Above the Fold by Corrina Lawson

Above the Fold

by Corrina Lawson

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Book Blurb:

In 1980s New York City, a crime reporter with little to lose risks the only thing that matters to uncover the truth.... 

Trisha Connell’s journalism reflects her punk rock lifestyle: relentless, confrontational, and bitingly honest. It’s a style that scores front-page headlines but has her forever teetering on the verge of victory or disaster. Now one crime will forever change Trisha’s life. 

As she charges into the story of a sensational theft at an art museum, she discovers a murdered guard is someone she knew, a former foster kid who was adopted and supposed to be living a good life. To make it worse, the guard is suspected to be one of the thieves. 

Determined to uncover the truth, Trisha bulls her way into the story, risking her life and career on what could be the story of the decade, if her editor doesn’t fire her first. She finds an ally in Edmund Grayson, a security expert assigned to the museum, who’s driven by his own guilt in failing to stop the murder. 

Chasing the story will take Trisha from the punk clubs to the high society to the inner workings of newspapers of New York in the 1980s. It will take all her street skills to survive. 

Excerpt:

 First Meet, Above the Fold 

The second man stepped forward and cut David off.  

From his voice, she’d pictured him as an older, retired cop but this guy was dressed like an upscale Wall Street trader. Still, classic rugged face and a nice head of hair, though peppered with gray.  

His tailored gray double-breasted suit showed off some seriously impressive shoulders. His white shirt was pristine, and he was wearing cufflinks, for God’s sake. Who the hell used those anymore? His wingtip shoes gleamed.  

He’d sounded angry and frustrated. But he looked calm and collected.  

“David. Fill me in. Now,” Wingtips said.  

David unclenched his hands. “You are so dead, Trish.” He sighed. “Edmund Grayson, this is my friend, Trisha Connell. She’s the crime reporter for the New York Herald. I’ve mentioned her before, remember?” He shook his head. “Trish, Edmund Grayson.”  

 Grayson? David’s boss? This was him? At least her sunglasses hid her shock. Given how David talked about him, she’d imagined Grayson as an uptight, humorless guy. Not some dignified, dynamic, and dangerous man in a suit.  

 “You brought a reporter here?” Grayson said. 

“I had nothing to do with it,” David muttered. 

 

“Hi.” She put out her hand to Grayson. 

 

He ignored the gesture. “You have two seconds to explain what you meant about where to start the search.” 

 

Oho. Yep, once a cop, always a cop, even if he had gone private. She took off her sunglasses and stared at him, holding the eye contact. Nice brown eyes. “I know how someone could break into the museum.”  

“How?” Grayson crossed his arms over his chest. 

 

“Whatever you’ve got, spit it out, Trish,” David said. 

 

“Get me into the museum and I’ll show you.”  

Grayson glared at her, impassive. “I could always call over the police have you arrested for trespassing.”  

She shrugged. “You could but then you wouldn’t know where the entrance to the hidden subway tunnel is.”  

Grayson snapped to attention and stepped closer to her, giving her a chance to study his face. His chiseled features would be attractive if his jaw wasn’t clenched shut.  

Okay, he was attractive despite that. 

 

“Where?” 

 

An order, not a request. “I’ll show you,” she repeated. “Inside.” 

He shook his head. “You want to go inside, give me more.” 

 

Aha. He’d taken the bait. Now they were just negotiating.  

“I’ve done stories on the homeless people who live in the subway tunnels. I learned about the entrance from them.” Okay, she’d lied on that one. But the truth of the sneaking in with Nicky wouldn’t add to her credibility and neither would the confession that she’d been homeless at the time herself.  

Grayson turned to David. “Can we trust her?”  

 David nodded. “Yeah, she’s a pain in the ass while working but she wouldn’t lie about something this important.”  

Grayson grunted. “We did a thorough security check of the museum last month and found no evidence of a hidden entrance.”  

She forced her hands to stop twitching for a cigarette. “The entrance is covered over by ordinary floor tiles. You’d never spot it if you didn’t already know it was there.”  

“Are you sure?” Grayson said, with no expression at all. A good poker face. She wondered what it would take to make him smile.  

“Positive.” Sorta. It had been a long time.  

He let her word hang in the air, appraising her, as if checking off points on a tally sheet in his head. “If you tell me where this tunnel entrance is, I’ll come back out and give you the full story of what happened. On the record.”  

Tempting. But no guarantee Kimba wouldn’t scoop her while she waited for Grayson. “I go inside or nothing. And while we negotiate, your murderer has more time to escape.”  

