Category Archives: Books I wrote

Deep Down

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Out Now!        

Death stalks the haunted, windswept prairie in this chilling sequel to Wide Open.

Now that she’s solved her sister’s murder, Hallie Michaels has left the army and isn’t sure what to do next. Her relationship with deputy Boyd Davies is tentative, there’s still distance between her and her father, and she needs a job. The good news is, she hasn’t seen a ghost in weeks.

It turns out, though, that ghosts aren’t the only things haunting Hallie.  Or Boyd either, for that matter.  When she’s asked to help a neighbor who’s being stalked by black dogs, Hallie finds that everything’s connected, it all has consequences and the past never really dies.

Stalked by a reaper and plagued by dark visions, Hallie finds she must face her fears and travel into Death’s own realm to save everyone she loves.

Deep Down is available now.  You can order it here or here or buy it at your favorite bookstore.

 

Cover!

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I’m excited to show you the cover for Deep Down:

What do you think?  I love the colors. I love the way it echoes back to the Wide Open cover, but is pretty clearly different.  And I like that it’s a girl and a dog and the prairie.

What’s Deep Down about?

Hallie’s looking for a job, but those are few and far between in Taylor County, South Dakota.  She’s not even sure she wants to stay, except there’s Boyd.  And her dad.  Meanwhile, Boyd’s dealing with a ghost from his past.  He won’t involve Hallie; it’s his problem and he’ll deal with it.  Turns out, Hallie has other ideas. And everything that happened at the end of Wide Open?  Well, once you let something like blood magic into the world, it’s not that easy to shove it back down.

Okay, so maybe I’m not the person to go to when you’re writing your back cover copy, but I hope it gives you a hint of what’s coming.

Deep Down will be published in March, 2013 and is already available for pre-order at Amazon and Powell’s and BooksAMillion and possibly other places if, you know, you desperately need to order it right now.

tor.com reviews Wide Open

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I have to say, I love this review so much I should probably marry it:

I never grew tired of hearing the different ways Hallie described how cold the ghosts made her feel, of how angry or confused or ineffectual she felt, of the different freak storms. And I loved the dialogue. It came off as both very realistic and very true to the characters. People don’t speak in full sentences. We cut each other off, trail off without finishing, get scattered and distracted, forget what we were saying, refuse to say what we mean or mean what we say, and live and die by subtext and subtlety. Coates has mastered realistic dialogue and made it colloquial without being grating or difficult to read. She doesn’t have to describeher characters in minute detail because the way they speak, the words they choose, and the things they leave out reveal everything you need to know about them.

Wide Open Blog Tour Week Two Schedule

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Here’s the rest of the schedule for the Wide Open Blog Tour.  Hope you’re enjoying it so far!

Monday, March 19th

Tuesday, March 20th

Wednesday, March 21st

Thursday, March 22nd

Friday, March 23rd

Saturday, March 24th

Sunday, March 25th

Monday, March 26th

And, that’s it!  Hope you enjoy the guest posts, the reviews, the interviews and the giveaways.  I’ll be posting a few other interviews in the side bar and probably doing a review roundup at some point.  Whew!

 

 

Wide Open Deleted Scene #2

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Here’s another deleted scene from Wide Open.  If this scene still existed, it would be right at the beginning, except, of course, it doesn’t exist.  Not anymore.

The advertisement was for an alternative energy company called Uku-Weber. The picture, which was most of the ad, was divided into thirds–the same scene across the entire picture.

The first third showed thick gray clouds, jagged lightning and prairie grass flattened by lashing rain.  The second third was all ice and blowing snow, the sky leached gray-white.  The final third was gentle in contrast, soft-focus sun, brilliant green prairie grass, leafy green trees.  In the center was a long, low building which looked both modern and classical with open columns, large windows and a courtyard filled with painstakingly chaotic wildflower gardens. Beyond the building were windmills, a millwheel and a long row of slanting solar panels.

Underneath, it read, “Harnessing the weather for a better future.  Uku-Weber.  West Prairie City.  South Dakota.”

“Everything all right?”

A man in a blue TSA uniform with thin, slicked-back hair along a receding hairline approached her from the security area.  She realized she’d been staring at the Uku-Weber ad for several minutes.

She cleared her throat.  “Yeah.  I thought–you know this Uku-Weber?” She jerked a thumb toward the ad as if that had been the point all along.

The guy shrugged, watching the few remaining people from Hallie’s flight struggle past them.

“Ad just went up three days ago,” he said.  “Someone told me it’s a local Rapid City fella.  Some guy who left, made a fortune or something and came back.  Paper said last week he’ll be hiring two–three hundred people when it’s all up and running.”  He shrugged again.  “West Prairie City’s, I dunno, like the middle of nowhere.  You’d think he could have started that company right here.”  He shoved his hands in his pockets and tipped back on his heels.  “You looking for a job, are you?” he asked, taking in her boots, her rumpled fatigues, her short-cropped hair.

“I–no, not really,” Hallie said.  Eddie’s ghost hovered off her right shoulder, radiating cold no one but Hallie could feel. “I thought the name sounded familiar,” she said.

“Hmm,” the man said with a brief tilt of the head.  He turned back to his station as a clattering group of men in cowboy hats and blue jeans approached the screening area.

They reminded Hallie of every rancher she’d ever known–including the women–checkered shirts, hats with signs of wear along the brim and at the crown, denim jeans that fit like they’d been washed a thousand times, the entire security procedure an object of confusion and disdain though each of them had probably been through it a dozen times before.

Oh, yeah, even if this was not how she’d imagined it–never imagined Dell being dead, never imagined ghosts–she was definitely home.

The images in this post are used under Creative Commons licenses:

  1. Prairie Windmill—Jeff Slater (CC BY-NC 2.0)
  2. Wind Turbines in Beaumont Kansas—Brent Danley (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Wide Open Blog Tour Week One Schedule

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As I’ve mentioned previously, my publicist at Tor, Alexis Nixon, has arranged a pretty extensive blog tour for the release of Wide Open.  So extensive, in fact, that I’m not going to even attempt to list the whole thing in one post.  Here, forthwith, is the schedule for Week One:

Monday, March 12th

Tuesday, March 13th

Wednesday, March 14th

Thursday, March 15th

 Friday, March 16th

Saturday, March 17th

Sunday, March 18th

And that’s just the first week.  Whew!

Thank you to each of these bloggers and websites for hosting a bit of the Wide Open blog tour.  It’s a privilege, but also fun for me to see all these different websites–some of them I knew about, some of them I didn’t.  People talking about books.  How could that fail to be awesome?