Title: Girl Gone Nova
Author: Pauline Baird Jones
Genre: Science Fiction Romance, Action-Adventure, Space Opera
Book Blurb:
She’s an interstellar spy. He’s an alien warlord. Can their love heal a rift in time and space?
Delilah Oliver "Doc" Clementyne specializes in impossible missions. When relations between the Earth Expedition and the Gadi starts to turn ugly, she’s sent on a desperate mission to bring their people home before war breaks out. But Doc nearly blows her cover when she saves the life… and loses her heart… to the most hated leader in the galaxy.
Helfron “Hel” Giddioni has survived more than his fair share of assassination attempts. And he’s not about to ruin his perfect record by letting a drop-dead gorgeous spy cloud his judgment. But when she’s abducted by primitive brutes wielding high-tech weaponry, he can’t help but tempt fate and fly in the face of danger.
With war brewing all around and celestial chemistry sparking between them, Doc and Hel uncover a startling secret with the power to bend space and time. To save the galaxy, they must battle their way into the past to safeguard the secret from forces who would use it to destroy the future.
Girl Gone Nova is the second standalone novel in the high-adrenaline Project Enterprise sci-fi romance series. If you like badass women, bad boy love interests, and interstellar showdowns, then you’ll love Pauline Baird Jones’ time-traveling adventure.
Buy Girl Gone Nova to go undercover in a star-struck romantic adventure today!
Excerpt:
Cordite burned into her nose bringing Doc awake and into a low-profile crouch. She eased a weapon free from concealment, ears straining for threats in darkness lit by a half-hearted fire. Nothing immediate presented itself, but her gut refused to stand down and her senses twitched like live wires in water. Something bad had happened. People were down. Stuff was on fire. It took a few seconds to orient her memory, to reconstruct where she was, what had happened and why she was on alert at the cellular level.
What light there was showed her the remains of the lovely Gadi reception hall. Moans filtered in between the soft crackle of fire somewhere off to her right. Her brain noted aches and pains in a variety of places, and smoke stung her eyes and lungs, but it was a low-level concern, all energy channeled to her stretched out senses.
No one had told her to come to the party armed, but no one had told her she couldn’t. Truth was, even if they had, she’d still be armed. It was SOP—standard operating procedure—to expect the unexpected.
She extracted her infrared monocle. Not everyone could split their vision, but her brain liked it. It pulled more data from the combo of IR and real-time viewing. With the IR in place, she surveyed her surroundings again. Heat signatures popped out of the haze, all of them prone, bodies and rubble tumbled together.
She would have been one of those bodies, but she’d realized she couldn’t stop the attack and hit the deck before the blast. Still got her bell rung, of course.
She needed to find the General and not just because of his rank. He’d be one of the few wearing a radio. She wasn’t officially military, so she didn’t have one, though the Doolittle should be monitoring the contingent and seen the explosion on their sensors. There’d been at least one medical officer dirt side, but he’d been the one trying to push the bomber out of the hall. No way had he survived the blast.
Her brain needed more to do, so she set it to work estimating the general’s current position, calculating trajectories and blast radius. Seemed a good idea to assess for structural integrity concerns, so she threw that into the mental mix, too.
She had a medical degree in her pocket, but black ops resisted going offline. It was a bit like having multiple personality disorder, but without the forgetting part. No persona ever completely left the building, preferring to jostle for attention inside her head, but if black ops didn’t want to go back in the queue, maybe it shouldn’t. Doc knew to trust her gut.
According to her calculations, General Halliwell had to be somewhere off to her left. Doc started that direction, pausing when a body in her path stirred and muttered something. She crouched next to him, but before she could do more than check his pulse, a change in the air current proved black ops had been wise to stick around. Her IR-free eye met the wounded man’s gaze, a finger to her lips silenced whatever comment he’d planned to make.
Her backup weapon slid into her left hand as she went ghost. Both weapons were already silenced. She knew not to attract attention when she shot someone.
It was easy to locate the source of her unease. They were the only ones upright and moving. The bogeys split into two groups of two, using some kind of hooded light that extinguished any lingering doubt they were a rescue party. The lights passed over each body just long enough for an ID. They were hunting. Didn’t take many of her brain cells to determine two possible targets. Doc decided to go hunting, too. She attached herself to the team heading in the direction that should lead to the General and saw his prone figure when they did.
“Finish him off and let’s get out of here,” one of them, a male, said, looking back over his shoulder. His eyes widened as his gaze connected with hers, his mouth started to move.
Doc’s silenced weapon ended that move. The other found a target dead center of bogey number two. She turned before either body hit the ground. Thanks to her IR, she spotted team two. Didn’t look like they’d found what they were looking for yet.
Buy Links (including Goodreads and BookBub):
If money were no object and we weren’t in a pandemic, where would you go for a Spring Break vacation and why?
Since my book is science fiction romance, then of course, I’d want to go to the moon. Why not Mars, you ask? Because Mars is kind of a one-way trip and I want to be back in Wyoming. It took me 35 years to get back here!
Why is your featured book a must-read this spring?
GIRL GONE NOVA is an award-winning, exciting read that will carry you away from any lingering woes from 2020. A reviewer called it the “most wildly unbelievable believable book” she’d ever read. Wouldn’t you like to find out why?
Giveaway:
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Open internationally
Runs April 1 – 30, 2021.
Drawing will be held on May 3, 2021.
Author Biography:
USA Today Bestselling author Pauline Baird Jones never liked reality, so she writes books. She likes to wander among the genres, rampaging like Godzilla, because she does love peril mixed in her romance. She also loves chocolate, bacon, flamingoes, and mid-century modern anything.
Social Media Links:
Website: https://paulinebairdjones.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/paulinebjones
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/perilouspauline/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/paulinebjones/
Amazon Author Page: http://www.amazon.com/Pauline-Baird-Jones/e/B000APFS0M/