Virtual Book Tour + #Giveaway: Last Star Standing by Spaulding Taylor @astmcveigh1 @GoddessFish

Last Star Standing

by Spaulding Taylor

GENRE: Thriller (speculative)

BLURB:

Aiden has always felt like an outsider. After the rebel assassin is captured and imprisoned by the world’s galactic overlords, he awaits execution. Then a mole working for the occupying regime alerts him to a plot that could destroy the entire resistance...

Engineering a daring escape, Aiden’s growing feud with the new rebel leader leaves him out in the cold and smouldering with resentment. Faced with deceit and betrayals on every side, he recruits a group of overlooked outcasts and stakes everything on one last mission.

Can the restless, reckless Aiden take a stand long enough to save humanity from enslavement?

Video for Last Star Standing: TikTok

Purchase Last Star Standing on Amazon

Book will be on sale for $0.99 during the tour.

Excerpt:

Lips parted, the woman pressed eagerly forward. The target smiled at her but instead selected a pudgy lad of about six. He passed a skinny guy – who looked, the poor sap, practically broken-hearted. He was almost upon us. My heart sped until it seemed ready to jerk straight out of my chest. Choose me. Choose me. CHOOSE ME.

The Enlightened One seemed – or was it only my imagination? – to be gazing directly at me. Pushing swiftly past Petra I extended my hand. He turned, made a strange gesture, almost of benediction, then wired the back of my hand with that thick blackened stump. An instant surge of heat pulsed up my arm and throughout my torso. Then a wild swirl of fuchsia-slashed-with-orange flashed beneath my eyelids, as if the same stars, fiery and spot-lit against the black, had been injected into my brain. My every corpuscle felt fired, an almost intoxicating sensation, especially after the chill of the poison. I half-stumbled, almost squashing a smallish alien, and only saved myself from falling at the last second.

Through a haze – my eyeballs felt as if they were swimming in flaming waterfalls – I saw Petra and moved towards her. Of course. She couldn’t risk being stamped, in case the creature died too fast. As we walked the ornate brand began to swell on my hand – a warming, tightening feeling. The sense of strangeness accelerated, though this might have been from my borrowed DNA, the chilled poison in my blood, or the fiery stamp. But nothing could dent my happiness, because – I’d done it. I’d assassinated The Enlightened One.

 

Interview with Spaulding Taylor

Do you ever wish you were someone else? Who?

Yes! I wish I was Hilary Mantel and had won the Booker Prize twice (should have been THREE times – she was ROBBED!!! ROBBED!!! ROBBED!!!

Where was I? Um, yeah, Hilary Mantel.

Alternatively, Ursula le Guin. (Except for being dead.)

What did you do on your last birthday?

Wished I was younger. Not TOO much younger – I’d hate to be a teen again, or even what in Lord of the Rings is described as a “tween” (between 20 and 30). But 35 or so. Yeah. Let’s go with 35!

What part of the writing process do you dread?

Writing I always like. What I hate is editing, especially because I get my computer to read my books to me. Word’s readers sound like a cross between a bot and a mass-murderer, the British-accented ones, especially.

Soooooo they read my book to me and I try to catch mistakes, while I think about mass-murdering the bot reading it. Would love love love to lose this stage of writing, altogether.

Do you ever suffer from writer’s block? If so, what do you do about it?

No, instead I suffer from these two related ailments:

1. hearing about my many fellow writers’ writer’s blocks and

2. not having enough time to write everything I want to.

Number (2) is partly because my husband – a musicologist – and I have this great deal where we edit each other’s books. Which is kind of fine, and kind of not so fine, because he writes brilliant academic books about London concert life from the 1750 to 1950, which do my tiny head in, and I write much lighter stuff, thrillers and historical fiction, which he actually enjoys editing.

However, as any editor will tell you, editing anything really well takes time.

Tell us about your latest release.

Well, I’m in the process of writing the third in my six-book series of Austenesque books, which have already won multiple prizes. However, I’m just overwhelmed by the reception of my speculative thriller Last Star Standing, which I only wrote after losing a bet, which has so far won a Kirkus star, been joint runner-up in the Independent Press Awards, and made the finals of the Wishing Shelf Book Awards, the Eric Hoffer Book Awards, and is still currently a finalist for CIBA’s prestigious Cygnus Award.

And all this while I was busy writing/promoting my historical fiction! It’s as if Last Star Standing is a neglected but gifted eldest son, whose mother’s busy nurturing her twin baby girls, while he keeps on excelling…

AUTHOR Bio and Links:

Alice (Spaulding Taylor) McVeigh has been published by Orion/Hachette in contemporary fiction, by Unbound Publishing in action/adventure and by Warleigh Hall Press in Austenesque fiction. Her novels have won Gold Medal/First Place is the Global, eLit and Pencraft Book Awards, been runner-up in the Independent Press Awards, finalists in the Eric Hoffer, Rone and Wishing Shelf Book Awards and selected by Shelf Unbound as one of the "top indies" of 2021. Two of her novels are currently finalists in the CIBA Book Awards (the Cygnus and Goethe Awards). Her most recent novel (Harriet: A Jane Austen Variation) was just selected as Editors’ Pick “outstanding” on Publishers Weekly.

A professional London cellist, Alice lives in London and Crete with her professor husband: their only child is completing her Masters in Chinese Literature. They also share two miniature long-haired dachshunds and an incurable addiction to tennis.

Connect with Alice (Spaulding Taylor) McVeigh

Website ~ Instagram ~ Twitter

Goodreads ~ LinkedIn ~ Pinterest ~ TikTok

Facebook:

Personal and Author Page

Amazon Author Page:

Amazon US – Alice McVeigh, Spaulding Taylor

Amazon UK – Alice McVeigh

Giveaway:

$50 Amazon/BN GC 

a Rafflecopter giveaway

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