Labyrinth by Alex Beecroft Blog Tour, Excerpt & Giveaway!

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Hiya guys, we have Alex Beecroft stopping by today with her new release Labyrinth, we have a great excerpt and a fantastic giveaway so check out the post and leave a comment to enter the giveaway! <3 ~Pixie~

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Labyrinth

by

Alex Beecroft

Kikeru, the child of a priestess at the sacred temple of Knossos in ancient Crete, believes that the goddesses are laughing at him. They expect him to choose whether he is a man or a woman, when he’s both. They expect him to choose whether to be a husband to a wife, or a celibate priestess in the temple, when all he wants to do is invent things and be with the person he loves.

Unfortunately, that person is Rusa, the handsome ship owner who is most decidedly a man and therefore off-limits no matter what he chooses. And did he mention that the goddesses also expect him to avert war with the Greeks?

The Greeks have an army. Kikeru has his mother, Maja, who is pressuring him to give her grandchildren; Jadikira, Rusa’s pregnant daughter; and superstitious Rusa, who is terrified of what the goddesses will think of him being in love with one of their chosen ones.

It’s a tall order to save Crete from conquest, win his love, and keep both halves of himself. Luckily, at least the daemons are on his side.

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Excerpt

Kikeru was examining a moray eel skeleton when the hiss of urgent whispers sidled into his ear. He shook his head, hoping it would dislodge the sound, and turned the monstrous skull on his palm.

Two sets of jaws! If he insinuated his little finger into the mess of drying tendon and bone, he could push up a second set of teeth inside its mouth. So the first set sheared and the second seized the morsel and drew it further in? Was there an application for this mechanism in other areas? On a loom, perhaps, to secure the cloth while it was being rolled onto the overhead beam. Or on a ship to seize and tear the enemy’s sails?

“Once you get past the navy, there are no warriors worth the name. Just a bunch of whores and eunuchs.”

They were speaking in Achaean Greek. That was what made Kikeru attend at last—the difficulty and the challenge of working out what these two men were being so contemptuous about. He raised his head, closing his left hand over the skull with his finger still inside it. The inner teeth rewarded his prying by sinking deep into his hand and jarring against the knuckle. Pain rushed prickly up his spine.

Kikeru breathed silently, in, out, out again, forcing himself to relax. He was forever hurting himself on things. The surprise and sense of betrayal had worn off a long time ago. The discomfort was always reduced the less he allowed himself to be shocked.

“Getting past the navy is the difficult part,” the second speaker remarked.

The scent of dried kelp and drying tendon tasted salty on Kikeru’s tongue, and his stomach roiled, unsettled. What were the foreigners implying?

“But we,” the first voice insisted, “are already here. We are already past their ships.”

Kikeru had found the skeleton on the land side of a sand dune a short walk from Amphisos, the harbour of the great temple of Knossos. It had been lying there as though dropped from above by an unlucky eagle. Mostly fleshless, gleaming white as a belt of pearls. He’d been fascinated by the articulation of it, the ingenuity. The presence or absence of other people had not been on his mind. Most folk either knew him enough to disregard his foibles, or discerned something of the goddess’s gift about him and had the sense to leave him in peace.

None had so far found him entirely invisible, though. With a creeping sense that all was not right with this bright sparkling spring day he pulled himself out of his own head and looked for the Achaeans.

Nothing but the back of the dune, a sinuous humped shape of yellow sand, misted over with thin grasses and the spiky white flowers of sea daffodil. To his right, the grass faded out into dry, soft beach, where a distant fisherman stood up to his knees in the lapis lazuli waves. To his left, a stand of tamarisk foaming with pink flowers cut off the view of the harbour and its nodding ships.

“What are you suggesting?”

This second voice sounded sceptical but intrigued. That was apparent even to Kikeru, who found some of the nuances of the words puzzling. Apparently tone translated better than sense. An interesting observation.

By themselves, his hands put down the fish skeleton. He sucked the gash in his finger, absently tasting the coil of copper in his blood, and considered whether some universal language could be reconstructed out of the phonemes of tone. Something all humans would recognise without having to be taught . . .

“There are Achaean traders settled in every Cretan town.”

Apparently Kikeru’s mind had decided the first voice was important. It stopped him thinking, made him listen.

