Dim Sum Asylum by Rhys Ford #BlogTour #RGRGiveaway #PartOneShortStory

We are super excited here at Rainbow Gold Reviews to be hosting Rhys Ford as she starts her Blog Tour today for her upcoming novel Dim Sum Asylum with us!

Be sure to read Part One of the short story here and check at the bottom of this post for an exclusive, amazing giveaway!

 

Follow the whole story on the Dim Sum Asylum Tour:

June 1  Rainbow Gold Reviews
June 2  Sinfully Gay Reviews
June 5  MM Goodbook Reviews
June 6  Joyfully Jay
June 7  It’s About the Book
June 8  Love Bytes
June 9  The Novel Approach

Dim Sum Asylum by Rhys Ford
Available on June 9 at Dreamspinner, Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other online book stores

 

 

Welcome Rhys, and congratulations on your upcoming release of Dim Sum Asylum.

Thank you for joining me on the Dim Sum Asylum tour! And a huge thank you to the blogs who are letting me rent their space for the day!

Now a little bit about Dim Sum Asylum the novel. It was originally a short story in Charmed and Dangerous, a fantastic anthology created by JCP. When I was invited to contribute, I couldn’t type yes fast enough and so, the original short Dim Sum Asylum was created. Other authors have taken their contributions and expanded on them, delivering full length pieces but I hadn’t planned on doing that… mostly because of time.

Then Lynn West, the Editor in Chief of Dreamspinner Press, said to me; I want that story. One does not simply turn down Lynn and to be honest, I really enjoyed writing Roku. There was a lot about the world and his life I couldn’t fit into the short story and expanding Dim Sum Asylum would give me that chance.

So I folded it into the queue and after a few months of unstitching the short story and weaving in the pieces I’d always longed to put in, Dim Sum Asylum the novel was born. This is my first urban fantasy romance and I had a blast writing it. A lot of romantic tension, a bit of suspense and murder plus a whole lot of magical creatures and fantastical people. Oh…and there’s Bob the Cat.

It is available on June 9, 2017 at Dreamspinner, Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other online book stores. I hope you enjoy reading the story as much as I loved writing it.

Did I mention this blog stop’s giveaway? Because there is one. Comment, Rafflecopter or however the blog chooses to run its contest and enter to win a $20 gift certificate to the online store of your choice!

This tour is a serialized story featuring Roku MacCormick, the lead in Dim Sum Asylum and will be told over the blog tour stops. AND there is a separate giveaway on each stop so be sure to follow the short story, enter to win and grab a copy of Dim Sum for your ereader or bookshelf!

Mondays are never a good day in Chinatown.

For a variety of reasons but first and foremost, Monday is the traditional day most—if not all—ethnically Asian restaurant owners close their doors for a day off. While this practice might work in other parts of the city where there are other places to eat, Chinatown’s food choices ran primarily from Northern Asian to… Southern Asia…with a little bit of Asian fusion thrown in just to screw me up when I headed to the Indian-Thai food place at one in the morning only to find it shuttered with a We’ll Be Back at 11 am sign swinging from the front window.

Standing on the corner, I hawked up the burble of frustration I’d stewed in my belly and swore, “Shit.”

English wasn’t working for me. I tried Japanese but I needed something filthier, tangy even. Swearing in Hawaiian just made it sound like I was thanking the Gods for the beauty of the land. That language was shit for spitting out curses and Cantonese, while good for a slap of consonants, would make all of the older faerie and human women manning the tourist trap shops turn around and give me the evil eye.

Also, a lot of them knew me from when I was a little kid and my wearing an SFPD Inspector badge wasn’t going to stop them from trying to get my ass beaten. Back then they’d have called my mother to have her bitch me out. Now they’d call Gaines, my godfather and unfortunately for me, the Captain in Chinatown’s Arcane Crimes Division. Living in C-Town was like living in the basement of your mom’s house and everyone in the family thought they had a right to tell you how to live.

Trudging through the piss-drizzle rain, I grumbled, “I need to learn Russian or something. Something hard.”

I didn’t want street food but it didn’t look like I was going to have much of a choice. Crawling through the alleys and tucked in stalls for something to eat hadn’t been on my agenda. I wanted something hot and steaming with a cup of strong tea and walls around me to keep out the bitter San Francisco cold. The heavy rain turned the streets into a sewage-perfumed gazpacho and sitting on a stool with my feet hooked into the rungs to keep them out of any puddles promised to leave me with aches in my joints.

After that, I wanted to head home, get a shot of whiskey in me, then crawl into bed and fall asleep just long enough for Bob the Cat to sit on my head and wake me up.

Gangnam Alley was bustling with foot traffic and the aromatic pull of sizzling kalbi tempted me. Rice… my stomach suddenly wanted rice… and the skinny slot between two apartments held a lot of promise. I flipped up the collar of my leather jacket then shoved my hands into my pockets, prepared to do battle with all of the late shift workers who were gulping down their dinners while shouldering aside the off-nights club kids they’d slung drinks to not more than an hour ago.

