Virtual Tour & #Giveaway for A Thin Slice of Heaven by P.M. Terrell

Welcome to my stop on the Virtual Book Tour, presented by Goddess Fish Promotions, for A Thin Slice of Heaven by P.M. Terrell.  Please leave a comment or question for P.M. to let her know you stopped by.  You can enter her tour wide giveaway, where she will be awarding a Celtic Butterfly Suncatcher similar to the one mentioned in the book, symbolizing both the never-ending cycle of life and the metamorphosis of a butterfly, by filling out the Rafflecopter form below.  You can follow all of the stops on P.M.’s tour by clicking on the banner above, the more stops you visit, the better your odds of winning.  

Visiting Scotland By P.M. Terrell

About ten years ago, I became interested in my ancestors, who had immigrated to America from Ireland around 1720. This past year, I had the amazing experience of visiting Northern Ireland and the community where they once lived. I stood at the family cemetery at the top of the hill overlooking all their land holdings; they had once been the Laird and Lady in Glencull, County Tyrone. I visited the school that was built on land they donated, the church that had also been built on their donated land, the village they once walked, and I even visited with people who still remembered the last of the family to live there.

The first Laird Neely arrived in Ireland in the early 1600’s from the lowlands of Scotland, where they were known as the MacNeelys. They dropped the first syllable of their name when they moved to Ireland, presumably to blend in better with the populace there. Some of the family records show they came from Dundee, Scotland, which is an area I’d love to explore. Dundee is Scotland’s fourth largest city and it sits on the eastern coast north of Edinburgh, overlooking the North Sea.

My family was granted the lands in Ireland because they fought for the English crown, but I’ve discovered their loyalties tended to waver. One set of records showed that their holdings were taken away from them by the British monarchy when they sided with the Irish in the late 1600’s, but by 1700, they had become such a pest to the British that they gave them back the land so they would be further away from England and—they must have hoped—out of their hair.

By 1720, they were firmly entrenched in Irish life. Out of the six sons that were born in County Tyrone, three of them chose to leave Ireland for America. I am in the process of discovering where these three sons moved and what happened to them. I know that one was my ancestor and within two generations, his family would be torn apart by Indian attacks as they made their way westward to Fort Nashborough (now Nashville, TN).

I have seen photographs from the 1800’s and the men look surprisingly like my brothers do today, and how my father appeared when he was younger. They had black hair and green eyes, and I’m certain that’s why the lead male characters in many of my Irish-themed books have those characteristics. They were also fiercely independent, a trait they brought with them to America.

I will be in Ireland this July during much of my book tour, and I plan another trip there later this year. But I am already looking ahead to trips to Scotland to discover where the Neely family once lived there, what their lives must have been like, and how things changed for them when they left the Scottish lands their ancestors had known for a new life in Ireland and then in the New World.

A Thin Slice of Heaven

By P.M. Terrell

Publisher:  Drake Valley Press

Release Date:  March 25, 2015

Genre:  Paranormal Romantic Suspense

Length:  89,820 Words (Approximately 262 Pages)

ISBN:  9781935970354

ASIN:  B00VGS3ES0

About the book: 

She had arranged to meet her husband in Northern Ireland for a second honeymoon, but when Charleigh arrives at the remote castle, she receives a message that he won’t be coming—and that he’s leaving her for another woman.

Stranded for the weekend by a snowstorm that has blocked all access to the castle, she finds herself three thousand miles from home in a country she knows nothing about.

She is soon joined by Sean Bracken, the great-grandson of Laird Bracken, the original owner of the castle, and she finds herself falling quickly and madly in love with him. There’s just one problem: he’s dead.

As the castle begins to come alive with secrets from centuries past, she finds herself trapped between parallel worlds. Caught up in a mass haunting, she can no longer recognize the line between the living and the dead. Now she’s discovering that her appearance there wasn’t by accident—and her life is about to change forever.

Buy Links:  Amazon | B&N | Kobo | iTunes | Smashwords

EXCERPT

He moved closer to her until he was leaning over her, looking deeply into her eyes. She felt his presence more than she recalled feeling any living being, and yet she knew… She didn’t know what she knew, she realized. It was beyond her comprehension.

Her eyes traveled along his shirt. It appeared custom made and fit him like a glove. She reached out to stroke the fabric. It felt coarse and yet soft, as if the fibers had originally been more abrasive than modern-day clothing, but it had been worn into a suppleness like her favorite pair of slippers. Her fingers traveled along the sleeve. She felt his muscle beneath it, rippling slightly as her fingertips pressed more deeply against him. The seconds passed as she continued moving along his arm until she felt the short, fine hair on the back of his hand. Then she traveled upward once more, memorizing the contours until her palm rested across his shoulder.

He never said a word but his eyes didn’t leave hers, even when her own scrutinized the hand-sewn seam of his shirt sleeve that lay a few inches below his shoulder, or the folds of fabric in the sleeve that was just short of billowing, or the carefully constructed cuff with the slightly misshapen, handmade buttons.

When her palm reached his face and her fingers followed the line of his jaw, she asked hesitantly, “How is it that I can—?” She stopped herself. Maybe she didn’t want to know. Maybe if she knew, he would disappear and she would be left alone in this massive castle. Perhaps if he wasn’t here, the moon and the stars would seem to disintegrate as well until she was left with nothing but the inky blackness of a night that would feel too long and too painful to endure.

AUTHOR Bio and Links:

p.m.terrell is the pen name for Patricia McClelland Terrell, a multi-award-winning, internationally acclaimed author of more than twenty books in five genres: contemporary suspense, historical suspense, romance, computer how-to and non-fiction.

Prior to writing full-time, she founded two computer companies in the Washington, DC Metropolitan Area. Among her clients were the Central Intelligence Agency, United States Secret Service, U.S. Information Agency, and Department of Defense. Her specialties were in white collar computer crimes and computer intelligence, themes that have carried forward to her suspense.

She is also the co-founder of The Book ‘Em Foundation, an organization committed to raising public awareness of the correlation between high crime rates and high illiteracy rates. She is the organizer and chairperson of Book ‘Em North Carolina, an annual event held in the real town of Lumberton, North Carolina, to raise funds to increase literacy and reduce crime. For more information on this event and the literacy campaigns funded by it, visit www.bookemnc.org.

Links:

Author’s website: www.pmterrell.com  

Twitter: https://twitter.com/pmterrell  

Blog: www.pmterrell.blogspot.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/author.p.m.terrell

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