Tuesday, March 25, 2025

Life in Rotations by Farid Yaghini - Book Blast and Giveaway

This post is part of a virtual book tour organized by Goddess Fish Promotions. Farid Yaghini will be awarding a $10 Amazon/BN gift card to a randomly drawn winner. Click on the tour banner to see the other stops on the tour.
Farid Yaghini's unforgettable memoir takes you on a journey from escaping persecution in Iran to rebuilding a life in Canada and serving on the frontlines with the Canadian military. Filled with humour, heart, and unflinching honesty, his story of resilience, redemption, and the founding of Camp Aftermath will inspire you to believe in the power of hope and human connection.

Read an Excerpt

On the fourth night, I woke to my mother shoving bread into my jacket sleeves. Everyone around us was scrambling, panicked. The smugglers were making their move. My mother, my two-year-old sister, and I were crammed into the back of an SUV, sitting on jerry cans. One popped open, drenching us in gasoline. The driver, cigarette in hand, barely seemed to notice.

Hours later, we stopped in the middle of the desert. Just as we climbed out, headlights appeared in the distance. Without hesitation, our smugglers jumped back into their vehicles and tore off, leaving us stranded in the open. We ran for cover, crouching behind a hill as the approaching vehicles roared past. Not border patrol—just more smugglers.

Separated from my parents, I was sent off with my cousins and a group of young boys. This should have been terrifying, but to seven-year-old me, it was an adventure. No rules, no bedtime. We hid behind restaurants, rode in the backs of pickup trucks, and dodged guards at the border. One smuggler, Shahpur, fascinated me—his hand always on the gun in his jacket pocket. The day he set it down on a car hood, I touched it, awed.

Weeks later, I was reunited with my parents. I hadn’t seen them in so long that I forgot to be scared. But when I overheard them whispering about never returning home, I finally understood. We weren’t going back to Iran. Ever.

About the Author

Farid Yaghini was born in Iran and fled to Pakistan with his family to escape religious persecution following the Islamic Revolution of 1979. At the age of nine, he immigrated to Canada as a refugee, navigating the confusion and frustration of adapting to a new way of life. Through it all, he carried a deep sense of resilience, hope, and an irrepressible knack for finding humour, even in the most challenging moments.


Monday, March 17, 2025

Mean Cuisine by Wendy W Webb - Book Blast and Giveaway


This post is part of a virtual book tour organized by Goddess Fish Promotions. Wendy will be awarding a $25 Amazon/BN gift card to a randomly drawn winner. Click on the tour banner to see the other stops on the tour.

Beluga Stein is taking a cooking class and it's a real killer. This time she's traded her signature loud muumuus for ill-fitting chef attire, including a toque the size of her ego.

A well-liked chef is found dead and it's up to Beluga and her feline familiar, Planchette, to investigate. There's no recipe to follow, only the hope that her erratic psychic ability will hit the spot. Is a supernatural entity stirring up trouble, or something far more dangerous?

Beluga and Planchette can't stand the heat, but there's no way out of this kitchen while murder is the main dish.


Read an Excerpt

Beluga Stein’s Diary

Such a day.

And while Chef Pernod tried mightily to restore order with an impromptu lecture on the differences between Grande, Classic and Nouvelle cuisines, I’m afraid the distinctions were lost when the frozen body was wheeled past us to the waiting ambulance.

The sight of such a spectacle took a toll on the chef as well, I should add. Fortunately for me there was no mention of Planchette in the kitchen, but for the rest of us the chef’s well-practiced lecture took a sudden nosedive into a stream-of-consciousness series of French words. I think I heard her say that a traditional kitchen brigade had positions with names sounding something like “poisoner,” which is rather ominous if you ask me, and “chefs who party,” which might warrant further investigation if things start to get dull. Or one finds herself in immediate need of hors d’oeuvres and a tropical cocktail.

