Guest post and giveaway with author P. L. Blair, Shadow Path tour

I'm so happy to welcome P. L. Blair to the blog today. She's stopping by on her Shadow Path tour and she's going to tell us about herself and the Portals Between Worlds.
Shadow Path was published March 15th 2008.

Feel free to post any comments and/or questions you have for P. L. Blair in the comments.

Info about the giveaway at the end of the post.

Portals Between Worlds
Shadow Path came about in part because I want to live in a world inhabited by elves.
Not a distant, medieval past, but ... today, here and now. I love the epic fantasy of Tolkien and McKiernan (among others), but there's a bittersweetness to them. In those worlds, at the end of the tale, the wizards and elves and dragons went away.
I wanted to explore what would happen when elves and wizards, dragons and pixies and trolls, ogres and all the other creatures of our legends and mythology came back.
That's the premise of Shadow Path and the subsequent books in my Portals series: Wizards and elves, trolls and ogres, dragons and all these other beings exist. They live in a world parallel to our own, separated from our world by gateways, the Portals.
In ancient times, these portals stood open, and the inhabitants of this other world, a world of magic, crossed freely into our human world. Our ancestors saw them, interacted with them. That's why we have legends and myths about these beings.
After centuries ... millennia ... the Portals were closed between our worlds. We forgot that elves and wizards and all these other creatures really existed. We relegated them to mythology "fairy tales"
Until, at some point in the not-too-distant future, the Portals open again. And these beings that we dismissed as fantasy are returning to our human world.
Bringing their magic with them.
Corpus Christi, Texas, police detective Kat Morales and her partner, Tevis Mac Leod, yes, an elf , investigate crimes that result when magic is used for the wrong reasons. In their first adventure, Shadow Path, they find themselves investigating a series of murders that, at first, seem to make no sense.
Until they discover that the killer is an old acquaintance of Tevis', a former lover, a wielder of black magic, who wants Tevis dead.
And the only way Tevis can defeat her, and save himself, and Kat, is through the magic that he himself ceased to wield thousands of years ago.

Thank you so much P. L. Blair for being here today, it's been a pleasure to have you here and I've enjoyed your guest post very much.

I'm sorry for the delay in posting your guest post.

Excerpt from Shadow Path:
"The sword," Tevis gazed at the lieutenant from under lowered brows, "is perfect ? cast from a single mold, all of one piece , even the hilt. The runes would have been engraved in a single sitting, each connected to the next by a thin line called the Vine of Binding, which would have been engraved after the runes were completed. It too would have been done in a single sitting, and as each segment of the line was drawn, spells would have been spoken. No slip mars the runes or the connecting lines, no scratch or mar upon the surface of the blade. The blade, the runes and the Vine are all perfect ? as they must be to hold the spells cast into the sword at its making. It is the sword's perfection that holds its Power. Mar the perfection, and the Magic is released."
"Where?" Harley looked, and sounded, alarmed. "Here? You're gonna release Magic in here?"
"It will be dissipated Magic. At the worst, it should do no more than make noise."
"Should?" Harley echoed. "And the sword ? My God, you're gonna destroy the sword!"
Tevis shook his head. "It will mar the blade's surface, nothing worse." He lifted a pair of safety glasses from the table, slipped them over his eyes, started the bone saw. The whine of the saw became a shriek as it came into contact with the weapon.
Something cracked. Blue bolts flashed from the sword blade.
They hit Tevis with the force of a physical blow. The Elf hurled backward as though struck by a battering ram, literally flew across the room and slammed into the wall with a thud that twisted Kat's stomach. He slid down the wall onto the floor and did not move.

Buy Shadow Path

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GIVEAWAY TIME!
Now you have the chance to win an E-copy of Shadow Path.

Official Contest information:
To enter, please leave a comment below
Contest deadline is July 11, 2011
Contest is open Internationally
ONE ENTRY PER PERSON!

Extra entries:
+1 GFC follower
+1 Networked blogs follower
+1 Twitter follower (@mette_s_jensen)
+1 Post about this giveaway (Twitter, Facebook ect.)