It's time for my Friday Favourites post and today I'm very excited to welcome Dal Maclean, author of m/m crime mystery romance, on my blog. Her second book, Object of Desire, was just released and it's a compelling murder mystery with strong romantic elements (and HFN ending!) which I absolutely adored. Read on to get to know Dal better and learn more about her book. 

Friday Favourites

I’m going to be completely useless at this because I don’t do absolutes well. I just don’t have ‘a favourite’ in most things. So please bear with me while I waffle?

1. Favourite place: Uuuum. This isn’t a good start. I’m shuffling because I don’t have one exactly. It depends? I love London and New York. Anywhere in the US really. Oxford. Singapore (specifically Raffles - yowser). The Dordogne in France. Sydney. Laos. Java. Hong Kong. Tokyo’s brilliant. Or my garden. My garden would be the easy choice.

2. Favourite food and drink: squirming in agony. Ummm. At this second, oranges and dark chocolate. And drink… I’ll go with cocktails of any description.

3. Favourite music/genre/artist/song: It depends -- again. I love bits of just about everything from classical and opera through blues to rock, pop, R& B. I probably like indie/alternative rock best though. I’ll go with what I’m listening to right now which is The Heavy who’re Indie/Blues rock. “Same Old” and ‘Short Change Hero’. But it could be a totally different tomorrow.

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4. Favourite movie/TV series:  I’m going to fail at this one tooooo…. TV - I love old-fashioned British mysteries and also police procedurals like Marple, Poirot, Morse, Lewis and Endeavour. Also harder core stuff like The Fall, Line of Duty, Broadchurch etc. I really love some sci-fi like Firefly. But currently I’m watching Lucifer and its oddly… compulsive. Movies - I like film noir as a whole. I love ‘The Uninvited’ (the b & w one) ‘The Name of the Rose’, ‘Presumed Innocent’, ‘My Cousin Vinnie’... I love the new Sherlock Holmes movies (the R Downey ones) and some of the Marvel stuff for pure entertainment value… I’m no use at this am I?

5. Favourite hobby besides writing, if you consider writing a hobby: I think probably gardening. It’s a mix of creativity, nurturing/science/practicality and hard work (Hey- that was actually a straight answer!)

6. Favourite books:

Argh. This is so hard. Non fiction - I read history books. One I love a lot is ‘The Time Travellers Guide to Medieval England’ by Ian Mortimer. It was such a clever concept to show not tell how alien so many aspects and attitudes of the distant past can be. I’m currently reading something that’s not history though -- “Mistakes Were Made. (But not by me)” which is a superb analysis of the lengths we go to to avoid admitting to ourselves we got things wrong.

In fiction, I read mysteries mainly – murder ones, supernatural ones. I like tension, a puzzle, suspense to keep me hooked -- something to figure out and hopefully a surprise. I’m trying to catch up on the Harry Hole books by Jo Nesbo, which everyone else read years ago. In MM, I read across the genre to see what’s up. So to speak. Theres so much great writing and story telling in MM. But if I have to choose one I think my fave MM of all time ever ever, is probably The Adrien English series by Josh Lanyon

7. Please introduce your latest/upcoming release

It’s called ‘Object of Desire’ and its set in London and in the same universe as my first and only other book to date, ‘Bitter Legacy’. But it’s not a sequel. This one is a psychological thriller/mystery/romance and its much less of a slow build than ‘Bitter Legacy’ in that the core events take place over a matter of days, as opposed to months.

The point-of-view character is a successful model called Tom Gray who finds his life beginning to disintegrate around him after the death of his female boss. And he has to turn for help to the man he cut out of his life two years before.

I'd say the book explores among other things the power of manipulation; the limited returns of celebrity, despite our idealization of it; the psychology of emotional self-protection driven by fear of vulnerability – and the hard reality that we can never be sure we truly know someone else.  Most of all though, I really hope it’s a page turner.

Blurb

Tom Gray is one of the world's top models–an effortless object of desire. Self-contained, elusive and always in control, he's accustomed to living life entirely on his own terms. But when Tom comes under suspicion in the gory death of his employer, his world spirals into chaos.

Someone's framing him. Someone's stalking him. And as old secrets come to light, Tom finds his adversary always one step ahead. 

Will Foster is the only man Tom trusts to help. But Tom brutally burned all bridges between them two years before, and Will paid a bitter price. If he wants to survive, Tom must prove his innocence to Will–and to the world.

  Buy links: Amazon / Smashwords 

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