New contract: REAPER'S TOUCH

I'm thrilled to announce my new deal with Carina Press for a historical paranormal romance titled REAPER’S TOUCH. I pitched it as a cowboys versus zombies story. Here's a brief summary:

Abby dreams of a normal life though she has trouble imagining what one would look like. She doesn't know how to farm, cook or sew a dress. She only knows how to kill Reapers—the slavering once-human monsters who terrorize the border towns she patrols. She’s not after the gold and glitter lifestyle the aristocrats enjoy in their mountaintop cities, but she knows there has to be more to life than this endless war. Born star-marked, she’s been a Ranger since she turned fourteen. Eleven years have passed and now she’s ready to lay down her guns and return to her family.

Jake is a Reaper, turned nearly two centuries ago during the initial outbreak of the plague. He’s managed to wrest control of his body from the parasite that infected him and he’ll do anything to end his centuries’ long slavery to the bloodthirsty creature even if it means his own death.

Rumors of a cure are quickly silenced by the destruction of the research facility where Jake is held prisoner. After his escape, Jake and Abby form an unlikely partnership to discover the truth about the cure and to find out who was responsible for the massacre at Fort Hill.

The first book will release early 2014 and the second later that same year.

Here's the official announcement:

FICTION: WOMEN'S/ ROMANCE

Eleri Stone's REAPER'S TOUCH, about a heroine entrusted with the power to save her world from a horde of slathering half-human monsters, and the darkly attractive man who has combatted the disease for two hundred years, to Angela James at Carina Press, in a two-book deal, for publication in 2014, by Sara Megibow at Nelson Literary Agency (World).