Hi Readers!

Just dropping in to your inbox to let you know that not one but TWO great sales are on at the moment, plus a catch-up of what I've been up to and what's on for 2023.

The Vet from Snowy River is on ebook sale for the month of February in the Australia and New Zealand regions in ALL EBOOK STORES for just $4.99. This is the perfect time to introduce your friends and aunts and neighbours to the world of Hanrahan before the next book, A Home Among the Snow Gums, comes out in May. BUY LINKS TO ALL STORES ARE LISTED BELOW.

And Tropic Storm, my award-winning island romance which won the RWA Emerald Pro in 2019 for best unpublished manuscript, has been selected by Kindle to be a Kindle Monthly Deal in February for just $1.49c. LINK IS HERE. As this is Amazon, there is a "look inside" function so you can have a squizzy to see if its for you before committing. Tropic Storm is set in Hawaii, which I have been lucky enough to visit, and where I fell in love with the waves and the palm trees and the magnificent islands.

READER TEAM QUESTION: A few people have been asking me online what I've been up to in writer land lately, so in brief:

• Finishing A Home Among the Snow Gums has kept me very busy. It is Hannah and Tom's story, and the two of them proved particularly inept at working out that they were perfect for each other. The hoops I made them jump through!! It comes back for the final proof read on January 10, and I have to return it by January 20 for the typesetter and audio people and ebook formatting people at Harper Collins to work their magic.

• I'm just finished working on a Christmas story for an anthology with Alissa Callen, Pamela Cook, Penelope Janu and Lily Malone. First draft was due January 31 and I amazed myself by getting it one day early! My story's working title is A Cattle Dog for Christmas, and I have drawn inspiration from that awesome show on ABC, Muster Dogs, and from Paul Kelly's song How to Make Gravy. None of us have read each others' stories yet and I am very keen to get my hands on them.

• I was lucky to be sent Advance Reader Copies (ARCS) of Penelope Janu's Shelter from the Storm and Alissa Callen's Snowy Mountains Promise, which have both provided me with some wonderful reading hours on the back deck this holiday season.

• I'm also just back from a writing research trip to Longreach and Winton in northwest Qld to soak up the sights and sounds and smells for my 2024 Harper Collins Harlequin release, which is as yet untitled (and unwritten!!!). I have some title ideas circling in my head, but the publisher likes a say when it comes to titles, so it's too early to say what it might end up as.

• It's library talk time for me again next week in Redlands Shire - Cleveland Library. I'll be doing a Q and A session about A Town Like Clarence, my rural drama set in Northern New South Wales and what inspired the WW2 history mystery with lovely Shannon.

• And finally, no details yet, but I'm coming to Tamworth in April 2023 with the Harper Collins team for a bookish event that celebrates Aussie rural writing, with some other fabulous authors. I'll share more details when I know them.

Here's an extract from The Vet from Snowy River in case - like Josh on the front cover - you're a fence sitter and need a little more persuasion to join the "cool club" of people who've read it ... 750 reviews and ★★★★★ can't be wrong, right? ... (I hope!)

To set the scene - this is where we meet Josh, our hero.

But first, the buy links for The Vet from Snowy River:

Amazon EBOOK Aust/NZ Store

Apple Store

Kobo

Google

CHAPTER 2

Josh Cody slid a loop of gut into his hooked needle and carefully knotted the last suture.

‘How many?’

He looked up at his sister, who’d popped her head in round the door of the surgical room. ‘Eight. Three black, one chocolate, four yellow. You owe me ten bucks.’

Hannah flashed him a grin. ‘You’ve got mad diagnostic skills, Dr Cody.’

He ran his hand over the chest and stomach of the plump labrador on his stainless steel table. She’d been exhausted when the man who’d found her in his shearing shed had brought her in—luckily, he’d performed more than one emergency caesarean by now. The operation had gone smoothly, which made being called Dr Cody, Veterinarian, feel less like the dream of a moron who’d screwed up his chances and more like the hard-earned truth.

‘Did you find a microchip? I can run it through the database.’

‘Nothing. Her fur’s in a poor state, nails are brittle and torn up, and she’s a little long in the tooth to be having a litter. She’s not underweight though. Hard to say if she’s a stray, or just has owners who haven’t got a clue how to look after a pregnant dog.’

He glanced down into the plastic tub on the bench, where eight furry lumps the size of vegemite scrolls snoozed atop a pink fluffy heat pack. The cause of this morning’s drama, the chocolate pup who’d tried to enter the world sideways, lay on his back, a tiny pink tongue poking from his snout.

Hannah moved in next to him and reached a hand into the bucket of pups. ‘Poppy’s going to go nuts when she sees them.’

He sighed. ‘I hope so.’

