Kimberly Menozzi, Author

Teaser One:
Let the Right One In
by John Ajvide Lindqvist

BLURB:
Oskar and Eli.  In very different ways, they were both victims.  Which is why, against the odds, they became friends. 

And how they came to depend on one another, for life itself.

Oskar is a 12 year old boy living with his mother on a dreary housing estate at the city’s edge.  He dreams about his absentee father, gets bullied at school, and wets himself when he’s frightened.

Eli is the young girl who moves in next door.  She doesn’t go to school and never leaves the flat by day.  She is a 200 year old vampire, forever frozen in childhood, and condemned to live on a diet of fresh blood.

Excerpt/Opening Paragraph:

Blackeberg.

It makes you think of coconut-frosted cookies, maybe drugs. "A respectable life." You think subway station, suburb. Probably nothing else comes to mind. People must live there, just like they do in other places. That was why it was built, after all, so that people would have a place to live.

Teaser Two:
Ask Me if I'm Happy
by Kimberly Menozzi

BLURB:
Sometimes the simplest questions are the hardest ones to ask.

Emily Miller is forced to spend a day in Bologna when she'd rather be catching her flight to the US. Determined to put ten years in Italy and her marriage behind her, she wants to have nothing to do with anything - or anyone - Italian ever again.

For Davide Magnani, chivalry isn't yet dead. He accompanies Emily to Milan, if only to reassure himself of her safe arrival. The following morning, he's stunned to realize he's fallen in love with someone he's only known for twenty-four hours - and it seems that she feels the same way.

One year later, Emily and Davide reunite. As their relationship strengthens, unforeseen events reveal deeper, troubling connections all around, which drive Emily away from the first man she's ever really trusted. Can she forgive the lies she's been told, or the truths which have been hidden from her? And how can Davide prove to her, once and for all, that Italy is precisely where she needs to be?

Excerpt:

When he turned, he saw her watching and his smile lit up his face again. His eyes met hers fully and she looked away, her cheeks tingling as she turned to the window and the countryside emerging in the growing daylight beyond it.

In spite of herself, her eyes shifted to follow him yet again when he stepped away from the row with the broken window.

His hair had been tousled by the wind, and upon settling back in his seat he ran one hand cautiously over it, taming any wild, out-of-place waves. His dark eyes behind the oval frames of his glasses flicked in her direction before he turned toward his own window. She thought it was clear that he was trying not to be obvious about watching her.

First, the blurb and a teaser from the first page of the book
I'm currently reading, which is
Stephen King's 11.22.63
(available at Amazon, of course, or just about anywhere else you can think of.)

_Blurb:

On November 22, 1963, three shots rang out in Dallas, President Kennedy died, and the world changed. What if you could change it back? Stephen King’s heart-stoppingly dramatic new novel is about a man who travels back in time to prevent the JFK assassination—a thousand page tour de force.

Following his massively successful novel Under the Dome, King sweeps readers back in time to another moment—a real life moment—when everything went wrong: the JFK assassination. And he introduces readers to a character who has the power to change the course of history.


Jake Epping is a thirty-five-year-old high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching adults in the GED program. He receives an essay from one of the students—a gruesome, harrowing first person story about the night 50 years ago when Harry Dunning’s father came home and killed his mother, his sister, and his brother with a hammer. Harry escaped with a smashed leg, as evidenced by his crooked walk.

Not much later, Jake’s friend Al, who runs the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to 1958. He enlists Jake on an insane—and insanely possible—mission to try to prevent the Kennedy assassination. So begins Jake’s new life as George Amberson and his new world of Elvis and JFK, of big American cars and sock hops, of a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and a beautiful high school librarian named Sadie Dunhill, who becomes the love of Jake’s life—a life that transgresses all the normal rules of time.

A tribute to a simpler era and a devastating exercise in escalating suspense, 11/22/63 is Stephen King at his epic best.

_Teaser from Chapter One:

I have never been what you'd call a crying man.

My ex-wife said that my 'nonexistent emotional gradient' was the main reason she was leaving me (as if the guy she met in her AA meetings was beside the point). Christy said she supposed she could forgive me not crying at her father's funeral; I had only known him for six years and couldn't understand what a wonderful, giving man he had been (a Mustang convertible as a high school graduation present, for instance). But then, when I didn't cry at my own parents' funerals -- they died just two years apart, Dad of stomach cancer and Mom of a thunderclap heart attack while walking on a Florida beach -- she began to understand the nonexistent gradient thing. I 'was unable to feel my feelings,' in AA-speak.

'I have never seen you shed tears,' she said, speaking in the flat tones people use when they are expressing the absolute final deal-breaker in a relationship. 'Even when you told me I had to go to rehab or you were leaving.' This conversation happened about six weeks before she packed her things, drove them across town, and moved in with Mel Thompson. 'Boy meets girl on the AA campus' -- that's another saying they have in those meetings.

And here are the blurb and a teaser from Chapter Fourteen of
my own novel, Ask Me if I'm Happy,
which is also available on Amazon worldwide as well as
many other online retailers,
in ebook and paperback.

_Blurb:

Sometimes the simplest questions are the hardest ones to ask.

Emily Miller is forced to spend a day in Bologna when she'd rather be catching her flight to the US. Determined to put ten years in Italy and her marriage behind her, she wants to have nothing to do with anything - or anyone - Italian ever again.

For Davide Magnani, chivalry isn't yet dead. He accompanies Emily to Milan, if only to reassure himself of her safe arrival. The following morning, he's stunned to realize he's fallen in love with someone he's only known for twenty-four hours - and it seems that she feels the same way.

One year later, Emily and Davide reunite. As their relationship strengthens, unforeseen events reveal deeper, troubling connections all around, which drive Emily away from the first man she's ever really trusted. Can she forgive the lies she's been told, or the truths which have been hidden from her? And how can Davide prove to her, once and for all, that Italy is precisely where she needs to be?

_ 

_Teaser from Chapter Fourteen:

Neither of them spoke while they rose to the fourth floor. The only sound was the quiet hum of the elevator itself. When the doors slid open at her floor, Davide’s heart sank.

This is it. This is where we say goodnight—and goodbye.

He followed her to her room, the suitcase in his hand seeming to grow heavier with every step, until he considered setting it on the hallway carpet to take a rest. Before he knew it, however, she was moving to slide her keycard and open her door.

With wonder, he watched her miss the slot. Her hands were shaking hard enough for him to see and she took a deep breath before trying again. This time the keycard slid home and the small green light blinked, a soft click signaling that the door was unlocked.