THE GOLD ROSE Book Blog Tour and #Giveaway #LoneStarLit

Since the early 1940s, THE GOLD ROSE, a secret rescue agency with Asian origins, has used unique systems to ferret out and save victims in every corner of the world. Charlotte Hunt-Basse has faced dangerous and often deadly challenges in her decade as an agent with the agency, not the least of which was the past rescues of two of her assignments, Pinkie and Babe.

Two-year-old Pinkie is discovered abandoned on a dirt road during a violent storm. She is whisked off to Mexico by oil heir Clint Sutton and his girlfriend, Angelina, as they attempt to escape the lies of Clint’s father’s second wife. Three years later, Pinkie is stolen away to Argentina by an aging Romani. Pinkie suffers from the malice of her captor but wins the fatherly love of a Buenos Aires circus owner and his fiance. Shortly after landing in the crosshairs of THE GOLD ROSE, Pinkie’s life takes two more shocking twists. When the agency locates Pinkie again, Agent Charlotte must throw all caution to the wind to rescue her.

Babe, the child of Texas-based missionaries, is hidden by two Chinese families during the Japanese invasion and ensuing Communist takeover of China. She is forced by the second family to live incognito as a “boy” for several years to save her from soldiers invading China from the North. Martial arts are banned, but the grandfather of the family teaches Babe Yǒng Chūn in deepest secrecy. The civil war escalates, and Babe finds herself on a dangerous quest for survival as she journeys alone through enemy territory toward the faintest hope of rescue.

A Selection of Notable Quotables

From The Gold Rose

By Jodi Lea Stewart

I didn’t drown in the South China Sea holding Babe’s rooster in the air, but nearly. – ROSE Agent Charlotte

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Let me ask… what is survival of every calamity worth when you are finally saved, but your savior turns out to be worse than all the others? – Pinkie

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As a matter of fact, my rushing to answer the guilt-laden siren of distress only certain people allow themselves to hear is how I met my two favorite assignments, Pinkie and Babe. – ROSE Agent Charlotte

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All that I went through before I was ten years old was nothing compared to what came next. – Pinkie

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“The long hours of gut-wrenching, secret practice of the art of Yŏng Chūn became my life. Now… come and get me. I’ll be waiting. – Babe

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Where is that ticket clerk? I waltzed shoeless across the room with the grace of a knock-kneed giraffe, and he’s nowhere in sight. There’s no denying I am still a Texas girl when it comes to public protocol. – ROSE Agent Charlotte

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Babe likes to claim Pinkie can cut a tree down from twenty feet with her acrid tongue, and isn’t that something quite formidable to be known for? Personally, I find it fascinating. – ROSE Agent Charlotte

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The ones who participate in this good ‘ol boy mentality of the South wear it as a badge of pride… proof of their virile masculinity. – Oil-heir Clint Sutton

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“I don’t like the way she looked at Pinkie, that Madam Rosie lady. She gives me a bad feeling. Something in her eyes…who wears all those rings? And her earrings are bigger than Texas grapefruits.” – Angelina Serrano

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I moved aside glancing at the card in my hand. It was black with a single gold rose embossed on the top and a phone number on the back. – ROSE Agent Charlotte

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When he leaves, she runs her finger over the embossed gold rose on the front of the black business card. On the back, a solitary phone number and no address.

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He is broke, but not broken. The terrible world war is over, but the war inside his soul rages hot. Each step away from the prison represents a step closer to redemption… and revenge.

 

 

Jodi Lea Stewart is a fiction author who centers her themes around the triumph of overcoming adversity through grit, humor, and hard-rock tenacity. Born in Texas and growing up in Arizona smelling cedar berries and cow pens on a large cattle ranch wedged between the Navajo Nation and the White Mountain Apache Tribe, most of her friends were Native American and Hispanic, with a few Anglos thrown in for good measure. On the ranch, she climbed petroglyph-etched boulders, sang to chickens, bounced two feet in the air in the backend of pickups wrestling through washed-out terracotta roads, and rode horseback on the winds of her imagination through the arroyos and mountains of the Arizona high country. Later, she left her studies at the University of Arizona in Tucson to move to San Francisco, where she learned about peace, love, and exactly what she didn’t want to do with her life.

Moving back to her native Texas, Jodi graduated summa cum laude with a BS in Business Management, raised three+ children, worked as an electro-mechanical drafter, penned humor columns for a college periodical, wrote regional western articles, and served as managing editor of a Fortune 500 corporate newsletter. Her lifelong friendship with all shades of folks, cowpunchers, southern belles, intellectuals, and “outlaws” propels Jodi into writing comfortably about the Southwest, the South, and far beyond. She currently resides in Arizona with her husband, two wild and crazy Standard poodles, one rescue cat, her fun-loving ninety-plus-year-old mom, a never-be-still-four-year-old tornado, and numerous bossy houseplants.

(US only; ends midnight, CDT, 4/21/23)

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