Featured June Release - Daughter of Ashes by Esther Mitchell

THE BLURB:

Telyn Gwndal has always feared Majik. But when her destiny brings her back to the place her nightmares were born, Telyn must take up a sacred quest to avenge the father she never knew. Her greatest ally is a man with a secret that could reawaken a past Telyn believes dead and buried, and destroy the truth she holds sacred. Can she trust him with her heart, or will her destiny force her to let him go?


EXCERPT:

Outside the Camp House, Telyn wished she hadn't been so hasty to leave. Against her will, her gaze traveled to the mountain, and her insides twisted in a mixture of pain and longing.

Raiador.

"Quite a sight, isn't it?"

Her attention whipped to her left at that query, to find a man standing beside her. He had the long, plaited hair of a Borderlander, and his tarnished armor screamed mercenary loud enough the dead could have heard it. And yet, something told her he was neither.

"Excuse me?"

He nodded toward Raiador. "The mountain. Never seen anything quite like it."

She peered closer in the diming light, trying to discover what it was about him that convinced her he wasn't exactly what his appearance claimed. He was tall, even to her with her Bathron blood. That could be a Borderlander trait -- the few she met were easily as tall as she was. His mud-brown hair hung midway down his back, woven into the traditional Borderlander plaits. But there were secrets in his smoky-green gaze that told her he wasn't who he appeared. A sense of kinship to this man blanketed her -- she was more than she appeared, as well, even if she wasn't sure what that was, yet. This man's charisma told her he was far from the mercenary his garb declared him to be.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

While unpublished until her twenties, Esther Mitchell spent her life dreaming of writing. As a young child, she learned to read on such classics as Gawain & the Green Knight and Beowulf. Raised in Europe, with its wide exposure to mythology, history, and the paranormal, she quickly became fascinated by the lore of the unseen, eventually translating into an educational background in parapsychology and a lifetime of study and practice in spiritual healing and counseling.

Life in a fast-paced, on-the-edge military community ingrained her with both an intimate understanding of the military world, and the ability to craft edgy suspense.

At the age of eight, she fell in love with romance, and by the time she was twelve, she had already penned the first of a series of Arthurian romances, and was working on what would later become the futuristic suspense series, Underground.

Always dedicated foremost to her writing, she writes under her real name, and has completed about thirty novels to date, of which ten have previously been published, with more to come. Reviewers and fans alike have dubbed her work "exciting," "edge of your seat" and "daring."

Desert Breeze congratulates Esther on her latest release.