Welcome Toni V.Sweeney

SINBAD’S PRIDE: You can’t keep a Good Smuggler Down
I never really intended to write a series when I started Sinbad’s Last Voyage. It just happened. I was just going to tell a love story set in the future, a single-shot, stand-alone novel—of a half-breed smuggler who hated Terrans and the Earthwoman who made him forget that. There would be strife, of course, because she was married and he was trying his best to keep from falling in love with her. There would be adventure as they tracked her fugitive husband across the galaxy, but it would be definitely end Happily Ever After. As usual with things having to do with Sinbad sh’en Singh, it didn’t turn out that way. The story of Sinbad and Andi is a lesson in the course of True Love running any way but smooth. At the end of Book One, Sinbad and Andi have a child but he learns he’s dying of a disease contracted while he was a prisoner in the Toxic Zone, the Federation’s deadliest prison.

Well, I couldn’t just leave it there. No sir! I had to get Sin and Andi married, and save my hero to fight another day. So, along came Sinbad 2: Sinbad’s Wife, in which, among other things, Sin struggles to convince Andi to make an honest man of him by marrying him, he discovers he has a 15-year-old son, and he collapses into a coma brought on by his terminal disease. Piling it on even thicker (after all this is a space opera), there is only one doctor who can save Sin and he blackmails Andi into becoming his mistress before he’ll perform the surgery. While Sin is recovering but still in a coma, Andi is subsequently kidnapped by her former husband, a power-mad Serapian general named Tran, who makes her into a sex slave. She’s rescued by Sinbad who kills Tran in a duel-to-the-death, but not before Andi has given birth to Tran’s second son. Sin, a sucker for infants and his wife’s tears, accepts the baby, they go into a clinch…roll credits…

Whew! Could I stop after that? Nosiree…now, Sin’s been pardoned by the Federation, he’s a law-abiding citizen (much to his dismay) and he’s back on his home planet, being re-instated as his grandfather’s heir and about to inherit one-third of the planet Felida. Having now reached the age of thirty-one and considered a mature adult (though Andi sometimes denies that), Sin is bored and looking for some trouble to get into. He finds it in the Peace Treaty Felida signed after being defeated by the Federation. In it there’s a loophole which no one, not even the Felida Pride Chiefs realize is there, a clause preventing prosecution of any Pride member for any crime against the Federation.
Well! When someone who hates the Fed as much as Sin does finds a document like that—even though they’ve given him amnesty for killing Tran (who was a threat to everyone and not just Andi) and posthumously pardoned his father--you know something big is going down. And it does. With the aid of the other Pride Chiefs, Sin decides to turn Felida into the biggest smuggling planet in the galaxy…and thumb his nose at the Fed at the same time. Of course, there are immediate complications, such as the fact that the Pride Chiefs want an affiliation with the operation through marriage, and send their nubile daughters to Sin as concubines. Sin tries to explain to Andi they mean nothing. It’s all politics. Andi doesn’t see it that way. There’s trouble brewing in the bedroom tonight. And for many nights to come. If Sin doesn’t watch it, he’s going to be sleeping on the sofa until he’s an octogenerian!

In the meantime, Sin’s son Adam and Andi’s son Cash are leaving adolescence and becoming men in every sense of the word. Joining Sinbad in his smuggling operation, they begin cutting a wide swath through the females of Felida, and then—as Fate will have it, they meet the two women neither can have and both want…their father’s concubines…

Sinbad’s Pride is a play on words. A Pride on Felida is made up of various clans loyal to one Chief. Sinbad is the heir to the largest Pride. He also has plenty of pride in the usual sense of the word, and whether he’s confronting the lawyers of the Federation, an incensed wife, or an adulterous child, he has to decide when to let that pride go and when to balance revenge with mercy. No matter what happens, however, one thing is certain: Sinbad loves Andi and he’ll do anything to keep that love. It’s also a story about family, and how a man who has lost everything must now try to keep together the one he’s blessed with in the face of crises which would usually blast that family apart. How Sin works it out makes up the majority of the story. It’s an erotic, sometimes funny, sometimes tragic adventure, and one I think readers will enjoy it.
Sinbad’s Pride is available through Double Dragon Publishing at http://www.double-dragon-ebooks.com/single.php?ISBN=1-55404-748-X. . Also just released is Toni’s fantasy romance A Singing in the Blood, also available from Double Dragon Publishing at http://www.double-dragon-ebooks.com/single.php?ISBN=1-55404-754-4.

