Bloody Scarlet, the skull collector of the Crimson Forest, is just a cautionary tale to keep children from wandering in and getting lost — isn’t she? Well something’s out there.
Welcome to one of the January 6th stops on the blog tour for the Dark Goddess Chronicles by Leonard & Anne Marie Wilson with Silver Dagger Book Tours (schedule linked.) Be sure to follow the rest of the tour for spotlights, reviews, and a giveaway! More on that at the end of this post.
Please note that this post contains affiliate links, which means there is no additional cost to you if you shop using my links, but I will earn a small percentage in commission. A program-specific disclaimer is at the bottom of this post.
About the Books
Lethal Red Riding Hood
Dark Goddess Chronicles Book One
by Leonard & Ann Marie Wilson
Published 4 October 2020
Lost In The Wood Press LLC
Genre: Dark Fantasy
Page Count: 403
Add it to your Goodreads TBR!
Bloody Scarlet, the skull collector of the Crimson Forest, is just a cautionary tale to keep children from wandering in and getting lost — isn’t she? Well something’s out there.
In a world dominated by a cruel Inquisition that sees demons and witches everywhere it turns, Keely just wants to make a dishonest living convincing the obscenely wealthy to part with their excess riches through guile and trickery.
When the Inquisition shows up to destroy her life anyway, Keely goes on the offensive rather than scurry back into the shadows. To set it up for a fall she lures the Inquisition into an invented race to find a heretical book of prophecy that may never have existed.
When Keely builds her lies on existing rumors, though, and points the hunt in the direction of the Crimson forest, a new player introduces herself to the high stakes con game as a deadly wild card.
Whether or not the woman in red is the real Bloody Scarlet, the closer Keely gets to the dark, twisted heart of the forest the more quickly things spiral out of control.
Amazon US | Amazon CA | Amazon UK
“First character crush ever! I just want to say that Keely is my girl!…my FAVORITE character out of this whole book…very cunning and intelligent. The perfect protagonist to Bloody Scarlet.” ~ Jordan, book reviewer, editor, author, life-on-the-shelf.com
Excerpt
Sabina pulled another dusty book off the nearest shelf and dropped it with a satisfying thud onto the table next to the growing pile. She opened it reverently, and carefully turned the brittle pages, to find more of the ancient, indecipherable text. Or, to put a finer point on it, the text was indecipherable to her, given her personal ignorance of the old imperial tongue, but this was the stuff: tome after tome that reeked of age and authority, each one a musty exemplar of what a fifteen-hundred-year-old holy text should be.
Behind Sabina, a light flared as her hostess lit a candle, then placed it on the table, and it was only then that Sabina realized how dark the cottage had become. Was night falling already?
“Where did you get these?” Sabina asked the woman excitedly. It was the first words either of them had spoken since Sabina had been invited in. Instantly entranced by the collection, Sabina had never even spared her hostess a second glance, and the woman had seemed in no hurry to break the spell.
“Oh, the usual places.” The woman answered in the hushed tones of a librarian—though there was no one else about for her voice to disturb—before gliding off again into the gloom. “Salvaged from the deepest pits of despair, wrestled from out of the darkest nightmares. That sort of thing.”
“That’s…usual, is it?” Sabina asked. Finally taking an active interest in her hostess, Sabina peered into the darkness, but could see no more of her now than a shadowy silhouette as she moved about, pulling a book off a shelf here, sliding one onto a shelf there.
“Where else?” The woman still whispered, though her voice carried like a bell in the cold silence of the library. “Seriena trains up women to read and to write so that when they die and she drags their souls screaming down into the pit, she can chain them up in dank little cells to make books for her for all eternity. When they’re not being poked with red hot needles, of course. That would make them jump and smudge the words.”
“Oh,” Sabina said, not knowing what other answer she could give to that story.
“Books are evil, dear. Poison. They’re how Seriena spreads her hate and her venom to every corner of the land.”
“And yet you surround yourself with so many…” Sabina observed, trying against all her natural urges to not sound judgmental.
“Oh, these aren’t mine,” the woman whispered. “These are for you. That’s what you came looking for, isn’t it? Forbidden knowledge? Power at any cost?”