He’d not seen his daughter for weeks. And her absence from his life had chiselled a hole in his heart that even the excitement of his new vet career couldn’t fill. She was mad with him for moving from Sydney to ‘the boonies’, as she called it, and kept finding new ways to make him suffer. The first time he’d brought up the idea of relocating to Hanrahan she’d flounced off back to her mother’s, returning a week later with a second set of ear piercings. Dragging her feet about visiting was Pop’s latest brand of torture.

Sure, he got it, school and assignments and Year Ten exams mattered … but didn’t he matter too?

‘Give me a hand with getting her off the table, will you, Han?’ he said, turning his attention back to a problem he could do something about.

‘Sure.’

They lifted the sedated dog and carried her through to a pen. ‘You written up the chart yet?’ said Hannah.

‘No time. She looked ready to pop when Trev carried her in.’

‘Trev? The old bloke from out near Stony Creek? Wow, I haven’t seen him in yonks. I thought he hated the hustle and bustle of town.’

He snorted. ‘Hannah, I hate to be the one to break it to you, but Dandaloo Street in Hanrahan can in no way be described as hustle and bustle.’

‘That is so not true. You haven’t seen the fuss and bother going on in the old bank building. Some fancy new café is opening up. Hanrahan is cosmopolitan these days, big brother.’

He rolled his eyes. ‘Noted. I’d also like to point out that the only hustle and bustle we need to worry about right now is the fleas on this dog. I’d better find the old girl a flea collar.’ He rested his hand on the brown dog’s head. ‘You’ve got fleas as big as bandicoots, Jane, you know that? Don’t worry, we’ll get rid of them for you.’

‘Jane?’

He shut the pen gate and returned to the bench to collect the pups. ‘Jane Doe. Isn’t that what they call unidentified people in cop shows?’

Hannah put her hands on her hips and gave him the ‘you’re an idiot’ look she’d been sending his way for nearly thirty years. ‘Only the dead ones, moron.’

He pulled her long brown pigtail. ‘My case, so I get naming rights. I say it’s Jane Doe.’

He put the pups into the whelping box next to their mother’s cage. She’d be waking soon enough, and once he was sure she wasn’t so sedated she’d roll on the new arrivals, he’d pop them in with her. One happy family.

Just like he and Poppy could be if she ever condescended to pay him a visit.

‘Before you get into the paperwork, I want to show you something.’ Hannah dug into a pocket of her navy scrubs and pulled out a thin card. ‘A box of these arrived this morning. What do you think?’

He read the card in her hand and flashed his sister a smile. Finally. Finally. ‘I didn’t know you were getting these printed.’

She punched him in the arm. ‘I don’t have to tell my new partner everything.’

He read the words a second time: Josh Cody, Cody and Cody Vet Clinic, Cnr Dandaloo Street and Salt Creek Flats Road, Hanrahan. It had been a year since his little sister had invited him to buy into her growing vet practice in the historic mountain town where they’d grown up. He’d still been a student then, Poppy living with him every second week, and working construction on weekends to keep the bills paid. It had taken him three seconds to decide that was the move he wanted to make, but it had taken another three months before he’d told Poppy his move to Hanrahan was no longer a dream, but reality.

She’d been so thrilled she’d moved all her belongings out of her bedroom in his apartment and taken up residence permanently at her mother’s.

‘Just getting used to be being abandoned,’ she’d thrown at him.

Happy days.

What Poppy didn’t understand was how much Hanrahan was a part of him ... of all the Codys. His grandparents had lived here back when the Snowy River still flowed in all its glory from the mountains to the Southern Ocean, flooding pretty much everything in its path when the snows melted. Despite her current refusal to reside with him, Poppy was as much Cody as he was, which meant she needed to know that city life wasn’t the only type of life she could have.

And then there was the other thing. The personal thing. Fifteen years in Sydney, scraping and saving and working his arse off to get by had just about done him in. He needed this. He needed respect, and he needed to be valued. And—he rubbed his hand over the Poppy-sized ache in his chest—he needed his daughter to be the one doing the respecting and the valuing.

Maybe then he could finally quit beating himself up for blowing his chances.

As he slipped the card into the back pocket of his jeans, he choked down the lump in his throat. ‘I love it. Thanks, Hannah.’

She grinned. ‘You can thank me by sweet talking Sandy into opening a pack of the good biscuits. I’ve got surgeries back to back this arvo, and if I don’t get some chocolate into these veins, I’ll be too weak to cut the boy bits off Mrs Grundy’s dalmatian.’

Josh winced. Why was it women vets always said that with such relish?

>>> end of extract >>> to read the rest, the links are above, or find EVERY link on the Harper Collins website here

Until next time,

Stella Quinn