Spotlight & Giveaway: Blind Date with a Werewolf by Patricia Briggs

Today it is my pleasure to Welcome author Patricia Briggs to HJ!

Hi Patricia and welcome to HJ! We’re so excited to chat with you about your new release, Blind Date with a Werewolf!

 
Thank you! I am so happy to be here (virtually).
 

Please summarize the book for the readers here:

Asil is a very old werewolf. Very dangerous. A bit unstable. And some lunatic (or lunatics) decide to present him with five dates from Internet dating sites for Christmas. Mayhem, violence — and justice commences. Oh! And some romance, too.
 

Please share your favorite line(s) or quote from this book:

Asil in an email to his Concerned Friends (the perpetrators):

I do not feel that we have the same understanding about the meaning of the words “background check”.

Please share a few Fun facts about this book…

The germ for the story (or stories depending upon your viewpoint) happened when I was trying to find a Christmas story I could tell for a Kevin Anderson anthology I’d agreed to participate in. My Trusty Assistant (Ann) came in giggling like a hyena because the morning radio talk show she’d listened to on the way to work had been finding unusual on-line dating sites.
“That’s it!” I exclaimed. “We’re going to give someone on-line dates. Five on-line dates.” Because one was just not enough.
“Who?” Asked my Trusty Assistant.
By then I might have been rubbing my hands together. “Asil.”
“But he’s not Christian,” observed my husband.
I might have given an evil laugh. “I know, I said. That’s even better.”

I wrote the story of Asil’s first date, knowing that I wanted to find out what happened on the others. I don’t write many short stories—I have written more novels than short stories—but I enjoy them when I get the time to play. Over several years, I wrote the story of the third date and the fourth date. Then Asil decided that I should finish his story—and solve the mystery of his Concerned Friend(s) identities/identity.
 

What first attracts your Hero to the Heroine and vice versa?

Asil wants me to tell you that everyone finds him stupefyingly beautiful. And also, that he was forced to go on the dates so he was in no way attracted to any of them. Not at first.

I wish to clarify that he is being dramatic. No one forced him. He was bored.
 

Did any scene have you blushing, crying or laughing while writing it? And Why?

I live on a farm so nothing much makes me blush, but Asil makes me laugh all of the time. Here’s a brief snippet.

The woman’s face grew grimmer the closer Asil got to her table. She glanced at the rose in his hand, folded her arms, and looked away.
Amusement fought with pique—he had dressed carefully for this “date” his Concerned Friends had arranged for him from the Platonic Plantophiles—A Meeting Place for Friends Who Garden site. His shirt was silk, yes, but it was a dusty brown a few shades lighter than his skin, a most ordinary color. Nothing romantic. The shirt a friend would wear going to dinner with another friend.
Maybe she hadn’t wanted a platonic friend? The restaurant was more romantic than he had expected. But he thought that even in a brown silk shirt he wouldn’t make a bad date. Her reaction reminded him of . . . the very first of these dates, actually.
Ah, of course. The problem was that he was too beautiful. That response was something he was used to dealing with.

Readers should read this book….

If they‘d like to try one of my books but they are intimidated by starting a long-running series. Blind Date with a Werewolf is set in the Mercyverse, but you don’t have to have read any other of my books to enjoy it.
Or if they have had bad experiences—or good ones!–with on-line dating.
Or if they want to hang around a cunning old werewolf in unusual circumstances.
Or if they want a good Christmas story filled with violence, laughter, monsters, and love.

What are you currently working on? What other releases do you have in the works?

I am currently working on the next Alpha and Omega book (at last). I’ll know more about release dates when I get it finished.
 
 

Thanks for blogging at HJ!

Giveaway: One copy of BLIND DATE WITH A WEREWOLF for a U.S. only winner.

To enter Giveaway, share this post and leave a comment to this Q: If Asil had to take part in a sixth date, what Internet dating site do you think would be the most interesting one to find him a date on?

Giveaway will end 3 days for post date.

Excerpt from Blind Date with a Werewolf:

Unappreciated Gifts

At three in the afternoon on the first day of December, the werewolf sometimes known as the Moor, feared for centuries by his own kind, opened his email to find this:

Dear Asil:

We have become worried about you. A werewolf alone is a sad thing, especially at Christmastime. So we have a challenge for you. Five dates in three weeks. We have taken the work out of it and connected you with five people (from online dating sites) who should make the excursions from your lonely existence worthwhile. Or amusing, if only to us. The dates, except for meals, which we thought should be up to you and your partner for the experience, are planned and paid for (when necessary). Tickets for your first event should arrive in today’s mail-all you have to do is write an email and arrange a meeting time and place.

You should know that all of these people think they have been talking to you and are looking for you to bring a little romance into their lives. We have carefully chosen people we think would be very hurt to find out they were unwitting participants in a game. Some of us believe that you would not hurt a stranger just to avoid a little discomfort. Others think that knowing that we have informed the whole pack (via email) and instigated a betting pool will be better incentive. Especially since no one, so far, has bet on your attending more than one date.

