Deborah Cooke: Author

She’s baaaaaaaaack, visiting my blog again. Please welcome J.K. Coi, everyone.

The Surprise Hero
by J.K. Coi

The third book in my Immortal Series is out this week, and I’m very excited about it. It took me by surprise, you see. I hadn’t intended to write this book at all when I first started down this particular road.

When I began to plan out the series, I had a very clear picture of each of the men in each book and the roles they were going to play—The stoic leader (Rhys), the cocky bad boy (Baron), and the reluctant warrior (Gideon). Alric and the others were the necessary supporting characters who would help me flesh out the “real” heroes.

Now, I’m not much of a plotter at the best of times, so I can tell you that this picture was actually more like a Jackson Pollock painting. Abstract and unstructured. As I worked my way through the first book and each of these characters took on more and more life and energy, the painting started to become more focused. And more aspects of it began to take shape, including the secondary characters—their motivations, their pasts, their needs and hopes and desires. And just as I was finishing up Baron’s story, the entire series’ plot arc took a sharp twist—all because one of the other Immortals stepped forward, no longer content to stay in his “supporting role”.

Alric. In the first two books, we see him as strong and centered. His relationship with Diana is a perfect model of happily ever after. But in writing him as a secondary character, his past was slowly revealed to me; the horrible torture, the endless darkness, and the overwhelming rage. I needed to know how he had gotten through it, how he had escaped the certainty of madness to become the man he is now—and of course, the answer was Diana. She was his saviour, his light.

And then I was too intrigued by what he told me to set him in the background again, relegated to the sidelines. The questions and possibilities wouldn’t leave me alone. What would happen if that light were taken away, if darkness were to envelop him once more? What would happen if he were faced with his worst nightmare in the very image of the one person who kept him sane?

The story just had to be written.

J.K. Coi writes dark and edgy paranormal romance, where love is all consuming, the stakes are always high, and the immortals are to die for…

Book 3 of the Immortal Series, Dark Immortal is available now…

Five years of happiness, erased in one vicious act of violence.

Diana freed Alric from his prison and the insanity of his own mind, offering him the kind of love only a fool would deny. Now she lies broken and comatose from a vampire attack, locked deep inside herself where he cannot reach her.

Awakening in a strange bed, Diana has no memory of how she got there. The huge, muscled man leaning over her is straight out of nightmares full of blood and pain. Married to him? It can’t be true…even if her body craves his touch, and the anguish in his eyes shatters something deep inside her.

Alric has no intention of giving up on the woman who never stopped fighting for him. His one hope is that time will heal her mind. But with a demon god poised to tip the balance of power, time is not on their side…