Spotlight & Giveaway: Three Kinds of Lucky by Kim Harrison

Today it is my pleasure to Welcome author Kim Harrison to HJ!

Hi Kim and welcome to HJ! We’re so excited to chat with you about your new release, Three Kinds of Lucky!

 
Thank you ! I am so pleased to have the chance to talk to your readers.
 

Please summarize the book for the readers here:

What happens when your high school frienemy grows up to be a sexy professor teaching magic at the local university—and then contracts you to pick up his magical trash thinking it’s an honor?
 

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

My smile widened to meet hers with a honey-drenched sweetness. Sure, bantering with a muckety-muck donor on the first day wasn’t a career-boosting move, but what were they going to do? Fire me? Please…
“Dross exists because every mage and mage-based company blissfully makes it,” I said as I spun the dross on the wand like cotton candy, deftly handling the tingling energy that would break on her faster than a bug hits a newly washed window. “If you don’t like the fees, don’t engage us. We are a service, like everything else, doing what you could do yourself if you cared to—but don’t.”

Please share a few Fun facts about this book…

The inspiration behind Three Kinds of Lucky was idea that magic, like all things, must create waste. I dabbled a little with this idea in the Hollows, (smut and the devastating pollution of the ever-after) But I wanted to talk about waste being more costly, more intimate, and far more timely in its effects on us, so in Three Kinds of Lucky, I decided to make dross, or magical waste, cause bad luck if not contained. From there came an entire branch of magic to deal with it. Much like our modern-day trash men, sweepers are not well thought of even though they are the back bone of our lifestyle. Only by change the minds of those around her as to what that magic waste actually is can Petra fix what’s broken.
 

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

Having first met in high school, Petra and Benedict have a long history. They both come from magic-using families, but peer pressure drove them apart when Benedict chose popularity over true friendship, a choice he regretted the moment he made it. Now, with both of them working at the same university, Petra assumes nothing has changed until Benedict unexpectedly stands up for her. Still, it’s not until Benedict comes clean that his past mistakes were only because he doubted himself that Petra begins to let herself be drawn to him again.
 

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

It’s been so long since I worked on Three Kinds of Lucky that I honestly don’t remember blushing, laughing, or crying while writing it. Three Kinds of Lucky is not a strict romance, so no blushing even though Petra and Benedict clearly like each other. Petra gets angry, not sad when faced with unhappy happenings, and it’s not a humorous book, even after taking out an enormously large chunk of unhappy in the editorial rewrite. Petra doesn’t cry, she pulls herself up and gets on with it, and she’s too busy trying to figure out what’s going on to get very romantic.
 

Readers should read this book….

If they enjoy frenemey turned romantic interest.
 

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

2024 is a huge year for me with several projects finally reaching the shelf. Contemporary fantasy Three Kinds of Lucky will be released 3/5, followed by an audio/ebook of Eclipsed Evolution, released in three parts in April, May, and June. And finally, as of writing this, the next Hollows book, Demon’s Bluff, is scheduled for October.
 

Thanks for blogging at HJ!

Giveaway: One finished copy of THREE KINDS OF LUCKY for a U. S. only winner.

To enter Giveaway: Please complete the Rafflecopter form and Post a comment to this Q: If the only way to save yourself was to destroy and remake the balance of your society, would you do it? Or would you look the other way?

 
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Excerpt from Three Kinds of Lucky:

I leaned into the turn, bike tires humming until the pavement roughened and my smooth ride dissolved into a rumble, unheard but felt as Nine Inch Nails blared in my earbuds. The mirror attached to the handlebar was less than helpful with the vibrations, but traffic had stopped and I slowed, feeling the afternoon heat from the street as I scanned the commuter cars, their windows up and air-conditioning on. My spandex kit emblazoned with a nonexistent bike-messenger service gave me some slack, but I’d had enough near misses with doors to be wary.

That’s why the helmet and skidproof gloves. Both had the sweepers’ triangle logo on them, as did my backpack and water bottle strapped to the bike frame. So did the blueprint tube over my shoulder, the metal tube heavily stickered with grunge and alternative rock bands.

Reason one for a bike, I thought as I rolled past the cars. Here outside the university campus, the low, squat buildings did little to hide the late sun, and I squinted as I found the intersection. The light changed before I got there, and after making eye contact with the driver on my left, I jammed on the pedals in time with the hard beat in my ears to cross the street.

I kept up with traffic, muscles moving smoothly as I watched the street and sidewalk in a familiar pattern of defense. My gaze, though, kept returning to a glinting shimmer half a block up. It looked like a heat mirage and I stifled a call of warning when a woman stepped right into the hazy glow and picked it up like dog doo. Immediately she tripped on the sidewalk-and the distortion of dross clinging to her heel was gone, used up in a flash of bad luck.

