Chanticleer Book Reviews

Author: sara-stamey

  • GLOBAL THRILLERS Sharing NOVEMBER SPOTLIGHT! – Writing Competition, Thrillers/Suspense, Int’l Mystery & Crime

    GLOBAL THRILLERS Sharing NOVEMBER SPOTLIGHT! – Writing Competition, Thrillers/Suspense, Int’l Mystery & Crime

    Scene:  President James Marshall (played by Harrison Ford) “Get off my plane!” —  Air Force One (the 1997 film).

    Now just imagine…

    The President’s motorcade is stopped by a mob dressed in black wearing Guy Fox masks. The leader jumps onto the limousine’s hood and exposes an explosive-loaded torso with a pressure release in his hand. He starts counting down from five. From out of nowhere, Spiderman swoops down, shoots a web around the assailant’s fist and takes him out. But now, the rest of the Guy Foxes reveal their explosive-ready torsos…

    ~~~

     

    An international human trafficking consortium is meeting in Belguim and you get wind of it. It’s your job to capture as many individuals as possible,  but you can’t kill them because any one of them may know the whereabouts of a group of children taken from a school bus in Maine. Your six-year-old daughter was on that bus…

    ~~~

    Welcome to the Global Thrillers Awards, a category of literature where life as we know it hangs in the balance – and when bad things happen, the fallout is global. 

    We’re talking James Bond-worthy.

     

    We’re talking it’s time to call in the X-Men and X-Women.

     

    We’re talking about Global Thrillers!

     

    This is the category for Science Fiction that is set – or really could be set in our understanding of how things work. This is called “Lab Lit” in the industry. Even Star Wars and Star Trek are good examples because Global Thrillers covers Science Fiction and BIG Storytelling, EPIC Storytelling.

    Here are what we are looking for: 

    Photo by Huie Dinwiddie from Pexels

    stories that rock us right out of our seats, where the suspense is so strong we cannot put the book down. Something that will have us saying these lines to our poor hungry families,  “Dinner? Are you crazy? The world is about to end in the next chapter!”

     

    Thrill us. Chill us. Make us believers in your masterpiece or published novel. We read every single submission that is sent in and we relish in the good stuff.

     

     

    International Bestselling Thriller author J.D. Barker (aka Master of Suspense) to present at CAC19. 

    Our Global Thriller Book Awards categories are:

    So, does your thriller have what it takes?

    Find out by entering the GLOBAL THRILLER AWARDS because time is running out!

     

    The deadline for submissions the  GLOBAL THRILLERS Book Awards  is

    November 30, 2018.

     

     

    We are honored to recognize the  Global Thrillers Book Awards Hall of Fame Grand Prize winners!

    The Ariadne Connection by Sara Stamey took home the 2017 Grand Prize for the GLOBAL THRILLERs Book Awards.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    The Ariadne Connection by Sara Stamey

    As radical climate swings, drought, famine, flood, and pestilence take on Biblical proportion, deep inside the earth’s core, a violent shift of its geomagnetic poles – a shift paired with cataclysmic seismic activity commences. With planetary life headed for extinction, mankind reaches out to its “gods,” both secular and non-secular, for salvation. At the same time whisperings on the NeuroLink claim that there is a savior among them—Saint Ariadne.

    Global Thriller Winners Lawrence Verigin & Sara Stamey

     

    Because the GLOBAL THRILLER Awards is a new division in the CIBAs, we also recognize the following kicking novels that won their category in the 2017 Global Thrillers Awards: 

    • The Han Agent by Amy Rogers
    • What They Don’t Know by K.V. Scruggs
    • Stormfront by James Tacy Cozad
    • Seed of Control by Lawrence Verigin
    • The Kafir Project by Lee Burvine

     

    Here are some winners that came before: 

    From the 2016 CLUE Awards:

     

    From the 2015 CLUE Awards:

    • Blended Genre: Timothy S. Johnston – The Tanner Sequence: The Furnace, The Freezer, The Void
    • Espionage/Spy: Michele Daniel – The Red Circle

    We also had Cybertech Thrillers and Political Thrillers such as John Trudel’s Raven’s Resurrection and the Raven’s Series.

    Now you know why we had to add the GLOBAL THRILLERS division to the Chanticleer International Book Awards (The CIBAs). 

    The Global Thriller Awards ~ Thriller and Lab Lit Fiction Novel Writing Contest ~2018
    The search for 2018’s best Thriller & Suspense Fiction Books

    Deadline November 30, 2018

    Chanticleer Book Reviews is looking for the best books featuring suspense, thrilling stories that put the balance of world power or that will end the world as we know it. We include with Global Thrillers the Lab Lit genre. Lab Lit is when Fiction Meets Real Science and Research or stories that are based on real science and research up to a certain “what if” point.

    Examples from www.LabLit.com:

    • Enigma by Robert Harris; A brilliant mathematician struggles to crack German codes in the second world war. Historical Fiction
    • The Highest Tide by Jim Lynch; A budding marine biologist has an unforgettable summer.
    • Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis; A scientist/medic leans the hard way that pure research is nobler – and cures plague in the process.