The tightly packed side street didn’t disappoint. It was muggy from bodies pressed into sardine-can stalls, asses and wings hanging over makeshift perches constructed out of nailed together wooden crates and haggard bar stools old enough to vote in the next election. Most stalls depended on gōngyù bridges spanning the gaps between buildings for some kind of cover but oddly enough the Gangnam walkway was clear to the sky, a tragic victim of a generations-old gōngyù slums feud, the two collective rooftop villages vowing to never connect their borders, leaving everyone below without cover during San Francisco’s torrential rains.

Fighting through the crowd, my prospects weren’t looking good. I couldn’t find the source of the kalbi scent and after the third set of wings struck my jaw, I was ready to bail on the whole thing and possibly eat one of Bob the Cat’s nearly-edible cans of tuna and crash.

That’s when a handful of tentacles zipped through the press of people and slammed into my face. Stupidly, cop instincts immediately made me reach for my gun then after a second of wet, flailing suckers and a spritz of rank ink into my open mouth, it dawned on me to yank the thing off of my head.

The suckers leaving my skin hurt and when I flung the cephalopod off, it took off again, its bulbous head giving it flight by the furious flapping of slender, translucent wings. It defied gravity, leading with its undulating tentacles, its body flashing rainbow swirls beneath its spongy pale grey skin. Leaving clouds of inky mists in its wake, it careened and bounced around the crowd, heading towards the street.

“Roku!” A booming voice broke through the mildly alarmed chatter around me and I turned, recognizing the voice.

A big Japanese man who’d once tossed larger men out of sumo rings for fun and games, Senior Inspector Brian Yamada now spent his time arresting errant magic-users and the occasional poacher but seeing him cut a path through clusters of stall customers, it wasn’t hard to imagine him throwing salt into a ring to purify it then grabbing another man by the mawashi and hefting him into the stands. Still, he was generally a happy kind of guy, a cop who’d pat his perp on the head to warn him about the edge of the door frame when putting him into the back seat.

This Brian Yamada, however, was certainly not only unhappy but borderline volcanic by the time he reached me. He didn’t break his stride and grabbed me by the arm, hustling me out of the alley. I gave a token resistance, pretty much digging my sneaker heels in but he outweighed me by a group of small children and could bench-press me while half-asleep so my trying to stop him was laughable.

“Hey, Yamada!” I feinted as best I could when he nearly plowed me into a fire hydrant then stumbled off the curb, grateful for his ham-sized fist knotted around the front of my shirt or I’d have landed flat on my face. “Dude, where the fuck are you taking me?”

“We’ve got to catch that thing!” He kept going, dragging me behind him like I was one of Bob the Cat’s flat fur toys she liked to pull around the house behind her. “Someone just used it to murder my favourite pho guy!”

 

Welcome to Dim Sum Asylum: a San Francisco where it’s a ho-hum kind of case when a cop has to chase down an enchanted two-foot-tall shrine god statue with an impressive Fu Manchu mustache that’s running around Chinatown, trolling sex magic and chaos in its wake.

Senior Inspector Roku MacCormick of the Chinatown Arcane Crimes Division faces a pile of challenges far beyond his human-faerie heritage, snarling dragons guarding C-Town’s multiple gates, and exploding noodle factories. After a case goes sideways, Roku is saddled with Trent Leonard, a new partner he can’t trust, to add to the crime syndicate family he doesn’t want and a spell-casting serial killer he desperately needs to find.

While Roku would rather stay home with Bob the Cat and whiskey himself to sleep, he puts on his badge and gun every day, determined to serve and protect the city he loves. When Chinatown’s dark mystical underworld makes his life hell and the case turns deadly, Trent guards Roku’s back and, if Trent can be believed, his heart… even if from what Roku can see, Trent is as dangerous as the monsters and criminals they’re sworn to bring down.

Comment on this post for your chance to win a $20 Gift Certificate to the online store of your choice. One winner will be randomly chosen.

You need to be 18 years or older to participate. Void where prohibited. Etc.

This giveaway will end on June 11, 2017 at 11:59 PM CDT.

 

Rhys Ford is an award-winning author with several long-running LGBT+ mystery, thriller, paranormal, and urban fantasy series, including Murder and Mayhem, a 2016 LAMBDA finalist. She is published by Dreamspinner Press and DSP Publications.

She’s also quite skeptical about bios without a dash of something personal and really, who doesn’t mention their cats, dog and cars in a bio? She shares the house with Yoshi, a grumpy tuxedo cat and Tam, a diabetic black pygmy panther, as well as a ginger cairn terrorist named Gus. Rhys is also enslaved to the upkeep a 1979 Pontiac Firebird and enjoys murdering make-believe people.

Rhys’ Blog: www.rhysford.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rhys.ford.author

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Rhys_Ford

Rhys Ford’s books can found at Dreamspinner Press (http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com), DSP Publications (https://www.dsppublications.com/) and all major online book stores.