“Who are you?” Sabina asked, shivering suddenly. She found herself whispering in imitation of the woman.
“Oh, I know Seriena has this whole ‘sweetness and light’ thing going,” the woman continued. “But that’s just a mask for the rubes. Helloooo? Inquisition? You think she doesn’t condone their methods? She’s no better than the rest of us.”
“I think I’d better go,” Sabina whispered nervously. “My brother’s looking for me.”
“Of course,” the woman said. “Show yourself out. Sometimes the power’s not worth the price, is it?”
“Sometimes,” Sabina agreed, a note of uncertainty creeping into her note of uncertainty. But she stood up slowly and started edging toward the door. “You’re the witch, aren’t you?”
The woman laughed loudly, the suddenness of it startling in the quiet darkness. “I’ve been called a witch,” she murmured finally. “I’m not.”
“Then what are you?” Sabina asked earnestly.
“Famished,” the woman answered with a thoughtful nod. “And perhaps a bit melodramatic. It’s hard to be sure, though. Is this Tuesday?”
“I…no,” Sabina shook her head, now at least as perplexed as she was nervous.
“Pity.” The woman sighed wistfully. “I have a theory about days of the week, you know. Melodrama is so much easier to recognize on a Tuesday. But look, we’re not here to talk about me, are we? This is all about…you.” The woman finally stepped into the candlelight, and for a moment there was something unnervingly familiar about her manic grin. Then she leaned over and blew out the candle with one quick puff of breath and the room plunged into utter darkness.
Gingerdread
Dark Goddess Chronicles Book Two
by Leonard & Ann Marie Wilson
Published 15 April 2021
Lost In The Wood Press LLC
Genre: Dark Fantasy
Page Count: 106
Add it to your Goodreads TBR!
Hell is a Bakery
Jordan hadn’t wished his stepmother, Eva, dead. A little something involving spiders would have served vengeance quite nicely. Still, he hadn’t exactly grieved when they said she’d died in the fire. A protective big brother will only forgive so many sins against his sister.
Even if Eva had been alive, though, what business would she have begging for his help now—a year later? And how insane was he to even consider offering help, much less seek out where her voice was coming from on such a miserable dark night?
As heir presumptive to the barony and a soon-to-be knight in training, Jordan refuses to let fear stop him from seeking answers to impossible questions.
But when the questions keep piling up, each darker and more dreadful than the last, only one thing becomes crystal clear: he’ll never look at an oven the same way again.
Amazon US | Amazon CA | Amazon UK
Excerpt
He peered cautiously in through the window there. Beyond lay a smallish room, half-intact but stripped of furnishings, marred by soot and smoke and by a year of partial exposure to the elements. In the dark it had seemed dreadfully sinister. In the morning it just felt abandoned and forlorn. No crying, pleas, or pounding came from within. He wanted to tell himself he’d dreamed the whole episode, but the charred timber lying freshly shattered on the floor said otherwise.
Rather than climb through the window—which looked structurally unsafe—Jordan retraced his steps around to the doorway and through the old house. Whatever the room had been before the fire, he didn’t recognize it. This would have been servants’ territory and nowhere he had ever ventured. With the scent of damp and decay filling his nostrils, he moved slowly, carefully, so as not to cause any further shifting of the ruin. He also moved as quietly as he was able so as not to disturb anything that might be lurking. Locating the wall, he circled it again, hoping sunlight would reveal something that candle light hadn’t. It didn’t.
Jordan had longed to find some way to quiet his conscience that didn’t involve drawing attention to himself again, but soon it would be breakfast, and lessons would come after that whether he’d eaten or not. Before he could return here again it would almost certainly be dark.
His mind raced down all the possible paths he might find himself on if he walked away not knowing. It didn’t like any of them one bit. He weighed them against what could go wrong if he didn’t just walk away. It didn’t make him feel any better.
How on earth had anyone decided that he was the brave one? But somehow now that everyone thought he was, he was terrified of letting on that he wasn’t.
He pressed his ear to the wall again, ready to flinch away and run. Nothing. He closed his eyes. He drew a deep breath. He realized he was stalling. He rapped quietly on the wall. He rapped again a little louder.
“Hello?” The voice came small, tentative.
