Anyta Sunday Brings "Liam Davis and the Raven" Calling, And There's A Giveaway

The Novel Approach is pleased to be a part of Anyta Sunday’s virtual blog tour for her latest novel Liam Davis and the Raven. Read on to learn a little bit about Anyta, the book, and register for your chance to win some great prizes!

Author Bio: A born and raised New Zealander, Anyta Sunday has been exploring the literary world since she start reading Roald Dahl as a kid. Inspired, stories have been piling up in her head ever since. Fast forward to her mid-twenties and jump a few countries (Germany, America, and back again), and she started putting pen to paper. When she’s not writing or chasing her kid around, she’s reading, hiking, watching Joss Whedon series, attempting Pilates or curling up with her two cats. Updates on her projects can be found at anytasunday.com.

Author’s Web Page: http://www.anytasunday.com
Author’s Book Page on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/liamdavisraven
Author’s Page on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Anyta-Sunday/251386378229403

Acknowledgements: Caroline Wimmer (http://streiflicht-fotografie.de/?project=book-cover-art-anyta-sunday&lang=en) for the amazing cover art! I love how this so wonderfully captures the tone of the book and its setting.

Teresa Crawford for developing the story and discussing how best to shape the direction of the novel.

Lynda Lamb for keeping me sane while I took so long to get this one ready, and then for going through and catching all my nasty spelling and formatting errors.

HJS Editing (http://www.hjseditingservices.com/) for such wonderful and thorough copyediting and making my characters actually sound American.

“Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are.” ― Benjamin Franklin

Title: Liam Davis & the Raven

Author: Anyta Sunday

Publisher: Self-Published

Pages/Word Count: 220 Pages

Rating: 4.25 Stars

Blurb: Liam Davis is a serious journalist, and he’s good at it.

Or at least, he was. Until the chief of Scribe, the campus magazine, makes him give up his politics column to write for the party page—the party page that is problematic for two reasons: One, it threatens Liam’s chance of getting the traineeship with his apathetic father at his prestigious newspaper company, and two, he has no idea what it means to party, let alone how to capture this new audience’s attention!

But Liam Davis is no quitter. He’s determined to prove to his father, the chief, and above all himself that he can do it—and do it well.

Life doesn’t make it easy. Not when Freddy Krueger comes stalking out of the shadows to attack him. Luckily the Raven, the campus vigilante—the vigilante getting hate mail sent to Scribe’s opinions page—comes to his rescue.

Now, between finding the perfect angle for his party page columns and making friends (and perhaps something more?), Liam needs to find this mysterious Raven—not only to thank him, but to warn him to watch his back.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Review: There are only three things I know for sure about heroes: 1.) Where there is a hero, there is a villain. 2.) Not all heroes have extraordinary powers. 3.) The title “hero” is sometimes dubious and can be a thankless job.

I could probably think of more than three, but in the case of Anyta Sunday’s Liam Davis & the Raven, those things pretty well sum up the world in which our protagonist exists. Liam is the reporter who’s looking to impress his father by becoming the features editor for his university campus newspaper. The only problem is that for as good as Liam is at his job, the paper’s chief editor doesn’t think Liam’s quite good enough. Liam needs to flex his writing chops a bit more if he’s going to prove himself to the chief, so he’s assigned to write the column for the college party circuit, and it’s in carrying out his journalistic duties that Liam’s life changes forever.

The question of the difference between a hero and a criminal has been explored in comic books, in one form or another, for decades, and Ms. Sunday brings that topic to the fore in the character of the Raven, a campus crusader who works under cover of darkness, avenging the gay men who’re being beaten simply because they’re gay. The villain has an axe to grind, and the Raven is there to make sure vigilante justice is served. Is the Raven a hero or nothing more than a thug who’s answering violence with violence? The police want the Raven stopped, someone wants the Raven dead, and Liam wants nothing more than to discover the Raven’s identity.

One thing I’ve learned to count on from this author is a story that will keep me on my proverbial toes: There are times when it’s unclear who the protagonist’s love interest will be as the story unfolds, there are always clever twists and turns to be found, and her ordinary romances come wrapped within a storyline that is rarely ever ordinary itself. Liam Davis & the Raven fits the mold perfectly. Ms. Sunday takes a lonely and friendless young man, gives him the incongruous job of reporting from the fringes on the height of college social interaction, then makes him an integral part of his own storyline as he not only falls victim to the villain but becomes the unlikely hero of his story. Liam may be plain spoken and, at times, a bit obtuse, but he finds friendship, discovers he’s not who he’d always believed himself to be, and falls in love all in the course of a day’s work.

There are red herrings enough in this book that I was fooled right up until the big reveal, and that in itself made Liam Davis & the Raven a page-turner from start to finish.

You can buy Liam Davis & the Raven here:

The Giveaway: Prizes include an e-copy of Liam Davis and the Raven; or an e-copy of Liam Davis and the Raven and the choice of any one backlist book; or an e-copy of Liam Davis and the Raven, an e-copy of any backlist book, and a $10 Amazon Gift Card.

Good luck!

Tour Stops:

March 31 – My Fiction Nook
April 1 – Mrs. Condit & Friends
April 2 – The Novel Approach
April 3 – Cate Ashwood
April 4 – MMGoodbooks
April 7 – Prism Book Alliance
April 8 – Nephylim
April 8 – Book Reviews, Rants, and Raves
April 9 – Book Whores
April 9 – Top2Bottom Reviews
April 10 – Hearts on Fire
April 10 – Elisa Rolle
April 11 – Bound by Blood
April 14 – Amanda C. Stone