Two doors away, a more certain gleam lurked under a painter’s scaffold. The shimmer was unseen by nearly the entire world’s population, oblivious as they walked through it to snag wisps of dross and carry them over the entire city. A tiny half percent had some sense that it was there, and an even smaller fraction, like me, could actually do something about it.

The city of St. Unoc just east of Tucson had one of the highest percentages of magic users this side of the Mississippi, bringing the usual ratio of one in a thousand to more like eight out of ten. The ratio at our closed campus, named after the small city, was even higher. But that was what made St. Unoc University special-and my job essential to keeping the silence of our existence.

I signaled a lane shift, checking behind me before sliding over to give the hazy glimmer a wide berth. Dross never broke on me, but it might pop my tire if I drove through it. No reason to tempt fate, I thought, knowing someone would be along to sweep it up. It was a rather large chunk of dross, though. A mage was being careless with his or her magic.

Big surprise, I thought as I bunny-hopped up onto the curb, slowing to a crawl as I swung a leg over the saddle and rode on one pedal to the bike rack before a three-story office building. Behind me in the street, a horn blared followed by a crunch of fender. I turned, knowing the accident would be right where that heat-distortion-like haze was.

Or had been, I thought as the drivers in ties and power dresses lurched out of their vehicles, tired and surly from the heat. Maybe I should have tried to gather it up, but I had a pickup, and even the best of us wouldn’t sweep dross during rush hour. Besides, the haze of latent energy was gone, used up in the crash. Any left was probably stuck under one of the cars, where it would stay, slowly breaking down as snapped belts and leaking hoses: a long-running total.

The bike rack by the door was a small pocket of stillness between the ornamental cacti and the overgrown lavender, and I jerked one earbud out, letting it hang as I took off my helmet and fluffed my bangs to ease my helmet-head coif. Sometimes it sucked to be able to see the origins of the bad luck that was so common that it was accepted as the natural order of things and not someone else’s magical waste.

“Reason two for a bike,” I whispered, my blueprint tube and backpack over my shoulder as I timed the revolving door and went inside. “Door-side parking is always available.”

I pulled my other earbud out as the cool of the building hit me. There was a definite flow of people leaving, and I got only a cursory check at the front desk as I signed in and opened my bag for inspection. The elevator was empty, and Reznor fought with the Carpenters on the way to the top floor.

The air felt different when I got out. Clearly I was among the point-five percent. Magic. I could smell it more than the unspent jet fuel from the nearby air base: the tang at the back of my throat and a hint of ozone pricking my nose.

Which isn’t always a good thing, I thought when the floor receptionist recognized the sweeper insignia on my kit and pointed me down a hall even as she reached for a phone to alert the building manager. Most mages could see the waste they generated when doing magic: a flicker of distortion, a hazy glow near the eye’s blind spot. The two required semesters of dross manipulation and capture were usually enough to give magic users the skills to direct dross into traps without touching it, but only Spinners and sweepers had the ability to physically touch dross without it breaking on them in a wash of bad luck.

Which was how I landed my sweeper job eight years ago at the soul-crushing age of eighteen. Eighteen and pigeonholed into a low-status but surprisingly high-demand job, for even though I couldn’t do magic, my dross-handling skills made me not only an essential worker but also a frontline defense against deadly shadow.

Excerpted from Three Kinds of Lucky by Kim Harrison Copyright © 2024 by Kim Harrison. Excerpted by permission of Ace. All rights reserved.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
 
 

Book Info:

Luck is its own kind of magic, in this first book in an electrifying new contemporary fantasy series from the author of the #1 New York Times bestselling Hollows novels.

Petra Grady has known since adolescence that she has no talent for magic—and that’s never going to change. But as a sweeper first-class, she’s parlayed her rare ability to handle dross—the damaging, magical waste generated by her more talented kin’s spellwork—into a decent life working at the mages’ university.

Except Grady’s relatively predictable life is about to be upended. When the oblivious, sexy, and oh-so-out-of-reach Benedict Strom needs someone with her abilities for a research project studying dross and how to render it harmless, she’s stuck working on his team—whether she wants to or not.

Only Benedict doesn’t understand the characteristics of dross like Grady does. After an unthinkable accident, she and Benedict are forced to go on the run to seek out the one person who might be able to help: an outcast exiled ten years ago for the crime of using dross to cast spells. Now Grady must decide whether to stick with the magical status quo or embrace her own hidden talents . . . and risk shattering their entire world.
 
 

Meet the Author:

c is the author of the #1 New York Times bestselling Hollows series, including Demons of Good and Evil, Trouble with the Cursed, and Million Dollar Demon. She has also published traditional fantasy under the name Dawn Cook. Kim was born and raised in Michigan and between other projects is currently working on a new Hollows book.