackest kind, and a trail theat leads into Tevis' past, to a former lover, now a necromancer, who wants to extinguish her old flame - permanently.

This first book in P.L. Blair's "Portals" fantasy adventure series begins at a time in Earth's not-too-distant future when magical portals are opened between the world we now know and the "otherside," a parallel world filled with magic and all manner of magical creatures and beings. The "Portals" series will launch you on a wonderous journey of imagining what it would be like if magic and creatures of myth and legend were to suddenly step into our world for real.

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Winner TBA Next Wednesday