Below you can see the profile, photos, and email exchanges between your first date and . . . well, I guess you know it’s not really you. Charles, computer guru that he is, did help with sending email that looks like it’s coming from you and intercepting the return emails. He was unwilling until we enlisted his mate. Lest you get excited, Anna is not one of us. And though she does know who we are, she has sworn not to tell.

Should you succeed in all five dates (success defined below), we shall confess, turn over any and all audio/video footage, and submit ourselves to your reckoning.

Sincerely,

Your Concerned Friends

*A successful date is one in which (a) neither party runs screaming into the night, (b) there are no dead bodies at the end of it, and (c) lasts longer than two hours-at least an hour and a half of which is spent with your date-which is an hour and fifty minutes longer than we expect any date of yours to last.

Asil read the email three times, followed the link to his profile on BiteMe.com, a dating site for . . . humans pretending to be vampires. He adjusted to that idea for a heartbeat before considering the information his Concerned Friends had assembled about him.

The photo they’d used was a close-up, though he didn’t remember any such photos being taken of him. To get a close-up from far enough away that he hadn’t noticed would take a very expensive camera. He put that observation aside as a possible hint to the identity of his benefactors.

The photo showed him with his shirt off, looking slightly to the left of the camera with a Black Baccara rose held between two fingers at hip level. His face was mostly hidden in the shadows.

It had clearly been taken during the summer, but not, he thought, last summer. He’d moved that rosebush indoors because, even though it was supposed to be hardy, Aspen Creek, Montana, required a sturdier hardy than his Black Baccara could manage.

He looked beautiful and dangerous.

He approved. If one had to have a photo posted on a website called BiteMe.com, it was good to have one that represented him properly.

He spent significantly less time examining his date’s profile because it was not interesting. The photo was a black-and-white blurry image of someone in a (presumably) black cape. It was possible to discern that the person had two eyes and a mouth, but everything else was lost in shadows. The profile was brief and generic. Given the dearth of biographical data, he could only assume she had been chosen because she lived in Missoula, a smallish university town about four hours away by car. Missoula was quite possibly the closest location they could find for a person using the dating app. Aspen Creek was very, very far away from civilization.

There were not, to his knowledge, real vampires in Missoula. Vampires were, generally speaking, city creatures. Missoula was still too small to provide adequate hunting grounds. The occasional missing person would be noticed.

Vampires, unlike werewolves, could not reveal themselves to the human population and expect to coexist peacefully. Being thought of as food was not something people tended to get used to.

Vampires could and did exist as lone hunters, but four hours by car was still too close to the Marrok’s territory for a single vampire to feel safe.

Actual vampires, that was. Apparently, there were enough humans pretending to be vampires that they held a yearly winter dance, which Asil and-he checked the name-Kelly were scheduled to attend. Sometimes Asil thought that he’d been a werewolf too long to understand humans at all.

More interesting than his date’s bio were the somewhat breathless emails exchanged between his date-to-be and the people who pretended to be him, if only because he could examine them for more clues about the identity of the people to whom he owed this charming . . . gift.

In the end, he concluded that whoever was writing emails as him knew him rather well. These were letters he might have sent himself-excepting only that he would never have written to anyone who signed up on a website for fools who pretended to be vampires.

He hadn’t been able to discover much about the person he was supposed to take on his date from the emails-they seemed very impersonal for someone looking for love on the Internet. But people no longer expressed themselves as well as they used to in writing; he blamed it on the move from pen and ink to keyboard.

Asil leaned back in his chair, staring at his computer screen without actually looking at it.

He considered what he should do.

Probably he could figure out who’d sent the email to him-he already had some strong suspicions. He could, without a doubt, extract himself from the situations in which his unknown opponents . . . benefactors . . . had embroiled him.

But he had been invited to a game. An adventure. Adventures were often uncomfortable but never boring.

He composed an email to the woman he was going to take to a vampire ball, Kelly No-Last-Name, whose email was-Asil sighed-FangsForTheMemories@umontana.edu. He suggested they meet at his favorite Thai restaurant in Missoula sufficiently early so that they could retire and assemble their costumes after they ate. Vampires apparently preferred to dance in costume-it was a masquerade ball. Asil’s benefactors had assured Kelly that Asil had suitable clothing-which was a costume that humans would think a vampire might wear to such a thing. And indeed, he did own several that would work.

After he sent the email to Kelly, he wrote back to the people who had begun this adventure for him.

Dearest Children,

Challenge accepted.

Asil

Postscript-You do know I am Muslim, yes? I do not care about Christmas, except that the music which the season subjects me to is mostly bad.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
 
 

Book Info:

When the deadly werewolf Asil is gifted five blind dates by some anonymous “friends,” his reclusive life will never be the same, in this enthralling novel in stories from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Mercy Thompson series.

Includes two all-new stories as well as three previously published stories.

Dear Asil:

We are worried about you. A werewolf alone is a sad thing, especially at Christmastime. So we have a challenge for you: five dates in three weeks. We have taken the work out of it and connected you with five people from online dating sites. You should also know that we have informed the whole pack and instigated a betting pool. Have fun!

Sincerely,

Your Concerned Friends
 
 

Meet the Author:

Patricia Briggs is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Mercy Thompson urban fantasy series (Winter Lost, Soul Taken) and the Alpha and Omega novels (Wild Sign, Burn Bright).