About the Author:
Wendy W Webb (aka one of the many Wendy Webbs) has published dark fantasy short stories and novels, co-edited anthologies, and has had productions of stage and radio plays. After a hiatus as a doctoral student of emergency management and as a disaster responder, she welcomed the return to fiction with The Wild Rose Press writing the gothic Widow’s Walk, and two updated books in the Beluga Stein supernatural-humor-murder mystery series, Bee Movie and Mean Cuisine. Sunbury Press under the Milford House imprint published the paranormal, travel, “memoir,” Eye of the Gargoyle. She adores her husband; two dogs, one of which turns on iTunes whenever Wendy leaves her office; dry red wine; theatre; and travel as long as she doesn’t see anymore ghosts!


Thursday, March 13, 2025

Bad Order by Mike Elliott - Book Blast and Giveaway

This post is part of a virtual book tour organized by Goddess Fish Promotions. Mike Elliot will be awarding a $10 Amazon/BN gift card to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter. Click on the tour banner to see the other stops on the tour.
This is the incredible true story of railroad worker and union official Mike Elliott, targeted by his railroad employer, BNSF Railway Company, for his safety-related activities. As the union's state legislative board chair, Elliott was the top safety official in the state, and the voice for over 900 rank & file locomotive engineers operating trains around the clock, every day of the year.

When his members reported a plethora of trackside signal malfunctions on the BNSF Seattle subdivision, Elliott went to the railroad first, asking that they fix the problems. When the BNSF failed to act, he contacted the government's regulatory authority, the Federal Railroad Administration. That led to an FRA inspection of over 130 miles of the railroad's track and signal systems turning up hundreds of federal defects – all with potential to put workers and the public at risk.

What followed was a retaliation plot reminiscent of the Nineteenth Century Robber Barons: A management-staged conflict at work, police called in, arrest, jail, criminal charges, and termination from his job – not once but twice.

The wrath, influence and power of North America's largest freight railroad is unleased in full force and in an all-out attack on a whistleblower's life, liberties, and career. An amazing journey of one man's righteous battle against impossible odds and the nearly unlimited resources of a multi-billion-dollar corporation.


Read an Excerpt:

Jim Vucinovich called me to the stand. He addressed background facts concerning my education, current employment, ongoing work for the BLET, and my past work history, including my USMC service and law enforcement experience. He asked most specifically about the “instruction and training in self-defense” I received at the police academy in California and if that training came into play during the Kautzmann parking lot incident.

“It had,” I answered.

We left this subject for the moment and went into more of my work experience, including the history of my railroad career. This gave us an opportunity to explain something about the labor structure in railroading while establishing my experience and expertise as a conductor and an engineer. We eventually zeroed-in on my knowledge of signals and safety, the nature of the signal complaints I received from my Union Pacific BLET members, and, most significantly, processes associated with tri-annual engineer recertification.

I testified to being through it several times previously, describing the “Net-Sim” (network simulator), its role in the process and how Net-Sim scheduling was accomplished through the company payroll computer. Jim also asked questions about the driver’s license abstract, the requirement it be submitted along with other documents to BNSF’s Overland Park, Kansas certification department and how Washington State only allows the licensee to obtain a copy of their own driving abstract. This was important information establishing that Dennis Kautzmann had no legitimate reason for contacting me on March 3rd, 2011, as the Net-Sim scheduling notifications were done through the payroll computer.

The testimony also laid the foundation for countering BNSF’s false assertion I had failed to submit my tri-annual recertification paperwork in a timely manner, or had submitted paperwork from the previous tri-annual recertification in 2005, by identifying the keeper of those records: BNSF certification manager Kathy Conkling.

From here, Jim led me through testimony about my safety work for BLET. I explained that I got into safety because I saw a disconnect between what workers learned in classroom training and what they experienced in the field.

About the Author: Mike Elliott was born and raised in Washington State. He enjoys the great outdoors of the Pacific Northwest, classic rock & roll music, vintage stereo gear, home cooked meals, and Seattle Mariners baseball. He lives in Tacoma, Washington.