“Eva?” he finally managed to squeak, emboldened by the morning light.
“Jordan? Jordan, please don’t go.”
He started to say he’d just run to get help, but could he? Maybe if he came up with the right lie. Maybe. “I…I’m not leaving,” he said finally. “How can I help?”
“It’s so dark. I can’t see. The door is stuck.”
“Eva, I don’t see any door,” he said, starting to feel a little better, bolder. A weight had lifted when he focused on her fear instead of his.
“What?! No! It’s here. Right here.” The distinct rattling of a doorknob could be heard through the wall.
“Rap on the door,” he said. “There, by the knob.” He heard it. “Keep rapping.” With his ear to the wall, he kept listening, moving around until he’d pinpointed the spot. He drove his knuckles into the plaster there, creating a noticeable dent, then he went looking for a makeshift tool.
He found it in the form of a jagged piece of stonework that had fractured from the wall. With it, he began to gouge at the plaster in earnest. It crumbled away quickly and easily but revealed only solid brick behind.
Jordan honestly couldn’t say whether he was disappointed or relieved, but it was too late to walk away—even for breakfast. It was too late to walk away even if he missed lessons and they sent a search party. If that happened and they didn’t hear Eva it would mean the willow switch. If they did hear her, though, then he could pass the whole thing off to the grown-ups. He’d have to risk it.
“Jordan?”
“It’s just a wall!” he called back. “I still can’t see…” His voice trailed off, and he hurried once more around the wall, inspecting it, his confusion giving way to suspicion.
“Hold on,” he said when he got back to where he started, and he began hacking away at the plaster again until he found the vertical seam where red brick met gray stone. Then he tore at it the other direction until he found another seam.
Brickwork less than a yard wide lay between him and his stepmother. Someone had bricked up a doorway and plastered over it. Jordan’s stomach tied itself in all sorts of new knots as that fact sank in, then got dragged to new depths as he studied the soot on the remaining plaster. There was no possible way that the door hadn’t been sealed off before the fire. His knees gave way to fear and horror, and he started retching on the spot, trying to turn out the contents of an empty stomach.
Ear Wyrm
Dark Goddess Chronicles Book Three
by Leonard & Ann Marie Wilson
Published 30 December 2021
Lost In The Wood Press LLC
Genre: Dark Fantasy
Page Count: 366
Add it to your Goodreads TBR!
A Dragon Is Forever
Meilani always wanted to be a monster hunter for the Inquisition. She was good at it, too, until the first time she came face-to-face with real monsters. Now she’s alone with her nightmares on the road she paved with all those good intentions.
Then one tiny glimmer of redemption finally offers itself—a chance to safeguard a little girl with a very familiar ambition—only to lead her further down the rabbit hole. The journey leaves them stranded in a tangled web of time with a deadly rogue’s gallery of psychopaths and other monsters.
Hanging over it all, a once comfortingly familiar song exhorts them relentlessly, inescapably to push ever deeper into a night that never ends, even as something at the center of the web stirs restlessly on its gleaming hoard of possibilities. Here, now, and always, there be dragons.
Amazon US | Amazon CA | Amazon UK
Excerpt
This time she didn’t feel the universe yanked out from under her. This time there was no universe to yank away. Instead, existence faded slowly into being like a materializing phantom until Meilani found herself standing in a vaulted cavern so huge it almost seemed unfair to call it a cavern. Could a thing be so big its inside counted as “outside”?
Stretching around her in every direction, the floor had been heaped with glittering baubles and shining treasures of every conceivable kind. Some had been stacked in tidy piles. Most had been carelessly dumped together to form hills and mountains. All of them caught the soft but inescapable light that radiated from nowhere and everywhere at once.
The air smelled of damp stone. It tasted sharply of copper. It caressed her naked skin like a lover just crawling under the blankets with her on a cold winter night. It reverberated with the impossibly distant but thoroughly unsubtle sound of dripping water, and with the bell-like jingle of unseen mounds of coins as they shifted and settled, apparently at random. Overlaying it all, Meilani could hear the joyous voices raised in song.
At the drawing of the year
Let us all gather near
As the fire brings good cheer
Sing laetatio
Before she could even remember why, Meilani fell to her knees and screamed.
