Double Summer Ebook Giveaway!

The Shutdown List and No Rules: cli-fi thrills, or drugs and runaway teen angst

Jun 23, 2024

Today, I’m off to Key West for a few nights to hang with an old high school friend who is in town for work, but before I go, I want to celebrate the release of a new novel, The Shutdown List, by friend and Writers’ Support Group member, author Sharon Duckett.

I feel personally attached to this book, as Sharon and I chat near-weekly in the writer’s group and I’ve seen her go through the entire process of writing, pitching, querying, and publishing this novel. I also helped provide feedback on her early draft, book blurb, and cover.

Yay! Now it’s out in the world. Congrats, Sharon!

To celebrate, I’m giving away an ebook of Sharon’s two books! A double giveaway. The winner will receive The Shutdown List AND an ebook of her award-winning first book, No Rules.

Both books follow strong, intelligent, adventurous, relentless, and bold women.

To enter the giveaway, share this post here on Substack, by email to a friend, or on your social media, then leave a comment on this post or email me letting me know you’ve entered and telling me your favorite summer place to read a great book.

I will pick a winner at random and let you know next Sunday, July 29th. Paid subscribers get double entries. Ebook will be sent to your reading platform of choice: Kindle, Nook, Kobo, etc.

I’d say The Shutdown List is perfect for a summer lake or mountain vacation read, and No Rules is a great beach or city book for your summer travels. Both go by fast.

More about the Shutdown List

From the book’s description:

Anita Forester witnesses her husband, Julian, being dragged away by police during a protest. A stranger warns her to flee. Still reeling from the loss of her adult son only two years earlier, Anita embarks on a perilous journey to find her husband, unaware of the crucial secret he has kept from her.

While piecing together the trail to her missing husband, Anita intercepts a hard drive containing priceless data sought by a fossil fuel magnate with secrets of his own—secrets he would kill to protect.

Set against a backdrop of climate activism, The Shutdown List is filled with twists and turns, corruption and betrayal. Anita must fight to stay alive and find Julian before he disappears forever.

The Shutdown List is a cli-fi thriller and suspense story, with an amateur detective female protagonist, and it includes a bit of a love triangle. The villains are also great!

It’s set in a part of America I’ve spent a lot of time in, good ole’ West Virginia and in Washington, D.C., where I also used to live and work. If you like thrillers with political intrigue, conspiracies, and sleuthing female protagonists, you will enjoy this book!

I also helped advanced read/sensitivity read for the West Virginia vernacular in the book’s dialogue, to help make the conversations feel more authentic, and another close friend of mine from rural, Western Virginia, on my recommendation, proofread and did the novel’s final edit.

Sharon was also a super-helpful advanced reader of my own novel, Acid Christmas. I also loved her memoir, No Rules, about her experience running away from home as a teenage girl in the 70s, which, like my latest novel, also involves some acid and a big trip.

More about No Rules

From the official book description of No Rules:

In this coming-of-age memoir, Sharon takes you with her on a nail-biting
adventure through the early 1970s after leaving her sheltered home life
at sixteen years old to join the hippies. Yearning for freedom, she
lands in an adult world for which she is unprepared, and must learn
quickly in order to survive.

Also, I just find it so impressive that Sharon ran away from home and still made something major of herself. I keep telling her she needs to write a second memoir because, in between running away and becoming an author, she also thrived in the male-dominated world of big tech—working as a programmer, consultant, project manager, and deputy director.

She’s done numerous TV, radio, podcast, and magazine interviews, which you can check out here, including features for big publications like Salon.