Grayson stared at her some more, his glare resembling a wolf sizing up his prey. She resisted the urge to growl at him just to see what he’d do.  

He glanced back over his shoulder at the main entrance. “The police aren’t going to let the three of us past them.”  

Gotcha! “I bet you know another way to get in.” 

 

His lips twitched, as if fighting a smile. “Maybe.” 

 

“Easier to apologize than ask permission,” she repeated. 

 

Surprisingly, he smiled. “All right. Follow me around this side.” 

Author Bio:

Corrina Lawson is an award-winning daily newspaper reporter with a degree in journalism from Boston University. She’s written paranormal, historical, and erotic romance, steampunk mysteries, and romantic suspense.  The Trisha & Grayson mysteries are her love letter to her favorite bantering crime-solving couples, such as Nick and Nora Charles, Jonathan and Jennifer Hart, and Castle and Beckett.  

 

Our Toxic Traits by Rebecca Christo

 

 

Some secrets are better left buried.

Others are waiting to pull you under.

Our Toxic Traits

by Rebecca Christo

Genre: Dark Romantic Suspense Thriller

Some secrets are better left buried. Others are waiting to pull you under.

Jill Davis is just trying to survive the hustle of New York City. As a private dog walker for the elite residents of an Upper East Side high-rise, she’s used to navigating the eccentricities of her wealthy clients. From the icy and demanding Briar Whitney, to the mysterious and unnervingly attractive Christopher Bennett. Jill prides herself on blending into the background; but in a city where everyone is watching, staying invisible is becoming a dangerous game.

While a serial killer that the media has dubbed the “Socialite Strangler” stalks the shadows of Central Park, Jill’s carefully curated life begins to unravel. A series of unexplained “glitches” in her daily routine, and a questioning detective suggest that the danger isn’t just in the park, but in the building where she works.

When a high-stakes Halloween party turns a theatrical hoax into a gruesome reality, Jill is thrust into the centre of a nightmare. Caught in a web of obsession and lethal deception, she must decide who to trust.

In a world where everyone is connected, there is nowhere left to hide. Can Jill break free before her own toxic traits and those around her, become her undoing?

 

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Avid dog lover and Author Rebecca Christo was born in Toronto, Ontario, where she developed an early love of both reading and writing. Of particular interest to her was creating a story with emotionally mature content that was still entertaining enough to be read for fun on a relaxing vacation. She hopes she’s succeeded with her very first published novel: Mirrored Wounds.

When she’s not travelling with her husband, Darcy Christo, Rebecca enjoys spending time with him, her children Ali, Brittany and Maxwell, and her puppies (Lucy and Winston) in Wasaga Beach, Ontario where she currently lives.

  

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Six Western Romance Novels That Feature Strong Friendships

 

One of the things I love most about writing Western romance is that love stories don't exist in a vacuum. Behind every hero and heroine is a web of people who matter to them—neighbors who show up with food in a crisis, friends who hold secrets close, and communities that close ranks around their own. Today I want to highlight six of my own books where friendship isn't just background; it's woven right through the heart of the story. 

Whether it's two young women helping each other escape a bad situation, a town full of neighbors rallying around a newcomer, or brothers whose loyalty saves a man's life, these are the friendships that make the love stories mean even more. 

 1. Josephine (Bride Brigade, Book 1) 

Josephine Nailor doesn't set out on her journey alone. When she spots a newspaper advertisement that offers a way out of an oppressive home situation, she brings her best friend, Ophelia, along. The two of them slip away together, making their way to Richmond and ultimately to the small town of Tarnation, Texas, as part of a group of seven young women gathered by the warm-hearted Lydia Harrison. 

The friendship between Josephine and her best friend is what makes her escape possible. She might not have been brave enough—or had the means—to go it alone. That bond between two women choosing hope over fear sets the tone for everything the Bride Brigade series becomes: a story about what women can do when they stand side by side. 

For readers, Josephine's love story with Michael Buchanan, the town's mayor and mercantile owner, is the romance at the center. But her friendship is the thread that gets her to the frontier in the first place. 

 2. Angeline (Bride Brigade, Book 2) 

Angeline Chandler has been disowned by her family, left alone and without resources after a brutal attack. In anyone's story, that would be a devastating place to start. But Lydia Harrison—Tarnation's kind and wealthy young widow—reaches out to Angeline and offers her a second chance: a place in the group of women traveling west to Texas. 

Lydia's friendship and generosity change the entire trajectory of Angeline's life. Without that outstretched hand, Angeline would have had nowhere to turn. In this story, friendship takes the form of one woman seeing the worth and the potential in another woman that her own family refused to see. 

