SHATTERED MINDS by Laura Lam Official Blog Tour | Spotlight, Excerpt & #giveaway @JeanBookNerd @LR

Print Length: 400 pages

Publisher: Tor Books (June 20, 2017)

Publication Date: June 20, 2017

Sold by: Macmillan

Language: English

ASIN: B01N0KCUGZ

Praise for FALSE HEARTS

“Riveting.” ―F. Paul Wilson, New York Times bestselling author

“A multilayered, suspenseful thriller, False Hearts explores themes of identity and power in a breakneck plot that keeps the pages turning.” ―Ilana C. Myer, author of Last Song Before Night

“An ingenious premise, and Laura Lam executes it flawlessly. Gritty and wise, your own pulse will be racing as you get caught up in this exciting tale.” ―Robert J. Sawyer, Hugo Award-winning author of Red Planet Blues

“A taut futuristic thriller, set in a San Francisco where everybody is beautiful... and nobody is exceptional. Two unusual sisters are caught in a war for control of a society that quietly suffocates its outsiders, rebels, and the damaged. Taema and Tila are all three, and their strange past and unique bond make False Hearts a difficult book to put down.” ―A. M. Dellamonica, author of Child of a Hidden Sea

“A smart debut from someone who's clearly got what it takes.” ―Peter F. Hamilton, author of the Commonwealth Saga

She can uncover the truth, if she defeats her demons

Ex-neuroscientist Carina struggles with a drug problem, her conscience, and urges to kill. She satisfies her cravings in dreams, fuelled by the addictive drug ‘Zeal’. Now she’s heading for self-destruction – until she has a vision of a dead girl.

Sudice Inc. damaged Carina when she worked on their sinister brain-mapping project, causing her violent compulsions. And this girl was a similar experiment. When Carina realizes the vision was planted by her old colleague Mark, desperate for help to expose the company, she knows he’s probably dead. Her only hope is to unmask her nemesis – or she’s next.

To unlock the secrets Mark hid in her mind, she’ll need a group of specialist hackers. Dax is one of them, a doctor who can help Carina fight her addictions. If she holds on to her humanity, they might even have a future together. But first she must destroy her adversary – before it changes us and our society, forever.

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Excerpt From Shattered Minds / Laura Lam (Tor Books, 2017)

The man coughs, blood splattering into his hand. He doesn’t pause to wipe it away. His hands dance in midair, manipulating the code his ocular implants project into the room around him. The room is empty, the white walls stark. There are no windows. His body is exhausted, his lungs struggling to work. Medical advancement miracles can’t cure every disease, espe- cially engineered ones.

Sweat trickles down his temples as he works. His hands shake, and he can’t afford to make even one mistake. There’s only one person he can trust. Or at least, trust her to want to take Sudice down as much as he does.

There. His hands fall to his sides. The code floats around him, beautiful and perfect, like a nebula of the universe made of letters, numbers and symbols. Now all he has to do is find her. Minimizing the code, he opens the government map he cracked into earlier, typing in the numbers of her new VeriChip.

There she is. Right in Los Angeles, as he suspected. And she’s plugged in.

“Finally, fate gives me a break,” he mutters, beginning to prep the transfer when he hears the door open.

“Fuck.” His pulse spikes. He has seconds, if that. He locks onto the signal in LA. “Please, please let this work.” He can’t stop a sob. “Don’t let this be for nothing.”

The footsteps come closer. The information streams into her brain. As soon as it finishes, he manages to still his shaking hands enough to obscure the breadcrumbs of the trail. He can only hope it’s enough. He turns to face his killer.

Someone shoots the lock and kicks the door open. The woman steps in and shakes her head at him. “I’m disappointed in you, Mark.”

“I’m more disappointed in you, you fucking psychopath.” He’s still shaking, but he hasn’t pissed himself. Maybe he’ll die with a modicum of dignity.

She tuts. “Language, Dr. Teague. And I’ve never been offi- cially diagnosed.” She flashes him a smile that never reaches her eyes before hefting the gun. “Now, what have you done here?” He says nothing. She moves forward, and with a wave of her hands latches onto his ocular implants. As she rifles through his recent history, he stifles a satisfied smirk when she can’t find where he’s sent it.

“You’ve made a mistake.” She points the gun at him.

“I’ve never been more certain of anything in my life. I only wish I could be around to see you and Sudice fall.” He’s proud that, in the end, he stood up to them, at least put a wrench in their plans after all they’ve done.

No company is entirely invincible. Sudice has been trying for decades, buying politicians and using its deep entangle- ment in every aspect of Pacifica’s economy and government to strangle its competition. Mark knows there’s always a crack, a flaw that can be used to bring the whole thing down. He’s found the fissure, but he’s not strong enough to give it enough pressure to break.

“Any regrets?” the woman asks with a sardonic tilt of her head. “Any last-minute confessions before you meet your maker, if you believe in that sort of thing?”

Mark regrets ever working for Sudice. Greed was why he started, and he opened his eyes to the truth far too late. “I only had a few weeks left anyway, with whatever you gave me.” He shrugs. “At least I might have done some good in the end. So no regrets.”

“Pity, that.”

She pulls the trigger. Mark falls. He stares at nothing, the dark bullet hole on his forehead like a third eye. Roz steps over him and takes up his code, transferring it from his dying implants into her own. Face impassive, she begins her search.

Book Nerd Spotlight

Photo Credit: Elizabeth May

Laura Lam was born in the late eighties and raised near San Francisco, California, by two former Haight-Ashbury hippies. Both of them encouraged her to finger-paint to her heart’s desire, colour outside the lines, and consider the library a second home. This led to an overabundance of daydreams.

After studying literature and creative writing at university, she relocated to Scotland to be with her husband, a boy she met online when they were teenagers and he insulted her taste in books and she insulted his right back. She almost blocked him but is glad she didn’t. She is now a dual citizen, but at times she misses the sunshine.

While working a variety of jobs from filing and photocopying endlessly at a law firm to library assistant to corporate librarian, she began writing in earnest. Her first book, Pantomime, the first book in the Micah Grey series, was released in 2013, which was a Scottish Book Trust Teen Book of the Month, won the Bisexual Book Award, was listed a Top Ten Title for the American Library Association List, and was nominated for several other awards. Robin Hobb says “Pantomime by Laura Lam took me into a detailed and exotic world, peopled by characters that I’d love to be friends with . . . and some I’d never want to cross paths with.” The sequel, Shadowplay, followed in 2014, as well as several the Vestigial Tales, self-published short stories and novellas set in the same world. The third book in the series, Masquerade, will follow in 2017.

Her newest book is False Hearts, a near-future thriller released in June 2016 by Tor/Macmillan and in three other languages. Peter F. Hamilton calls False Hearts “a strong debut from someone who’s clearly got what it takes.” Another thriller, Shattered Minds, will be released in 2017.

She is still hiding from sunshine in Scotland and writing more stories.

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