Hello everyone! Today I am so excited to welcome author Abigail Roux to the blog. Abi is here to talk to us about Cross & Crown, the latest in her Sidewinder series. And I am super excited because Joyfully Jay is the only place she is stopping with a blog post so we get some exclusive access. Woo hoo! She has also brought us a great giveaway, so please join me in giving Abi a big welcome!

Hello everyone! Welcome to the first day of the Cross & Crown blog tour! Thank you to Joyfully Jay for hosting. If you’re following along, you might find this spotlight schedule of use, and you might be interested in commenting on the spotlights each day, because Riptide is giving away a $100 gift card as a prize.

The Sidewinder Series

I’ve discovered over the last several years, if a reader knows me, it’s because they read Ty and Zane. While that alone is thrilling, it’s also a little scary. With the Cut & Run series coming to an end, and Ty and Zane about to step into their swan song, what the hell was I supposed to do to follow that up? Well, you go in the opposite direction.

Nick and Kelly were sort of an accident, and while I had intended to make a series around Nick and his love of history, mystery, and mayhem, Kelly was never supposed to be along for the ride. It’s probably a good thing he joined, though, because not only is he a perfect foil for Nick, but that also opened up all kinds of doors for me, creatively, that I hadn’t known were there before. The Sidewinder Series, unlike Cut & Run, has the freedom to go wherever the hell it wants to, and to take readers with it on the journey.

A reader doesn’t have to have read the Cut & Run series to enjoy Sidewinder, or vice versa for that matter, because they each follow their own path. But with Sidewinder, we can visit Ty and Zane because we’re all in the same world. We can pull the other characters from the Sidewinder recon team in for an unwilling adventure they will no doubt blame on Kelly, or we can spend a novella on Nick’s boat with something sweet and short. We can travel the world, and will, looking for trouble. The possibilities, and the scrapped ideas I can pull from, are endless. And that’s what makes this series exciting for me.

Cross & Crown pulls a little of everything into it to get it started, with a historical element added to an otherwise straightforward mystery, Nick and Kelly trying to figure out where they go from here, and an old friend from the past who’s crossed borders before. We meet characters we already know and we see them from new eyes. Readers should take these as cues of what’s to come, and know that these characters haven’t begun to show you what they’re made of.

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Blurb

When Nick O’Flaherty arrives at the scene of a double homicide to find he has a witness to the crime, he thinks it’s his lucky day. But when he realizes his witness is suffering from amnesia and can’t even remember his own name, Nick wishes he’d gone with his gut and put in for vacation time.

Then Nick’s boyfriend and former Recon teammate, Kelly Abbott, joins him in Boston, and Nick finds his hands a little too full as the case and his personal life collide. The witness he’s dubbed “JD” is being tailed by Julian Cross, a retired CIA hitman. To complicate matters further, JD forms an attachment to Nick that Nick struggles not to respond to as they search for the key to JD’s identity.

Trying to determine whether JD is friend or foe as they investigate the crime puts them on the trail of a much older mystery. When multiple attempts are made on their lives, Nick is forced to turn to old enemies and new allies to solve a centuries-old crime before he and Kelly get added to the history books.

You can order Cross & Crown directly from Riptide.

Giveaway

Follow the Rafflecopter link to enter to win a $100 gift certificate to Riptide Publishing. Entries close at midnight, Eastern Time, on June 21, and winners will be announced on June 23rd. Contest is valid worldwide.

Rafflecopter giveaway