Happy Valentine's Day and a #giveaway @LucyBurdette

LUCY BURDETTE: It’s Valentine’s Day and T-bone and I would like to celebrate the day with you by giving away an advance review copy of A DEADLY FEAST. 

Now comes a spoiler alert! If you haven’t read DEATH ON THE MENU and don’t want to know what's happening with Hayley Snow's love life, you can skip over the rest of this post and go directly to leave a comment for the drawing. 

For the rest of you…

Yep, it’s official, Hayley is getting married. (Or we hope she is anyway, she has some rocky moments to get through first.) As with many of us, she kissed some frogs before she found her prince. And to be honest, it took some forthright reader comments before I realized that her last boyfriend was a dud of a match. D-U-D, as my sister-in-law used to say.

My John could tell you that I was even worse than poor Hayley at recognizing that the best guy was right in front of me! Here’s a picture of those early days after we met playing tennis.

Gosh we were babies! I have a special warm place in my heart for Valentine’s Day, because that’s when John proposed with a very cute poem. I won’t bore you with with all the verses, but it ended something like: “Honey bunny don’t leave me in the lurch, let’s go do it in the church!"

 Even with exactly the right man in my sights, I had a few freak-outs along the road to destiny with true love. Hayley is nervously nutty too. "Til death do us part" is kind of a scary notion, don't you think? I'll leave you with a little snippet of Hayley’s spinning bride mind from A DEADLY FEAST. She's finished a food tour run by her friend Analise, and is observing the other customers...  

Once I’d finished writing down my thoughts and filling in some notes from the other stops on the tour, I scrolled through all those scribbles, trying to settle on what my angle would be for this piece. When nothing brilliant came to mind, I relaxed for a couple minutes, observing my fellow diners.

The group consisted of one couple, plus another man and woman who hadn’t said much to each other or the rest of us, so I assumed they were unrelated. Or if they had come together, maybe things had gone super-sour between them, and now they weren’t speaking to each other. That was my nervous bride-mind talking. Based on their tans and casual clothing, I guessed them to be local residents.

The couple did not pass the test that my roommate and I used to amuse ourselves back in college: Do these two people “go together” and how did they meet? Both perhaps in their late 40s, the woman was dressed in slightly upscale tourist attire, linen capris and a flowing white shirt, while the man wore a black leather vest, chains on his belt, boots with multiple zippers, and well worn jeans with holes at the knees that any stylish teen might have drooled over. He had a dark beard and sunglasses. Physically, they were not a match. But I guessed from the wedding rings that they were married, and from the way they held hands and shared food, that they were devoted to each other. Maybe her more than him. And that brought my next thought—was it better to be the adored, or the adoring? These kinds of observations were especially interesting to me these days, with my marriage to Nathan approaching quickly. 

And now for the giveaway: Leave a comment, are you a fan of Valentine’s Day or not so much? And tell us why if you're willing...

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A DEADLY FEAST will be published in May by Crooked Lane Books, but you can certainly pre-order it now! Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Indiebound, or wherever you like to buy your books…

And the winner of Rhys Bowen's new book is Sally from PA. Email her at RhysBowen at comcast dot net with your address!

And the winner of TRUST ME is: Well, Hank says: Too hard to pick a cat name! So THREE winners, because you are all fabulous: Kay, Rickie (for Trusty) and Andrea. Email Hank me at hryan at whdh dot com and I will send you TRUST ME!
(And you will be the first to know what I choose--a or when the kitty tells me what SHE chooses...)