Come On A Thrilling Adventure Vacation in Alive at 5 by Linda Bond, Now On Sale for 99 cents!!!

Now on SALE! Read the book that is described as a mix of James Bond and Romancing the Stone! Spend part of your summer vacation on a adventure with a TV news reporter and a thrill-seeking undercover cop while they search for a murderer and face their greatest adventure of all, love.

Interested where the idea for Alive at 5 came from?

Check out Linda’s blog post here!

Not only is ALIVE AT 5 having a sale, but it also got a new cover! Check it out below!

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About Alive At 5

Description: TV news reporter Samantha Steele is one panic attack away from losing her job. Future on the line and cameraman in tow, she follows her mentor on an exhilarating adventure vacation. When he dies while skydiving, her investigative instincts scream “murdered”, and lead her to gorgeous thrill-seeker Zack Hunter. Zack is an undercover police officer investigating his uncle’s death through the same adventure vacation company.

Samantha is a thorn in his side the moment they meet. Not only is she investigating the same case, but the emotionally wounded loner doesn’t want another partner, especially one whose goal is to splash evidence all over the evening news. But Samantha’s persistence is quite a turn-on, and Zack’s overpowering desire makes it harder for him to push her away. When the killer turns his attention to Zack, Samantha might be the only one who can save him, forcing the anxiety-riddled correspondent to finally face her greatest fear.

Check out the one of kind book trailer for Alive at 5 here!

Fresh Fiction had this to say about ALIVE AT 5:

"What a Treat: Great Characters, a Clever Plot, and Extreme Adventures!"

“ALIVE AT 5 is extremely well written, fast paced, and what a joy it was to experience, even vicariously, skydiving, scuba diving, and swimming with sharks! Ms. Bond has crafted a superior romantic suspense, and Sam, Zach, and Sam's cameraman George make such a fine team, I dare hope it's the beginning of a series! No chance of dozing off while reading ALIVE AT 5!”

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Linda Bond has a new release coming out soon called Cuba Undercover!

Check out the exclusive book trailer here!

Here is a never before scene excerpt from Cuba Undercover featuring Zach and Samantha from Alive at 5!

“Nicely done.” Zack Hunter was right beside her, tall as hell and commanding in his presence. “Sam sent me over to rescue you. But once again, looks like you can get out of an uncomfortable situation without much help.” He grinned down at her.

Zack’s confidence reminded Rebecca a lot of Antonio’s strength and power. Her heart fluttered at the thought of Antonio. But Zack was a more flirty kind of guy, winking and grinning, very unlike Antonio, who was always so intense and serious.

“Thanks.”

“We’re over here.” Zack gestured toward the door to another room.

“Did you have a chance to check on the case for me?” Her cheeks heated. She knew she shouldn’t be putting Sam’s fiancé on the spot. He was an agent for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and could get in trouble for talking to a reporter about information in an active case.

Instead of looking pissed, Zack just smiled. “Yes.”

Yes, and? “I know I shouldn’t ask you, but…”

“You’re going to anyway.” Zack winked at her. “Sam warned me you would. Here’s what I can tell you. Off the record, of course.”

“Of course.”

“The FBI’s kidnapping case is still open.” Zack casually led her through the crowd, nodding as they passed people, looking cool and in control. No wonder Sam lived for this guy. “Since we can only assume the other kidnapper, the one caught on tape throwing you in the van here in Tampa, is dead in the waters of Cuba, and Antonio Vega is still in Cuba, the FBI’s case will remain open for a while, but I wouldn’t worry about it.” Zack’s eyes crinkled at the corners. “You were clearly the victim in all of this.”

Was I? She exhaled. “Well, right, I’m not in trouble. I just don’t want Antonio to be either.”

Zack stopped dead in the middle of the room. “Really?”

Now her checks were flaming. One thing she’d left out of her documentary was her growing attraction to and relationship with Antonio. “Well, he has a family here now to support and…” In fact, she hadn’t shared all the details with Sam, either.

Zack threw up a hand. “Then your friend should stay in Cuba where our federal law officers have no jurisdiction.” Shaking his head, Zack motioned for her to move through the door first. “The man still masterminded a kidnapping that resulted in a murder.”

“He didn’t kidnap me, Zack.” Rebecca wished she had proof of what happened to both Ignado and Antonio, but even Esmeralda hadn’t been able to get info from inside Cuba. Rebecca furrowed her brow, a slight headache coming on.

“You okay?” Sam walked up, handing Rebecca a much-needed glass of white wine. “You look stunning in your Alexander McQueen.”

“Oh, right.” Rebecca glanced down at her black rented gown. “Thanks.” She’d forgotten how excited she’d been to wear it here tonight. That was before her trip to Cuba and before Antonio. “I’m fine. Thanks for the wine.” She raised the glass in salute to Sam, Dallas, and Zack, her friends all gathering around her in support. “Salud. To a great night.” She must concentrate on what was good right now.

Friends, fame, and food. Unlike in Cuba, there would always be plenty of food here.

Dallas rolled his eyes. “You get any happier, and that face is gonna fall off.”

She sighed. Dallas nailed her with the truth. Once again. “I’m just feeling a little guilty.” Why not tell Sam the truth, too? “Antonio is probably being roughed up in some Cuban jail cell, skinny and sick.”

She turned to look at the man who would definitely understand. “And Dallas, we’re here, drinking and being celebrated for exposing his poor family on national TV.” There. She’d said it. “And if Antonio ever comes back to America, I’m the reason he’ll probably be arrested.”

Zack Hunter cleared his throat. “You did nothing to seal that man’s fate. He’s a grown man who made his own decisions. You are a victim.”

