Giveaway and Review of Seduction by MJ Rose

The winner of the advanced reader copy is Kristin Gleeson. Congratulations. To enter the Giveaway of an advanced reader copy of Seduction, simply leave a comment below before June 30th.

M.J. Rose’s Seduction moves between the haunted world of Victor Hugo in 1855 on the Isle of Jersey after the death of his daughter and the equally problematic life of Rose’s modern heroine, Jac L’Etoile, a mythologist and innately talented perfumer with a tragic past. The book opens with news of the drowning of Hugo’s daughter, Didine, and subsequent attempts to contact her through séances. Hugo, the great French rationalist and defender of secular justice, becomes obsessed with the dead, even to the point of awakening a dangerous spirit.
On the modern side of this literary equation, Jac yields to her own menacing temptations. Jac’s extraordinary olfactory sense seems to draw her into the past as her “recall” of events is triggered by particular smells. Her mentor, Malachai Samuels, a Jungian psychiatrist and believer in reincarnation, tries unsuccessfully to hold her to safe projects, but instead she finds hidden in Malachai’s papers an invitation to her from Theo Gaspard, a man she hasn’t seen since she was fourteen, to come to the Isle of Jersey and explore Celtic ruins. As teenagers they connected at the Swiss clinic where Malachai treated both troubled kids, but they were separated for reasons Jac never understood after a mysterious accident. Now Jac, trying to recover from a broken heart, can’t help but wonder what Theo really wants and has to offer. She always felt an enticing sizzle between them.
Malachai is right to have been concerned, as it turns out. The journals from Hugo’s séances and the Celtic remains on Jersey tangle Jac and Theo in a dangerous web that may be the spirit world, may be Jungian universal images, or perhaps past lives coming through in a deadly way. Rose uses all these possibilities to invite the reader to enter into this ominous and atmospheric world.
Rose brought us the appealing Jac L’Etoile in The Book of Lost Fragrances and I’m glad to follow her into a new adventure blending the past and the present in a mystical way. I did not realize there had been a spiritualist stage for Victor Hugo, author of Les Miserables, a humanistic book determined to right social injustices toward the poor. Rose moved me with her portrayal of his grief and the frightening, wild irrationalities it drove him to. Her blending of the mystical and the historical pulls the reader deeply into the emotional crises of Jac and Hugo. This is a difficult book to put down.

About the Author
M.J. Rose is the international best selling author of eleven novels and two non-fiction books on marketing. Her fiction and non-fiction has appeared in many magazines and reviews including Oprah Magazine. She has been featured in the New York Times, Newsweek, Time, USA Today and on the Today Show, and NPR radio.  Rose graduated from Syracuse University, spent the ’80s in advertising, has a commercial in the Museum of Modern Art in NYC and since 2005 has run the first marketing company for authors – Authorbuzz.com.  The television series PAST LIFE, was based on Rose’s novels in the Renincarnationist series. She is one of the founding board members of International Thriller Writers and runs the blog- Buzz, Balls & Hype.  She is also the co-founder of Peroozal.com and BookTrib.com

Rose lives in CT with her husband the musician and composer, Doug Scofield, and their very spoiled and often photographed dog, Winka.

For more information on M.J. Rose and her novels, please visit her website. You can also find her on Facebook and Twitter.