Q+A with Suzanne Johnson + Royal Street Giveaway

Please welcome today's paranormal guest author Suzanne Johnson.  Suzanne is author of Royal Street.

Keep reading for a chance to win a signed copy of Royal Street by Suzanne Johnson.

EJ:  When did you begin writing?

Suzanne:   I've been writing for years as a journalist, but only began writing fiction in 2008, at first as a way to exorcise my demons of being in New Orleans for Hurricane Katrina. Then I got the writing "bug"!

EJ:  What brought you to the paranormal genre?

Suzanne:  I grew up reading Stephen King and Anne Rice, so it was a natural. I've always thought paranormal was the perfect blend of the speculative and the emotional aspects of fiction.

EJ:  If you could be any paranormal or have any one supernatural talent, what would it be? Why?

Suzanne:   Hmm...teleporting would be awesome. No planes, no long drives, no airport security. All good!

EJ:  Tell us why readers will enjoy your new release.

Suzanne:  I hope they enjoy it on a couple of levels. It's a story of wizards and voodoo and undead pirates set in New Orleans, which is one of the world's most interesting cities. It has a lot of humor in it, but the humor's tempered with sadness because it's also about Hurricane Katrina and what life was like in the city afterward. So I hope readers will have fun with it, but also will have an emotional connection to it.

EJ:  If your book(s) were being made into a movie, who would you cast for the leading roles? Why?

Suzanne:   My lead character, DJ, is a wizard, and I've always envisioned her as looking sort of like actress Emilie de Ravin. I thought artist Cliff Nielsen, who did the book cover, captured DJ really well. She's pretty but she doesn't look artificial. Very real and down to earth. No leather or bustiers for this girl. As for her partner, Alex...I'm still doing auditions for that role! For the pirate Jean Lafitte, I think Giles Marini would do very, very nicely. Mais oui!

Royal Street (Sentinels of New Orleans #1) by Suzanne Johnson.

As the junior wizard sentinel for New Orleans, Drusilla Jaco's job involves a lot more potion-mixing and pixie-retrieval than sniffing out supernatural bad guys like rogue vampires and lethal were-creatures. DJ's boss and mentor, Gerald St. Simon, is the wizard tasked with protecting the city from anyone or anything that might slip over from the preternatural beyond.
Then Hurricane Katrina hammers New Orleans' fragile levees, unleashing more than just dangerous flood waters.

While winds howled and Lake Pontchartrain surged, the borders between the modern city and the Otherworld crumbled. Now, the undead and the restless are roaming the Big Easy, and a serial killer with ties to voodoo is murdering the soldiers sent to help the city recover.
To make it worse, Gerry has gone missing, the wizards' Elders have assigned a grenade-toting assassin as DJ's new partner, and undead pirate Jean Lafitte wants to make her walk his plank. The search for Gerry and for the serial killer turns personal when DJ learns the hard way that loyalty requires sacrifice, allies come from the unlikeliest places, and duty mixed with love creates one bitter gumbo.


Thank you Suzanne for joining us here today at From the Shadows!

To learn more about Suzanne Johnson and her books, please visit her website.

**Royal Street Book Giveaway**

We are giving away two *signed* copies of Royal Street by Suzanne Johnson.

To enter, leave a comment on this post (please include your email address so we may contact you if you win).  This giveaway is INTERNATIONAL.  Giveaway ends April 12, 2012 midnight EST.