Monday, May 21, 2012

Book Tour for Cruce de Caminos by Heidi Belleau & Violetta Vane (Guest Post & GIVEAWAY)


It's our third week celebrating Riptide Publishing's Rentboy Collection and in honor of it I'm hosting Heidi Belleau and Violetta Vane along with their new release Cruce de Caminos.  I'll be giving you a glimpse of this book as well as some background into it publication.  So let's get right to it...........

Need, Folded in a Doughnut

By Violetta Vane

Café Du Monde, a famous New Orleans landmark, sells café au au lait in big white mugs and delicious French-style hole-less doughnuts piled high with snowy mounds of powdered sugar. There are tables outside under an awning. The interior is huge and cavernous, but full of light and air, because it has open archways in place of walls.

Out through the arches, you can see the riverfront. Birds fly in and peck for sugary crumbs underfoot. This place has served coffee for more than 150 years.

It's a natural location for our characters to use as a meeting place. Sean is a newcomer to New Orleans. He's wandered westwards from his abandoned, unhappy home in the suburbs of Florida, where nothing lasts, where everything is built out of stucco and rots away to be rebuilt next year even uglier than before. He's enchanted by New Orleans and its sense of history. It satisfies a desire deep inside him, a need he didn’t even know he had.

"Cruce de Caminos" is a story full of need. Sean is young and he needs so many things. First of all, heroin. It's taken over his life and his girlfriend's life entirely, suppressing all his other needs. He needs money for heroin. He needs to feel a sense of belonging, of rootedness, that was always denied to him before. He needs to be needed. He needs to feel like he's of worth.

He needs so many things it's impossible to keep track of them. They whirl around in his mind and begin to stand for other things. Heroin can stand for love, sadly enough. A strange man who introduces him to high-end prostitution stands for worth, and maybe love, too.  But "Cruce de Caminos" isn't ultimately a story about love, just the need for love, and Sean is too wounded to even name what he's looking for… although we do leave the door open for the man he will become to name it and find it.

At Café du Monde they shared a plate of beignets, and he spent way too much of the time thinking about how close he’d been to doing this very same thing with Ángel, and way too little time thinking about how cute Cristina looked with her lips dusted with powdered sugar.

He does find that sense of history in New Orleans, and ways to satisfy certain appetites, and how to satisfy the appetites of others. But he's not going to find a home. Not yet.

Walk with him for a little while through the crossroads.

Cruce de Caminos by Heidi Belleau & Violetta Vane

Addiction drives Sean O'Hara to a critical crossroads. Will he make the right decision, or will the floodwaters bound for New Orleans sweep him away?

Street kid Sean O’Hara never had it easy, but New Orleans has driven him to his knees. His girlfriend’s broken up with him for a sugar daddy, a gun-toting pimp has robbed him of everything but the clothes on his back, and he’s down to his last two OxyContin. Sean’s no seasoned streetwalker, but he’s not above it either, not when he’s already itching for his next fix.

A familiar-seeming stranger named Ángel may be his ticket to some quick cash, but only if Sean’s willing to help him indulge a high-class john’s weird fetish for the night. As Ángel tells him, in this city and this business, you have to get a little weird to survive.

When night falls on the French Quarter, Sean realizes Ángel and the john want more from him than he was expecting to give. What once seemed merely strange soon crosses the line into supernatural and sinister. And Ángel, the man Sean had viewed as a partner and protector, might also be his otherworldly judge and executioner.

Buy It/Read an Excerpt HERE.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS:

Heidi Belleau and Violetta Vane are two unlikely friends and co-writers from different sides of the same continent. Heidi, from Northern Canada, is a history geek with a soft spot for Highlanders and Victorian pornography. Violetta is a Yank (and a Southerner, and a Japanese-American) with a cinematic imagination and a faintly checkered past. Together, they write strange and soulful interracial and multicultural m/m with a global sensibility and the occasional paranormal twist.

Visit us online!

HeidiBelleau.com | Facebook | Twitter | Blog | Goodreads
ViolettaVane.com | Facebook | G+ | Twitter | Blog | Goodreads | Amazon | Pinterest
New Release Mailing List for Heidi and Violetta (new releases only)

**********GIVEAWAY**********

Want to win some Cruce de Caminos swag, as well as a few other surprise New Orleans goodies? Leave us a comment on this or any of our other Riptide Rentboys blog tour posts with your email (or other contact info), and we’ll enter you into our week-long draw!

-Giveaway is OPEN TO US/CAN.
-Ends at 11:59 PM CST on 6/5.

***In a separate giveaway, how about a copy of “The Druid Stone”, which picks up Sean’s story five years later? Click here to try your hand at the Cruce de Caminos quiz!  This one ends July 1st!

6 comments:

  1. I have loved New Orleans each time I have visited it! The food and atmosphere alone are enough to keep me coming back.

    I was held enthralled by Sean's journey. I hope to see more of his story.

    sionedkla@gmail.com

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  2. Great photo! And I love your description of the Florida 'burbs of stucco contrasted with New Orleans.

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  3. Very nice post. This sounds like an interesting book.

    bn100candg(at)hotmail(dot)com

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  4. Thanks for the awesome giveaway. Gale pgan427@yahoo.com

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  5. Thank you so much for having us here, Jody, and thanks to everyone who commented! I am getting email addresses from now up until June 5th, when the drawing will be held. Details here:
    http://violettavane.blogspot.com/2012/05/thoughts-on-cruce-de-caminos-and-then.html

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  6. I've been waiting for this book to come out. Thanks for the giveaway!!

    tiger-chick-1(at)hotmail(dot)com

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