Pirate Treasure: Author Post
Pieces of Eight
(Lost Souls’ Treasure, #1)
Genres: Adult, Adventure, Romance
Published by: Firefly Hill Press
Publication date: July 13th 2021
From the author who whisked you away on a wild escapade in The Key West Escape Series comes a sexy, adventure-packed spin off. Follow Mitch Thompson and his team of misfits as they find danger, intrigue, and romance on the hunt for the legendary Lost Souls’ Treasure…Former special ops aviator Griffin Dodge spent two years working on a marine salvage crew based out of Key West after his military career abruptly ended.
The only person he let himself get close to on the Salty Dog Crew was a woman called “Bug.” They couldn’t have been more different – the former all-star golden boy from the Midwest and the scrappy French circus performer turned salvage diver – but she became his best friend. Griff was happier than he’d been in a long time, but when his first love called to say she wanted him back, he caught the next flight out of town.A year later, Bug still resents Griff for ghosting her and the crew after he left. She’s furious when he shows up out of the blue to do a favor for her boss. It doesn’t matter that Griff is single again or that he’s sorry, she hates that she’s stuck flying shotgun to Martinique beside the guy who abandoned their friendship and betrayed her trust.
The trip was supposed to take two days tops. Just enough time to meet with an artifact collector who claims to have the missing pages of a diary that could lead them to The Lost Souls’ Treasure. But when the deal goes south, and Griff and Bug are caught breaking and entering, they’re forced to escape up the side of a volcano where the lava isn’t the only thing about to bubble over. The tension between them erupts into an unexpected night of passion that leaves them both uncertain about what comes next.
While Griff starts to question if settling down in the suburbs still fits the man he’s become, Bug isn’t so sure she’s willing to open her guarded-heart to the only man who’s ever broke it.
When a rival treasure hunter hellbent on beating the Salty Dog Crew to the treasure takes Bug hostage, Griff realizes his future plans won’t matter, if he can’t bring his best friend home alive.
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From the author who whisked you away on a wild escapade in The Key West Escape Series comes a sexy, adventure-packed spin off. Follow Mitch Thompson and his team of misfits as they find danger, intrigue, and romance on the hunt for the legendary Lost Souls’ Treasure…
Can you tell your readers something about why you chose this particular topic to write about? What appealed to you about it? Why do you think it is different and your approach is unique?
My first book series “The Key West Escape Series” was a planned trilogy. As I was writing book three, readers started asking me if there would be more books in the series. I had a lot of fun writing in this world and wasn’t quite ready to leave it yet either, so I considered doing a spin off series. In Rum Runner (The Key West Escape Series Book One) the heroine’s father Mitch Thompson is a retired Navy SEAL turned treasure hunter. He was a quirky character, as many of the secondary characters in the series were, and I thought how fun would it be to write a story about Mitch putting together crew to go on a big treasure hunt?
In Rum Runner, you learn that Mitch knows a lot of people and has made some enemies along the way. He was the perfect character to bring the spin off series together. And I thought, Mitch is ex-military, so his crew could be all or mostly ex-military as well. Maybe a bunch of outcasts and misfits who come together and realize after a rough start they actually work really well as a team.
One of the things that appealed to me about this idea was coming up with ways to link this new series with my first series. As I started mapping out the overall plot and characters to feature in each book of the planned six-book series, I had some fun bringing back a few secondary characters who appeared in The Key West Escape Series. My challenge: turning characters who may not have been likable when readers first met them into “heroes” who are featured in their own books.
Both The Lost Souls’ Treasure Series and The Key West Escape Series fall under the umbrella of Romantic Suspense. My approach to writing these stories is different, because I consider them to fall into a subgenre blend of Adventure and Romance fiction I call Romantic Adventure. These stories will take you away someone where exotic, and usually tropical, and they’re not as dark, or scarily realistic as your typical Romantic Suspense novel, but they still have elements of danger and suspense.
Romantic Adventure to me is lighter and often humorous. The characters are relatable, but the situations they find themselves in may be out of the ordinary. The adventure stories are centered around a romance. In most cases, the romance wouldn’t have happened without the adventure, but the romance is the story. To use movies for comparison, think Six Days Seven Nights, Knight and Day, or the classic 80s movie that actually inspired my first book Rum Runner, Romancing the Stone. If you haven’t seen any of these movies, I highly recommend them.
Thanks for having me. 🙂
Tricia Leedom
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TRICIA LEEDOM enjoys traveling to exotic destinations and having torrid love affairs with hot, dangerous men… even if it’s only in her own mind. When she’s not writing romantic adventure novels, she reads voraciously, tweets compulsively, and fangirls over a TV show based on her favorite book series. Tricia earned her BA in Creative Writing from The University of Tampa and her MFA in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University. Her favorite authors include Diana Gabaldon, J.R. Ward, Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Karen Robards, and Johanna Lindsey. She lives in Southwest Florida with two very spoiled dogs. Follow Tricia on Twitter and Instagram @tricialeedom