    GLOBAL Thriller examples:

    • Best examples of these are James Bond books, X-Men, Tom Clancy novels, and Star Wars/Star Trek where humankind is at stake or the planet is doomed.

    (For light-hearted, cozy, or classic Mystery and Suspense entries see our Mystery & Mayhem Awards and for Thriller/Suspense/Hardboiled-Detective series, please see the CLUE Awards)

    Don’t delay! Enter today!

    Tick Tock…

     

  • ISLANDS by Sara Stamey – a contemporary thriller that combines the lure of the Caribbean with gritty reality

    ISLANDS by Sara Stamey – a contemporary thriller that combines the lure of the Caribbean with gritty reality

    When anthropologist Susan Dunne goes to a Caribbean island to investigate a mysterious stone carving, she finds that it is not only the ancient past that haunts her, but a ghost from her closest family.

    Susan is drawn to the islands by a crumpled letter from her murdered brother, who before his death made a find that could lead her to academic fame. If she can locate his discovery, she may be able to prove that a petro-glyph hundreds of years old is of African origin, predating the incursion of Columbus to the Caribbean. The combination of her professional dreams and the nightmare of John’s violent killing quickly pull her into the bloody heart of the region’s notorious voodoo cult. Seeking an old, wise professor, Phillip Holte, who may know where to find the petro-glyphs, she is aided and at times thwarted by John’s grieving girlfriend Laura, and by John’s worst enemy, possibly his killer, Victor Manden.

    With Vic dogging her tracks and Laura watching from the sidelines, Susan, perilously naïve concerning the secrets of the island people, believes she is close to her goal when she finds and is befriended by Phillip. But she continually ignores the warnings of those who know better than she the danger she’s in. Almost too late she realizes that someone she has trusted is a force for savagery and suffering, pulling her into a morass of occult horror beyond her worst imagining. Before her island visit is over, Susan will have to confront the most primitive aspects of her own nature.

    Author Sara Stamey has lived some of what she has created in the fictional Islands: she is a world traveler, who, like Susan and her Caribbean companions, is an avid scuba diver. Stamey knows the region, colorfully painting the searing sunlight, the sparkling clear underwater world viewed by divers seeking buried treasure, the ubiquitous sweet and sometimes doctored rum drinks, and the tight, tense lines drawn between island “natives” (actually former slaves) and the “continentals,” the name given to the minority whites, former plantation masters now trying to cynically exploit their properties as a glitzy tourist trap.

    Mystical, romantic, intellectually and viscerally stimulating, Islands deftly depicts a woman’s encounter with deadly lies and the chance for true and lasting love.

  • The ARIADNE CONNECTION by Sara Stamey, a SciFi Thriller set in Greece

    The ARIADNE CONNECTION by Sara Stamey, a SciFi Thriller set in Greece

    The year is 2027 and planet Earth is angry. Pollution has gone viral, ravaging the global environment while corporate technocracy has invaded all aspects of the media using its sensory-loaded “NeuroLink” productions to commandeer the thoughts and will of the masses.

    Radical climate swings, drought and famine, flood and pestilence take on Biblical meaning. And deep inside its core, the bowels of the earth are being rocked by a violent shift of its geomagnetic poles – a shift paired with cataclysmic seismic activity.

    With planetary life headed for extinction, mankind reaches out to its “Gods,” both secular and non-secular, for salvation. At the same time whisperings on the NeuroLink claim that there is a savior among them. Saint Ariadne.

    With the story of a lifetime in her sghts, NeuroLink celebrity Leeza Conreid calls upon “freelance import expediter” Peter Mitchell to take her into the dark heart of the militarized Mediterranean League’s territory. She’s confident that her history with Ariadne will give her the access she needs, but Leeza has more than a hot story on her mind. Broken promises and a perceived betrayal have warped her soul, launching her on a revenge-driven mission to expose and destroy Ariadne.

    “Saint” Ariadne has her own plan. After pushing into alternative scientific frontiers using pulsed laser, electronic stimulation and a mysterious “tonic” water, she’s on the verge of finding a cure for a rapidly-progressing form of leprosy. But the ongoing electromagnetic upheaval is tapping into something primal in her DNA, and her life’s work as well as her “healing abilities” are under attack. With global salvation at stake, Ariadne must escape from the exile of her father’s house and place her trust in the talents of hard-drinking smuggler Peter Mitchell.

    Destined to be a classic in the Speculative Fiction genre, Sara Stamey’s Cygnus Award-winning novel, The Ariadne Connection, takes the reader on a visual feast through the azure waters and rugged Mediterranean landscape of the Greek Islands while tapping into the deep roots of mythological tradition. And her use of well-defined, believable characters invites us to cinch our seatbelts tight and come along for the ride of a lifetime.

    With a clever nod to movie blockbusters such as “The Fifth Element” and “Transporter,” Sara Stamey’s near-future novel The Ariadne Connection is a rocket-paced thrill ride that delivers complex, engaging characters in a laser-sharp plot.