“We could send out an invitation to the other Achaean settlements. Call it a feast—a sacrifice to Poseidon—and when they arrived, we could arm ourselves, walk into defenceless Knossos and take it. Their king is a perfumed catamite. The few guards are ornamental. These people spend all their time playing like little children. They have no sense of what it is to be men. They would crumble like chalk before us.”

Oh, so this humpbacked boil of something in his stomach was anger. It was anger he’d been feeling all along. Now—like milk reaching its boiling point—it foamed up and overspilled, filling his chest with scalding heat.

He’d risen to his feet and run forward before his agile brain could catch up. A few moments struggling to the top of the dune and then he was looking down on them. Grown men, of course. One with a white beard almost as bushy as the tamarisk, the other with a head of short hair so curly it could have come off a sheep. Their expressions matched—guilty, caught out, not yet sure what to do.

“What are you talking about?” Kikeru’s outrage blurted. “By what right do you come to this country and plot to take away what the goddess holds for us all? Don’t you live here yourself? This is your community too—if you strike at the heart of it, you’ll only end up hurting yourself.”

Silence. He hoped he had shamed them. Even little children knew you contributed what you could to the goddess, and she shared it out fairly so no one was in want. The idea that you might take things just because you could was . . . well, it was uncivilised in the extreme.

It was so uncivilised, it ought to be unthinkable.

Beard’s expression of astonishment transmuted into a mocking belly laugh. He jerked his head at Fleecy, and they both raced towards him, leaping up the dune’s outer side like bounding goats, faster than Kikeru thought possible. It was at this point his critical thought process finally caught up with him again and told him he was a fool who was about to get his head kicked in.

Read more at: http://riptidepublishing.com/titles/labyrinth (just click the excerpt tab)

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About Alex

Alex Beecroft is an English author best known for historical fiction, notably Age of Sail, featuring gay characters and romantic storylines. Her novels and shorter works include paranormal, fantasy, and contemporary fiction.

Beecroft won Linden Bay Romance’s (now Samhain Publishing) Starlight Writing Competition in 2007 with her first novel, Captain’s Surrender, making it her first published book. On the subject of writing gay romance, Beecroft has appeared in the Charleston City PaperLA Weekly, the New Haven Advocate, the Baltimore City Paper, and The Other Paper. She is a member of the Romantic Novelists’ Association of the UK and an occasional reviewer for the blog Speak Its Name, which highlights historical gay fiction.

Alex was born in Northern Ireland during the Troubles and grew up in the wild countryside of the English Peak District. She lives with her husband and two children in a little village near Cambridge and tries to avoid being mistaken for a tourist.

Alex is only intermittently present in the real world. She has led a Saxon shield wall into battle, toiled as a Georgian kitchen maid, and recently taken up an 800-year-old form of English folk dance, but she still hasn’t learned to operate a mobile phone.

She is represented by Louise Fury of the L. Perkins Literary Agency.

Connect with Alex:

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Giveaway!

To celebrate the release of Labyrinth, one lucky winner will receive their choice of an eBook off Alex’s backlist!

(Just leave a comment with your contact info to enter the contest. )
Thanks for following the tour, and don’t forget to leave your contact info!
(Entries close at midnight, Eastern time, on November 26, 2016. Contest is NOT restricted to U.S. entries.)
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Check out the other blogs on the tour

November 21, 2016 – Fangirl Moments and My Two Cents
November 21, 2016 – Scattered Thoughts and Rogue Words
November 21, 2016 – The Novel Approach
November 21, 2016 – Erotica for All
November 22, 2016 – Prism Book Alliance
November 22, 2016 – Book Reviews and More by Kathy
November 22, 2016 – Diverse Reader
November 23, 2016 – MM Good Book Reviews
November 23, 2016 – The Jeep Diva
November 23, 2016 – Wicked Faerie’s Tales and Reviews
November 24, 2016 – Love Bytes Reviews
November 24, 2016 – Bayou Book Junkie
November 25, 2016 – OMG Reads
November 25, 2016 – My Fiction Nook
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7 thoughts on “Labyrinth by Alex Beecroft Blog Tour, Excerpt & Giveaway!

  1. Another wonderful post. I am looking forward to reading this one.
    debby236 at gmail dot com

  2. Thank you for the excerpt, Alex! I’m so looking forward to reading this one!
    susanaperez7140(at)Gmail(dot)com

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