Love Bytes gives a warm welcome to author Lisa Henry who is joining us today to talk about her new release with co-author J.A. Rock, “Dauntless” book 1 of their new series, “Dauntless Island”. She also shares an excerpt with us all and brought a giveaway for our readers!
Welcome Lisa 🙂
Welcome to Dauntless Island! (by Lisa Henry)
Six years ago, I wrote a novella called Dauntless. It was a fun cozy murder mystery, set on a weird little island, and it turned out that I couldn’t get it out of my head. So after having these characters yell at me for a while, I turned to my coauthor J.A. Rock and asked if she’d be willing to expand the novella into a novel with me, and to turn it into the first book in a series. Luckily she said yes!
Dauntless Island isn’t a real place—though I wish it was—but its history is not dissimilar to Norfolk Island. The Dauntless Islanders are descended from shipwrecked mutineers, and even though it was two hundred years ago, it’s a huge part of their identity. A couple of centuries later, and they still don’t trust outsiders, and they still have a fiercely independent spirit despite technically being part of Australia.
Red Joe Nesmith is the lighthouse keeper on Dauntless Island. He’s also a direct descendent of the island’s founder, Josiah Nesmith. Eddie Hawthorne is a graduate student of history—and just happens to be the great-great-great-whatever-grandson of the captain that was hanged by the mutineers. Eddie comes to Dauntless expecting to find people as excited as he is about the discovery of a diary that could change what everyone knows about the mutiny, but unfortunately not everyone (well, no-one except Joe, really) is happy to have him there.
Dauntless is a fun little romp of a murder mystery, with an opposites attract romance at its heart, and I hope you enjoy spending your time on the island as much as J.A. and I did!
Here’s an excerpt from Dauntless, where Eddie is his usual chatty self, and Red Joe tries doesn’t know if he’s being flirted with or not:
In the morning, I saw Eddie Hawthorne again. At first he was just a small red speck on the steep seaward side of the point, but he was clearly making his way up towards the lighthouse. Hiccup took a while to notice him—she was distracted by a grasshopper—but when she did, she let out a bark of delight and bounded down the hill towards him.
I snorted at her and kept working in the garden.
The vegetable garden had been Amy’s pride and joy, and it was in a pretty sorry state. If I couldn’t get anything to grow in it before Amy returned for the summer, at least I could dig the weeds out, right? But the internet had promised me I could grow carrots and onions and beans in winter, so I was going to try that. Better than paying island prices for frozen supermarket vegetables from the mainland.
“Hi,” said a voice from behind me—just when I had almost forgotten he’d been climbing the hill. “So, you actually live at the lighthouse? That’s amazing.”
I stood up and turned around, brushing my dirty hands on my pants. “Yeah. You go okay in the storm last night?”
Eddie didn’t look like a drowned rat.
“I don’t think I slept a wink,” he said, and I noticed the dark smudges under his eyes. They didn’t detract from his smile though, which was as brilliant as I remembered and did hopeful twisty things to my stomach that I didn’t want to dwell on. “But it turns out my tent is well worth what I paid for it. Not even a leak!”
“That’s good.” The words came easier today, like water trickling from a rusty tap: I’d struggled to turn it yesterday because it had been a while, but today it shifted without much trouble.
Eddie stretched, his jacket and shirt riding up to reveal a sliver of skin. “Wow. This view is incredible.”
“Yeah,” I said, tearing my gaze away from Eddie’s abdomen.
From the lighthouse, the hill fell away sharply toward the rocky beach far below us. And from there, nothing but the ocean. It was grey and choppy this morning, the wind from last night’s storm lingering, but some days it was as bright and smooth as glass all the way to the distant horizon.
“This isn’t what I was imagining when I thought of a Pacific island,” Eddie said.
I nodded.
It was a common misconception. People thought of palm trees and white sand beaches when they imagined the Pacific, not pine trees and rocks. Dauntless was no Tahiti. It was something else entirely. It was wilder, older, and its winters were unforgiving.
“So, you’re a Nesmith, you said?” Eddie asked.
“That’s right.”
Eddie’s eyes widened. “Are you a descendant of Josiah Nesmith?”
“Yeah,” I said. “But so is half the island.”
I was one of the few people who carried the Nesmith name. My forefathers had tended to produce entire gaggles of daughters to every son, so the surname wasn’t as prevalent as it might have been. I was the only Josiah Nesmith left on the island, since Old Joe had passed away last winter. I was still stuck with the name Red Joe, though, thanks to the colour of my hair. It had distinguished me from my great-uncle while the old man had been alive.