Welcome, Toni V. Sweeney

FAUST UP-TO-DATE
Serpent’s Tooth is my own variation on the Faust legend, a meshing of a romance with slowly-encroaching horror, but Travis Brandt is no scholar bargaining his soul to the devil for power alone. He’s a naïve young Nebraskan, marrying early and orphaned earlier, talented and intelligent but having nothing to look forward to but a poorly-paid teaching position in an incorporated town on the Great Plains. And then his Big Break comes and he’s whisked away to Hollywood… and its contingent dangers, swept into the maelstrom of sex, drugs, rock and roll…and demon worship. Too late seeing the danger, and the only escape is to die, he spends the next quarter century in oblivion…until he meets a former fan, a woman who loves him not for the man he was, but for the man he has become. In her he sees his salvation, but his past rears its deadly head.
Serpent’s Tooth was the result of a dream, only one word remaining when I awakened: the name Hildebrand. Two days later, I heard the name again in a late night TV movie and knew I had to write a story using it. Perhaps there was a lingering taste of composer Paul Williams’ rock-horror-opera The Phantom of the Paradise. All I know is that the story of the young man from Nebraska, so determined to be a success he dares risk his immortal soul to gain what he wished, only to have it all explode in his face, came easily to the keyboard. It’s a horror story, yes, but it’s also a love story, the story of a man’s love for a woman which is so strong he dares risk his already-jeopardized soul to protect her.
I tried to make my description of the era as accurate as possible, and haunted the local libraries for weeks, researching the ’80, especially regarding the music, and current events and I also wanted to combine the Southern atmosphere of my younger days with the place I now reside, Nebraska. This, however, is no story of young love, reckless and unheeding. Both the hero and heroine are mature in that respect, adults who’ve already lived a good part of their lives before they meet. Melissa is a Southerner, a woman in her early 40’s who goes on a cruise to ease the memories of her mother’s death. Travis is in his 50’s, a man who fled to his Nebraska roots in order to hide, a man once ready to do whatever was necessary to become a success, but now finds himself afraid to love again because of a drug-induced promise he made two decades before. They are opposites—one a sheltered old maid, the other an orphan who’s always taken care of himself—each seeing something in the other to fulfill a need. Two lonely people thrown together by Fate and a love which is going to be tested in the worse way imaginable.

The story is told in a series of flashbacks which mirror events taking place in the present.

Opening with singer Hildebrandt’s decision to quit Hollywood forever, the story weaves back and forth between 2009 and the Eighties, reflecting how Hildebrandt, the most successful rock star of that era and an actor who had brought to life one of the most famous horror characters ever created, disappears from his beachhouse, never to be heard of again, only to surface twenty years later as Travis Brandt, rancher and lover of Melissa Powers, a sheltered librarian from Savannah. (An interesting aside, Travis is the great-great-grandson of Will Brandt, hero of Walk the Shadow Trail, a Western I wrote a dozen years ago.)

What should have been a happy ending, with two people starting a new life together, is only the beginning, as the horror Travis left behind when he fled Hollywood is now awakened to once more reach out and threaten the former movie star and his new bride.
It’s a different type of story for me. I hope readers of romance will be charmed by Travis’ love for Melissa. Though they may not like the ending, they might be moved to admit it was the logical one. I know readers of horror will appreciate its suitable irony.

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