I loved writing Lydia as a character who acts on her convictions. She doesn't just feel sorry for Angeline—she does something. In real frontier communities, that kind of active, practical friendship was often the difference between survival and despair, and I wanted to honor that truth in Angeline's story. 

 3. Cassandra (Bride Brigade, Book 3) 

By the third book in the Bride Brigade series, the women who have traveled together to Tarnation are beginning to form the kind of friendships that grow out of shared experience and shared risk. Cassandra's story involves a bold masquerade that requires the cooperation and loyalty of the people around her. 

One of my favorite things about writing the Bride Brigade books is watching this group of women become a community. They arrived as strangers, but by the time each one finds her own happily-ever-after, they've become the kind of friends who know each other's secrets and keep them faithfully. In Cassandra's book, that trust among the women is tested in ways that make the friendship feel hard-won and real. 

The entire Bride Brigade series is built around the idea of community—women supporting women, neighbors welcoming newcomers, and people building something together in a small Texas town. 

 4. Brazos Bride (Men of Stone Mountain, Texas, Book 1) 

Micah Stone's story begins in a dark place. He has been accused of his neighbor's murder, and he would almost certainly have been hanged if not for his two brothers stepping in on his behalf. That act of loyalty—brothers standing up for a man the rest of the community believed guilty—is the friendship that makes Micah's love story possible at all. 

When Hope comes to him with her proposal of a paper marriage, Micah carries the weight of a damaged reputation and his brothers' sacrifice. The men of the Stone family are a study in the kind of loyalty that doesn't ask for anything in return—you show up because that's what family and true friends do, even when it costs you something. 

I love placing strong male friendships and family bonds at the center of a Western romance because they show that heroes don't have to be lone wolves. A man who can be loved by his brothers and stand loyally beside them in return makes a more believable and more compelling hero. 

 5. The Most Unsuitable Husband (The Kincaids, Book 2) 

Sarah Kincaid is the kind of woman who simply cannot look away from someone who needs help. When she's traveling back to Kincaid Springs and encounters three orphaned children left out in the cold, she doesn't pass them by—she scoops them up and turns to the nearest person available, Nate Bartholomew, for help. 

That instinct to reach for community, to ask for help and give it freely, is at the heart of Sarah's character. She wants a home, a family, and a place in the life of her town—and she pursues those things not by pulling away from others, but by pulling people in. The orphans she rescues become the center of gravity for everything that follows. 

For me, Sarah represents the kind of frontier woman who builds her world deliberately: through kindness, through inclusion, and through the trust she extends even to people who haven't yet earned it. In a Western setting, that generous spirit was both a gift and a risk—and watching her navigate that tension is one of the great pleasures of this story. 

 6. Amanda's Rancher (Loving a Rancher, Book 1) 

Mara O'Sullivan's story begins with a promise made to a dying sister—the most binding kind of friendship there is. When circumstances end her sister's life, Mara steps forward to raise her niece as her own and to take her sister's place as Preston Kincaid's mail-order bride. 

That promise shapes everything Mara does in this book. She isn't acting for herself; she's honoring a bond with someone she loved and lost. The courage it takes to step into a stranger's life, in a place she's never been, with a child who is grieving, and a husband who doesn't know the truth—all of that flows from the loyalty she felt for her sister. 

For readers who love Western romances where the emotional stakes run deep before the love story even begins, Amanda's Rancher delivers on that promise. The friendship between sisters, though one of them is gone before the first chapter, casts a long, loving shadow over every choice Mara makes—and over the love she slowly, carefully builds with Preston. 

 Why Friendship Makes a Love Story Better 

I come back to friendship again and again in my Westerns because I believe the best love stories happen inside a life, not outside of it. Heroes and heroines who have loyal friends, protective siblings, and tight-knit communities feel more real to me—and I hope to you. 

On the frontier, friendship wasn't sentimental; it was practical and sometimes lifesaving. You helped your neighbor bring in the harvest because next season you might need the same help. You kept a friend's secret because you knew how quickly reputation could ruin a woman's options. You showed up after a loss because there was no one else to show up. 

When that kind of friendship exists in a story, the love that grows inside it feels rooted and believable. The hero has something to lose. The heroine has people who will notice if she disappears. And when the couple finally reaches their happy ending, it lands in a world where other people are glad for them—and so are you. 

I hope you'll pick up one of these books, or revisit an old favorite, and let yourself settle in to both the love story and the friendships around it.