“It’s a…” Eddie scratched his cheek while Hiccup lolled lovingly at his feet. “It’s a very small population.”
Which was a roundabout way of saying inbred.
Except that didn’t seem to be where Eddie was going at all.
“So, it turns out I have a link to the island as well.” His eyes were bright. “Hawthorne. My great-great-great-whatever-grandfather was George Hawthorne.”
“Ah,” I said.
Mavis was going to be all over this.
“That’s how I got interested in the Dauntless to begin with.” Eddie wrinkled his nose, making his glasses shift. “The wreck, the mutiny, all of it. It’s really fascinating. The museum was closed yesterday, but the lady at the shop said that it should be open today, so I’m going to go and check it out. Have you been?”
Of course I had. There really wasn’t a lot to do on the island; people on Dauntless would go to the opening of a window. I stopped in at the museum any time it was open just to say hello. Not because I was especially sociable, but because not saying hello was the sort of slight that was magnified exponentially in a place like this. Small communities had long memories, and places set aside for people to step into even before they were born. I was Tall Joe Nesmith’s son, and the direct descendant of the hero Josiah Nesmith. My name wasn’t just an inheritance, it was a legacy, and it came with expectations attached, and sooner or later—sooner, probably—I’d be expected to shoulder some of those.
“Quite often,” I said. “Mostly just to catch up with John Coldwell, who runs the place. I don’t think I’ve ever really had a look at the exhibits though.”
“Coldwell,” Eddie said with a smile. “That’s another one of those names that keeps cropping up here.”
“There are a few,” I agreed.
“Maybe he’d like to check out my research.” Eddie bent to rub Hiccup’s belly for a moment and then straightened again. “I’ll see you later, Joe. Maybe you could give me a tour of your lighthouse?”
“Okay,” I said, and it wasn’t until I saw Eddie’s cheeky smile and accompanying flush that I realised it might have been a euphemism.
Jesus. Was it?
I went inside and trimmed my beard after Eddie left, just in case.
The blurb:
Welcome to Dauntless Island, where nothing much has changed in two hundred years, and that’s just how the islanders like it.
Joe Nesmith leads a peaceful life as the lighthouse keeper on Dauntless Island, a small community off the coast of Australia where the occupants are proud of their mutinous history and have very long memories.
When graduate student Eddie Hawthorne comes to Dauntless, he brings with him a historical diary that throws everything the islanders have ever believed into disarray—and one of them may even resort to deadly measures to make sure that Eddie’s research never sees the light of day.
Unless Joe and Eddie can stop it, Dauntless’s bloody history is set to repeat itself. On the plus side, if they survive this, they might actually realise they’re falling in love.
Dauntless contains a taciturn lighthouse keeper, a cute history nerd, a dog who thinks she’s a seal, and a diary that’s apparently worth killing for. Also, watch out for the goats.
Release date (wide) – July 14
Universal Buy link
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About Lisa Henry
Lisa likes to tell stories, mostly with hot guys and happily ever afters.
Lisa lives in tropical North Queensland, Australia. She doesn’t know why, because she hates the heat, but she suspects she’s too lazy to move. She spends half her time working as a government minion, and the other half plotting her escape.
She attended university at sixteen, not because she was a child prodigy or anything, but because of a mix-up between international school systems early in life. She studied History and English, neither of them very thoroughly.
Lisa has been published since 2012, and was a LAMBDA finalist for her quirky, awkward coming-of-age romance Adulting 101, and a Rainbow Awards finalist for 2019’s Anhaga. Socially Orcward, co-written with Sarah Honey, was runner up in the Best Asexual Book category in 2021’s Rainbow Awards.
You can join Lisa’s Facebook reader group at The Book Nook, and you can find her website at lisahenryonline.com.
You can also join the free Patreon she shares with Sarah Honey and J.A. Rock here: patreon.com/henryrockhoney
About J.A. Rock
J.A. Rock is an author of LGBTQ romance and suspense novels, as well as an audiobook narrator under the name Jill Smith. When she’s not writing or narrating, J.A. enjoys reading, collecting historical costumes, and failing miserably at gardening. She lives in the Ohio wilds with an extremely judgmental dog, Professor Anne Studebaker.
You can find her website at jarockauthor.com.
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I like mystery stories. Looking forward to this one.
I love their writing, separately and together!
NOthing better than a good mystery. thanks
Murder mystery romp – sounds fun!