NEW RELEASE / TOUGH LOVE: / CHAT WITH AUTHOR AND FREE EXCERPT

Dear Reader:

Every writer eventually has to answer a quiet question: What exactly am I writing about? With Tough Love: Modern Noir Romances, my answer is simple enough to say but harder to define. These are romances. But they are not the kind that live comfortably inside the tidy architecture of conventional love stories. Noir romance occupies a different street entirely. The streetlights are dimmer there, the promises less certain, and the characters who wander through the stories know that love is not always a rescue. Sometimes it is the risk itself. 

 That distinction matters. I am not a male version of a Harlequin novelist. Nothing against the genre, but noir romance moves through a different emotional climate. In these stories the attraction between men and women carries gravity. It has consequences. Desire collides with ambition, loyalty, betrayal, power, and the private compromises people make to stay alive in complicated worlds. The characters may fall in love, but they are also capable of wrecking each other. That tension is the heartbeat of noir. 

The men and women who inhabit these pages are not naïve about romance. Many of them have already been bruised by it. Some have survived marriages that collapsed under ambition. Others have made careers in professions where trust is a rare commodity. Private investigators, lawyers, political insiders, wanderers, and opportunists move through the stories. They know better than to expect fairy tales, yet they still feel the pull of connection. In noir romance, love does not arrive as salvation. It arrives as a test. 

 That is why the genre is not for everyone. Noir romance speaks most clearly to readers who have lived long enough to recognize the shadows behind attraction. Those who understand how complicated intimacy can become when pride, fear, and longing sit at the same table. The characters in Tough Love do not pretend to be saints. They make mistakes. They gamble with their hearts. Sometimes they pay dearly for the privilege. 

 Still, there is something strangely exhilarating about visiting that territory. Noir romance allows us to explore the emotional edge without necessarily living there ourselves. It is a dramatic visit, not a permanent address. Readers step into these lives for a few pages, experience the pulse of dangerous affection, and then return to their own mornings perhaps a little more aware of how fragile and powerful love can be. 

 Modern readers also face another interesting question while reading short fiction. Are these stories real or reel? Are they slices of life drawn from experience, or are they scenes that might belong on a cinema screen? The answer, of course, is both. Fiction borrows freely from the emotional truths of life while arranging them with the clarity of storytelling. A look across a café table. A phone call that changes everything. A confession delivered too late. Life provides the raw material, and narrative gives it shape. 

 That cinematic quality is no accident. Noir has always shared DNA with film. The atmosphere, the moral ambiguity, the sudden turn of fate. When a reader enters one of these stories, the hope is that the page feels almost like a camera lens. You see the room. You hear the dialogue. You feel the tension that hangs between two people who know they should probably walk away from each other but do not. 

 Endure me here: If you decide to visit the world of Tough Love, think of the experience less as a purchase and more as a small ticket to ride. A brief journey you might take with your morning coffee. A handful of stories where attraction and consequence travel together, where romance is neither innocent nor entirely doomed, and where a few characters manage to survive the experience of loving someone perhaps by the narrowest of margins. 

AN EXCERPT.

 The following glimpse appears in the short story "Transit Lounge" from Tough Love. The choice of the passage came from a recent reader who mentioned she thought it the soul of the work. Of course, I was flattered.  Bon mots from a reader is why we write.  I'm blushing corny as that reads.

 Now the Moscow concourse swam with men pretending not to look. Cameras in every corner. His flight to Stockholm boarding in minutes. Then—impact. 

A boy tumbled against his leg, laughing as only a three-year-old could. Gresham scooped the giggling toddler, who smelled of baby powder. The mother rushed over, eyes grateful, English too polished. 

“Thank you… are you bound for Stockholm?” 

“Yes,” he said, surprised she knew. 

She smiled thin as glass. “Then stay at the Gander Hotel. My friend Annee Kinder works there.” 

He froze. She was gone before he could take a step. The packet in his pocket was gone. 

*** 

At the Gander’s glass doors, he saw her through the window—slim in black silk, tray balanced on one hand. He knocked once, knuckles on the pane. Her head turned. Eyes widened. The tray crashed to the floor. Moments later she was in his arms, breathless, the kiss fierce enough to steal the years away. 

“This can’t be,” Annee whispered. “You found me.” 

And for the first time in years, Tom Gresham let himself believe he had.  

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The eBook edition of Tough Love: Modern Noir Romances is available for $2.99 through the BookBaby bookstore.   

If you wish to find the book: https://store.bookbaby.com/book/tough-love