Angels of Istanbuhl by Alex Beecroft | Spotlight, Excerpt & #giveaway @RiptideBooks @Alex_Beecroft

It may be too late to stop the demons they've unleashed.

Wallachian nobleman Radu is recently arrived in Bucharest with his vampire parents. Welcomed as an eligible bachelor, he’s introduced to the enchantress Ecaterina, whose salon is Bucharest’s centre of magical expertise. 

But when Ecaterina’s brother dies of a mysterious new plague, it’s clear to Radu that his parents have not been idle. Soon Bucharest is in the grip of an undead epidemic—a less than ideal time for Ottoman Sultan Mahmud, Wallachia’s overlord, to call Bucharest’s nobility to assemble their armies in Istanbul for a holy war against Britain.

The Wallachians have long resented their Ottoman overlords, so Radu seizes the chance to eliminate them while also ridding Bucharest of the undead: he leads an army of vampires to Istanbul and sets them to feed on the Turks.

As Radu’s demons gut the city of Istanbul, their plans become horribly clear. This is only the start. With the Ottoman armies under their control, the undead are poised to suck the life out of the whole world. Radu, his lover Frank, and Ecaterina are appalled at what they’ve unleashed. But they may be too late to stop it.

Buy links: Riptide | Amazon 

Excerpt...

The girl pressed her hand to her mouth as if to stop herself giggling. She might have said something—she was actually reaching out to tug on Frank’s sleeve—when the driver of the carriage behind them flicked his long whip over his horses. They shoved forward into the back of Radu’s carriage, the men on the rear postilion fending them off with open hands. His driver took the hint, moved on, and the girl hopped up easily enough on the footplate and went with them.

How odd. Radu suffered himself to be led into the party, Frank at his side, but just a hair’s breadth behind, as was only right.

“What did you see?” Frank asked, looking about with curiosity and a not-unwelcome awe at the beauties of the Sterescu house. From the main hall, where they handed their outer cloaks to hovering servants and took the first of a series of shots of palincă, four spiral staircases rose to the upper floors, each one so heavily carved and fretted they seemed to mimic the ladies’ lace. Everywhere was colour and ornament, scrollwork, ogees, woodwork like the tangled branches of the deep forest, smoothed and varnished to a deep lustre and touched all over with gold. Such patches of the plastered walls that suffered to be seen through all the ornament were painted robin’s-egg blue, and gave again the impression of a summer sky seen through a tree canopy.

The outside of the house had been a blend of Wallachian and Ottoman styles, but the inside was pure Carpathian. He took note of it, like another secret revealed.

“I saw a Roma girl.” Radu smiled at the other new arrivals, hoping they did not see uncertainty under it. To have peers, all of a sudden—it was delightful, but disconcerting. How did one deal with equals? He didn’t know. “A very impertinent one.”

“Oh.” Frank smiled, nodding. “It must have been Mirela. She does that. Somehow changes her shape, I mean. She was a chambermaid at your house.”

“You saw her on the boat trip down here too. She was one of the boatmen on the raft.”

Frank stopped, and the crush of fellow invitees had to sweep around him, like a river around a small island. “I remember. She was wearing Nicu’s shape then. I knew it couldn’t be Nicu because he was dead, but how could you tell?”

“She always looks the same to me. Scruffy, cocky, half-dressed.”

So Frank saw her differently each time, and he did not. Judging from the footmen’s lack of reaction, they, too, saw her in her disguise. Nor had the boatmen seemed to find her out of place. Nor . . . he revisited the shameful memory reluctantly. Nor had his parents seen anything other than a village girl. Father, indeed, had sworn he would have killed anyone who mocked them by providing a Roma bride.

Had she fooled the villagers who had sent her? Or had they, knowing her talent, sent her in preference to one of their own, hoping she would fool him too?

Alex Beecroft is an English author best known for historical fiction, notably Age of Sail, featuring gay characters and romantic storylines. Her novels and shorter works include paranormal, fantasy, and contemporary fiction.

Beecroft won Linden Bay Romance’s (now Samhain Publishing) Starlight Writing Competition in 2007 with her first novel, Captain’s Surrender, making it her first published book. On the subject of writing gay romance, Beecroft has appeared in the Charleston City Paper, LA Weekly, the New Haven Advocate, the Baltimore City Paper, and The Other Paper. She is a member of the Romantic Novelists' Association of the UK and an occasional reviewer for the blog Speak Its Name, which highlights historical gay fiction.

Alex was born in Northern Ireland during the Troubles and grew up in the wild countryside of the English Peak District. She lives with her husband and two children in a little village near Cambridge and tries to avoid being mistaken for a tourist.

Alex is only intermittently present in the real world. She has led a Saxon shield wall into battle, toiled as a Georgian kitchen maid, and recently taken up an 800-year-old form of English folk dance, but she still hasn’t learned to operate a mobile phone.

She is represented by Louise Fury of the L. Perkins Literary Agency.

Connect with Alex:

• Website: alexbeecroft.com
• Blog: alexbeecroft.com/blog
• Facebook: facebook.com/AlexBeecroftAuthor
• Twitter: @Alex_Beecroft
• Goodreads: goodreads.com/Alex_Beecroft

To celebrate the release of Angels of Istanbul, one lucky winner will receive $10 Riptide credit and their choice of ebook from Alex’s backlist! Leave a comment with your contact info to enter the contest. Entries close at midnight, Eastern time, on April 1, 2017. Contest is NOT restricted to U.S. entries. Thanks for following the tour, and don’t forget to leave your contact info!

Every comment will be entered into the TTC monthly giftcard giveaway as well!