Mama Lona's Man by
Brett O'Neal Davis
Genre: Paranormal
Romance
ISBN: 9781301347049
ASIN: B00AH01DKE
Number of pages:
219
Word Count: 74,000
Cover Artist: Cate
Meyers
Book Description:
Mama Lona’s Man
combines a Caribbean love story with a zombie thriller. It’s a bit James Bond,
a bit "How Stella Got Her Groove Back" and a dash of "Night of
the Living Dead.
The leading man is
a ex-Navy SEAL controlled by a witch doctor. When he meets an American girl
caught up in island intrigue, they fall in love even though he's been dead
longer than she's been alive.
Excerpt:
Abigail
cautiously opened the bathroom door. The large men were gone. A guard rushed
down the hallway past her without even glancing in her direction. She heard
shouts echoing off the walls. She was beginning to think she wasn't going to
get that ride home after all.
She heard
what sounded like machine gun fire down the hall, coming from what she thought
was the outside of the house. Looking behind her she saw that while the
bathroom was large it offered no place to hide. She could sit on the toilet and
try to wait out whatever was going on, or she could go deeper into the mansion
and find a place to hide or a way out. Another machine gun burst, this one
accompanied by the grunt of a man in pain, settled the question. She opened the
door and ran down the hall, heading for what she hoped would be safety.
Having
some knowledge of how the president's house was laid out would have been
helpful. After a few minutes, Abigail realized that she was just circling
around a large inner courtyard where fighting was taking place. She hid behind a
sizable marble column and peeked around it. The president's guards—she
recognized them from their uniforms—were arrayed against what looked like a
ragtag militia, although one that was equally well armed. The militia members
had no uniforms, just ratty T-shirts and stained khaki pants. The guards were
hidden behind the furniture, including several overturned tables, and fired
wildly through the front windows and doors. Everything was in tatters. The
windows and doors were now nearly nonexistent, the drapes looked like moths the
size of Mothra had eaten them and the furniture was riddled with bullets,
although it was holding up surprisingly well. The guards no doubt were glad
that their boss had not cheaped out on the décor.
The
militia was not making much progress. One of its members would briefly appear
in a window or door, get off a shot or two and fall back. The guards, for all
their firing, did not seem to actually hit anything and the militia members
were no better. The noise was incredible, like an indoor thunderstorm, but as
far as Abigail could see hardly anybody had actually been hit yet. She was just
about to try to find her way out through the back of the mansion, leaving the
guards and militia men to their target practice, when something amazing
happened.
One of the
militia men went suddenly went flying to the side, losing his rifle in the
process. He didn't seem to be shot. It looked like someone had just grabbed him
from behind and flung him into the air. A few seconds later, a man walked right
through the middle of the room. The combatants were so stunned by his presence,
and his audacity, that they stopped firing. He was unusual not just for
standing up in the middle of a firefight but because he was the only white man
in the room. He was young, about Abigail's age, with straight, sandy-blonde
hair that was a little disheveled. He wore a stained blue T-shirt and dark
green pants but no shoes or socks. He seemed to have no weapons of any kind
except his muscles—the T-shirt and pants revealed that he was lean and fit.
Abigail was pretty sure he was also about to be dead, but still no one fired.
The man stood still and gazed around the room as if in a daze. He did not seem
surprised, or even particularly interested, to find himself in the middle of a
small war. Not finding anything in the room of interest to him, he started to
move on, heading for the doorway just to Abigail's right. That was when one of
the guards remembered that he was supposed to keep people out of the house. He
stood up and fired two shots into the man's chest.
Abigail
squeezed her eyes shut, not wanting to see her first dead body. She waited for
the thump of the young man falling to the floor but it didn't happen. She
opened one eye; he was still on his feet. Maybe those weren't muscles showing
through his shirt, maybe they were actually the ridges of a bulletproof vest.
The man walked over to the guard, who had a stunned look on his face, picked
him up by his lapels and hurled him against the wall as if he weighed only a
couple of pounds. The guard sagged to the floor and lay still. The man
continued on his way. Another guard rose from behind his hiding place, an
overturned table, and fired a shot right into the man’s back. There was no
bulletproof vest—with her own horrified eyes, Abigail saw a hole appear in the
front of the man's shirt as the bullet punched through; though oddly there was
no blood, just a yellowish stain. Still the man did not fall or even break
stride. He completely ignored the fact that he had just been shot three times.
He stepped
through the doorway and noticed her crouching behind the column. His eyes, so
dead in the other room, suddenly seemed to flare to life. He seemed surprised
to see her.
“You
should come with me.”
He
extended a hand but she just stared at it, not knowing what else to do. The
firing renewed in the front room. A bullet dug into the column above her head,
showering her with dust.
“I'm
pretty sure that's not real marble,” he said. “You should come with me.”
His voice was calm and even, just a little bit scratchy,
and had more than a hint of the American South.
About the Author:
Brett
O’Neal Davis is a native of Florence, Ala., and attended the same high school
as Sam Phillips, who discovered Elvis Presley. He studied journalism at the
University of North Alabama and the University of Missouri, writing about music
whenever possible. He also briefly “fronted” the one-man punk band Screwhead.
Despite clearing $1.50 in profit on consignment sales of the band’s lone album
at Salt of the Earth Records in Columbia, Mo., he turned to the slightly more
stable world of aerospace and defense journalism, working today in the field of
unmanned systems and robotics in Washington, D.C.
He is
the author of four science fiction and fantasy novels, all published by Baen
Books. The first, The Faery Convention,
was listed among the best fantasy novels for 1995 by Science Fiction Chronicle,
and Two Tiny Claws was named to the
2000 Books for the Teen Age List by the New York Public Library. An occasional
panelist at area science fiction conventions, he also has discussed fiction
writing at National Press Club events and at literary festivals, including the
annual T.S. Stribling celebration at the University of North Alabama. Mama Lona’s Man is his first foray into
paranormal romance, but it won’t be the last.
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