Maybe in the beginning, but I became a willing participant. And now I miss Antonio. Damn it. She missed every damn thing about him. She especially missed the way Antonio made her question her every decision. He’d forced her to think. He’d been the force behind her growth. And she was a better person now for it. She felt enlightened.

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About the Author:

Linda Bond is an Emmy award winning journalist by day and an author of romantic adventures by night.  She’s also the mother of five, four athletes and an adopted son from Cuba. She has a passion for world travel, classic movies, and alpha males. Linda currently lives in Florida, where the sun always shines and the day begins with endless possibilities.  You can become a Bond girl and share in her continuing adventures at www.lindabond.com

You can also visit her online at the following places:

Website  |  Twitter  |  Facebook  |  Goodreads  |  YouTube |  Google+  |  Pintrest

Flat Earth News is a really important book on a really important subject - how our news media is systematically undermined by the systems it employs and why that happens. It is also a deeply ironic book in that in critiquing journalism whilst using a journalistic register it falls into a number of traps that show the weaknesses that befall journalism even at its best. It is a book that you should definitely read if you read any form of journalism, and when it is on form it is incredibly powerful and illuminating, but it has to be read with the very set of skills with which it is trying to teach you to read.

The major problems are ones of judicious omission and accuracy. Davies decides, straight up, to ignore tabloid journalism as, he claims, no one believes it anyway. The problem here is that people do believe it, and in vast numbers, and even when they don't (a lot of Sun readers refer to it as a comic) it has a huge effect on how people perceive the world. Ignoring tabloid journalism is essentially a classist statement that says only the educated (middle class) constructed reality (and he talks a lot about concepts of constructed reality, even if he doesn't use that term, preferring to differentiate between a mass perception and an underlying reality) is of importance.

Except then he does talk about tabloids, because when you talk about the newspaper industry you cannot avoid talking about tabloids. The commercial structures Davies lambasts, Murdoch's and Maxwell's and so on, are all built around the tabloid business model. The history of the first decade of the 21st century newspaper industry is the death of the broadsheet as a physical object. Tabloids are unavoidable and Davies talks about them whenever he needs to, but just maintains that they aren't a part of the story when he doesn't want them to be. This is a journalistic tic.

Other journalistic tics surface in the very fabric of the writing; in the language used. Journalism as a mode, and in many ways when it is at its best, salts important information with enough flavour to make it easy to read. This flavour comes from the nice turns of phrase and the human interest and the mixing of nuggets of detail amongst the facts of the matter. This can be great; the feature article that introduces you to individuals before covering statistics both grounds and humanises the story. It can also be terrible; the Guardian style Guide has a joke about being so desperate for humanising synonyms that a write resorts to calling a carrot 'the popular orange vegetable.'

In Flat Earth news this surfaces as meaningless details that nevertheless distort the text: Charles Drudge of the Drudge Report is described as an ex Sales Clerk, which implies without being explicit a whole lot of assumptions about his suitability as a journalistic source. The fact is, he was making things up, but as he admits it was because journalists let him do it - not because of what he did before. Again, there is an implicit classism and a certain level of circling the wagon on Davies' part; he repeatedly claims that he will not let journalists off the hook, and yet also repeatedly finds ways of blaming people who aren't journalists for their mistakes. Earlier Davies describes a lone reporter as 'sitting alone in a darkened room' in a section about staff cuts. It's a very evocative, and easy to write, image but it is also patently untrue. He may have been sitting alone but why in a darkened room? How could Davies know? Are the evil owners even skimping on electricity bills now? This is over salting your prose, and it can be as much a mechanism of misinformation, although not as pernicious, as outright falsehood.

These may seem like small quibbles, but they extend, unfortunately, to the very core of Davies' thesis. Flat Earth News, in Davie's formulation, is news that spreads around the world because it seems right until it gets checked, and the problem is that the media is failing in its job of checking. He calls it this based on the idea that everyone thought the Earth was flat until someone checked. The big problem with this is that the belief that everyone thought the world was flat is itself Flat Earth News in Davies' formulation - it is an overstated belief that doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Meanwhile, the majority of Flat Earth stories Davies talks about  are not things that seemed correct but, as he himself attests, stories that were actively pushed into a media machine that was known to be faulty by people with agendas. The mechanism is the same, but the culpability is slightly different. Which is why the book is important even as it obfuscates some of it's own importance.

Flat Earth News tells a story of a noble journalism destroyed by 'grocers', a term repeatedly used, after an admittedly nicely written turn of phrase, as a more dramatic placeholder for capitalist economic theory. It doesn't help the divisiveness and implicit classism of the book that no grocer worth their salt would operate in the way that the newspaper owners have done, because grocers sell produce while newspaper owners have effectively stopped selling down (to consumers) but instead sell a content delivery system to advertisers. But, regardless, the argument Davies employs is that the capitalists, who it is important to note have done some incredibly destructive things to news and to journalism as a career option, are inherently worse in the way that they skew coverage than the old-style propagandist owners and that this is fundamentally because at least the propagandists cared about journalists. Even if part of that caring was telling them exactly what to write and when to write it.

Again, the points being made are important, valid and pertinent ones, but there is also an untold story. Alongside the history of closed newsrooms, sacked journalists and squeezed production lines is an untold, parallel version. This is a story of a union that failed its members, and of anti-union journalists who failed to see that they were no different the workers they were demonising when the eyes of industry turned upon them. It is a story of editors, journalists themselves, selling out as soon as they hit management positions and chucking those coming after them under the bus; or even worse, failing to stand up for good practise and capitulating to the demands of senior management even when they know that they are unworkable. It's these stories, along with the genuinely nasty, normative side of journalism - the side that wants there to be an underlying truth even when there isn't one or where exposing it would cause only pain, that is protected and I find it a shame. For every time Davies admits that journalism is not  blameless he then spends pages identifying why it isn't really journalists fault.