July 11, 7 PM EST
Ride the Suspense Train with Isabella Maldonado, Steve Berry, Susan Wiggs, and Nev March!
You’ll get adventure, mystery, and lots of book fun with these great authors. And not only is the evening FREE, you and three other attending readers could win the drawing for one of their riveting new novels. Emcee is our very own Tosca Lee!
And what about those books? Wishing you the best of luck to win one:
The Falcon by Isabella Maldonado
The Omega Factor by Steve Berry
Sugar and Salt by Susan Wiggs
Peril at the Exposition by Nev March
As always, our guests’ (or their characters’) favorite snacks will be posted on the Rogue website. If you’re feeling culinary and adventurous, dining and drinking will commence at the start of the show, so bring your favorite beverage.
Sign up soon! If you’re one of the first 100 in the Zoom room, you can personally debrief these accomplished writers. You can also catch them on Facebook Live, and interrogate there via comments.
Ride the Suspense Train with us!
The Falcon, June 28, 2022
Six female undergrads at an elite university vanish. The media descends. The families demand action. And as Special Agent Nina Guerrera follows clue by chilling clue, she realizes she’s tracking the most cunning predator of her career.
The case takes a turn for the worse, and the bizarre, when several victims are found perfectly preserved. No signs of violence, no hint of how they died. Just more evidence that the killer is cruel, calculating, and a master of mind control.
With her mission compromised, Nina must face her greatest failure—and greatest fear—to stop a deadly hunter before he claims another prize.
Isabella’s favorite drink is a margarita and we couldn’t agree more. Here’s her recipe for one perfect, single margarita:
Put the following ingredients into a shaker and shake for one minute:
• 3/4 oz. freshly squeezed lime juice
• 1 shot Jose Cuervo especial tequila
• 1 oz. Grand Marnier
• 1 cup ice cubes
Take one of the squeezed bits of lime and slide it around the rim of your glass.
Invert the glass so that the dampened rim touches a small plate of coarsely ground salt.
Check to be sure you have a solid white ring around the rim.
Pour the contents of the shaker into the glass.
Garnish with a fresh wedge of lime and serve.
Favorite snack (pairs perfectly): Tortilla chips & salsa. Mariachi music is optional but highly recommended!
STEVE BERRY is the New York Times and #1 internationally bestselling author of twenty-one novels, translated into 41 languages with over 25,000,000 copies in 52 countries. Somewhere in the world, every thirty seconds, one of his novels is sold. A trial lawyer for 30 years, holding elective office for 14 of those years. He shares his passion for history with his wife, Elizabeth, which led them to create History Matters, a foundation dedicated to historic preservation.
The Omega Factor, June 7, 2022
Nicholas Lee works for the United Nations’ Cultural Liaison and Investigative Office (CLIO). His job is to protect the world’s cultural artifacts. But when Nick travels to Belgium for a visit with a woman from his past, he unwittingly stumbles on the trail of the Ghent Altarpiece, the most violated work of art in the world. Thirteen times it has been vandalized, dismantled, or stolen.
Nick is plunged into a conflict that has been simmering for nearly two thousand years. On one side is the Maidens of Saint-Michael, les Vautours, Vultures, a secret order of nuns and the guardians of a great truth. Pitted against them is the Vatican, which has wanted for centuries to both find and possess what the nuns guard.
From the tranquil canals of Ghent, to the towering bastions of Carcassonne, and finally into an ancient abbey high in the French Pyrenees, Nick Lee must confront a modern-day religious crusade intent on eliminating a shocking truth from humanity’s past. Success or failure—life and death—all turn on the Omega Factor.
Steve, like his character Cotton Malone from Templar Legacy fame, loves cranberry juice! We found a Cranberry Ginger Fizz Mocktail recipe just perfect for those hot July days here.
Sugar and Salt, July 26, 2022
Jerome Sugar learned the art of baking in his grandma’s bakery, also called Sugar, on historic Perdita Street in San Francisco. He supplies baked goods to the Lost and Found Bookshop across the street. A newcomer has moved into his shared commercial kitchen: Margot Salton, a barbecue master from Texas.
Margot isn’t exactly on the run, but she needs a fresh start. She’s taken care of herself her whole life, pulling herself up by her fingernails to recover from trauma, and her dream has been to open a restaurant somewhere far, far from Texas.
Margot instantly takes to Jerome’s mother, the lively, opinionated Ida. The older woman proves to be a good mentor, and Margot is drawn to Jerome. Despite their different backgrounds their attraction is powerful—even though Jerome worries that Margot will simply move on from him once she’s found some peace and stability. But just as she starts to relax into a happy new future, Margot’s past in Texas comes back to haunt her…
Recipes inspired by Sugar and Salt:
(Click to view)
Peril at the Exposition: A Mystery, July 12, 2022
Newlyweds Captain Jim Agnihotri and Diana Framji are settling into their new home in 1893 Boston, having fled the strict social rules of British Bombay. It’s a different life than what they left behind, but theirs is no ordinary marriage: Jim, now a detective at the Dupree Agency, is teaching Diana the art of deduction he’s learned from his idol, Sherlock Holmes.
Everyone is talking about the preparations for the World’s Fair in Chicago: the grandeur, the speculation, the trickery—and Jim is sent there to investigate the murder of a man named Thomas Grewe. As Jim probes the underbelly of Chicago’s docks, warehouses, and taverns, he discovers deep social unrest and some deadly ambitions.
When Jim goes missing, young Diana must venture to Chicago’s treacherous streets to learn what happened. But who can she trust, when a single misstep could mean disaster?
Nev’s favorite drink is one she invented called Green Meadowbrook!
Recipe: Pour a jigger of spiced rum over 1/2 cup crushed ice. Add 1/3 bottle of ginger beer, 1/3 cup pineapple juice and fill the entire glass with coconut water. A dash of blue curaçao at the end gives you a green woodland section amid the lime colored meadow. Beautiful and delicious!
For a snack, Nev prefers chocolate covered cashews and raspberry stuffed chocolates. Nev tells us, “I prefer mildly bitter chocolate, with bits like nougat, crunches, even chili flavor (yup, I grew up in India!) or smooth truffles.”
Our MC:
TOSCA LEE is a New York Times bestselling author of eleven novels. Her work has been translated into seventeen languages and optioned for TV and film. She is the recipient of two International Book Awards, Killer Nashville’s Silver Falchion, ECPA Fiction Book of the Year, and the Nebraska Book Award. Tosca earned her bachelor’s degree in English from Smith College. A former first runner-up to Mrs. United States, she lives in Nebraska with her husband and two of four children still at home.
Watch Previous Rogue Reads Conversations!