“Really? This is your breaking point?” The voice floated through the air in dulcet five-part harmony, somehow managing to accompany itself. It could have been a woman’s voice if that woman had been born as a flock of songbirds.
Having exhausted her lungs, Meilani had fallen forward to lean on her hands while she gasped raggedly for breath. When she looked up it was into a pair of glistening black eyes set in a reptilian face as large as her whole body. Behind that face, yard after yard after yard of the owner’s jade-scaled, serpentine body wound away over and around the mountains of treasure to lengths Meilani could only guess at. From all she could see, the creature could have been a mile long—or considerably more.
“I, uh… Hello?” Meilani squeaked, hoping she wasn’t about to become a meal. On the bright side, the choir had stopped.
“Hello,” the thing sang in that same five-part harmony, offering a slight incline of its head. “I believe that you and I need to talk.”
So, not a meal—at least not yet. Meilani swallowed, pushed herself back up to sit on her knees, and tried to let some of the tension out of her shoulders. That might have been easier if she wasn’t naked. “I’m…Meilani,” she stammered, looking for something to say. She was still having trouble recalling who Meilani actually was, but at least it was nice to have a body and a name; senses too. Senses were good.
“Of course you are,” the creature sang. “And you may call me Larelyth.”
“Who am I?” Meilani asked. It wasn’t the question she’d thought she was going to ask, but she stuck with it.
“You,” Larelyth sang primly, “are a naughty mortal who has left me with a horrible mess to sort out. Not that it’s entirely your fault, but here we are.”
“Here?” Meilani asked, looking around at the ocean of shiny things.
“Focus please. I know the trip here is disorienting for a mortal, but you can be useful or you can be lunch.”
About the Authors
Leonard & Ann Marie Wilson met when she showed up on his doorstep where they quickly bonded over nearly everything, including their shared love of writing. Two years later they were married and collaborating on nearly everything, including writing as freelancers for role-playing games.
Leonard came to storytelling first through Dungeons & Dragons, then on to other role-playing games. Immediately after earning a degree in writing, he began freelancing, writing adventures for the RPG industry. While he was never a prolific author, the internet still seems to regard a couple of his works as classics of their type (“The Ghost of Mistmoor” in Dungeon magazine, and “The Heart Blade” in Pendragon’s Blood and Lust adventure anthology). Coincidentally, those same two adventures are what paid for their wedding rings and honeymoon.
Ann was a gamer girl in her own right when they met, and she retains an “old school” pedigree longer than anyone who’s ever accused her of being a poser. She wrote stories for fun, but thanks to the careless words of a particularly unfortunate English teacher, never got around to pursuing her ambitions of publishing before she met Leonard. That didn’t stop her from finishing her first novel-length manuscript before he finished his.
They launched their own imprint, Lost in the Wood Press, just in time to have it as a steady project to ride out the COVID lockdown, and are loving the complete creative freedom that comes with self-publishing.
Website | Website | Facebook | Facebook | Twitter
Instagram | Instagram | Amazon | Amazon | Goodreads | Goodreads
Giveaway Alert!
Autographed Set of The Dark Goddess Chronicles,
$20 Amazon giftcard
-1 winner each!
Disclaimer: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
I am looking forwar to reading these books. Ann Marie Wilson and Leonard Wilson are new to me, but I love meeting new authors. Thanks to this blog for the introduction.
And it’s always great meeting new readers, Audrey. Would love to hear what you think about the books, or even just talk fantasy fiction. What do you typically go looking for in a book genre/sub-genre?
I love the covers, synopses and excerpts, this is a must read book and series for me. Do you have any more stories planned for this series?
Definitely, Bea. While we always try to tell a complete, satisfying story in each book, we also love the effect that can only come from weaving stories together to revisit an ensemble of characters and explore a larger world. Taken together, these first three books should give you a feel for our approach to that. Lethal Red Riding Hood and Gingerdread have very little to tie them directly together, but if you blink and miss the connections that do exist, Ear Wyrm will start to bring some of them into focus for you.
Next up we’ll be revisiting the most direct repercussions of Lethal Red Riding and looking into the legacy of Blackwater Molly.