Poison of Life (Paperback) | Released: 10 Apr 2016

Grey Chesterfield is the daughter of a millionaire-smart, alluring, and ill-equipped to handle life when her father's jet plummets in an accident. Cut off from her fortune by her stepmother, she boards a bus to New Orleans to the only opportunity she can scrounge: a job as a nanny for a lesbian couple and their three-year-old daughter. Zoë Cates is an author of sensual vampire tales with writer's block. Trapped in a loveless marriage, she feels exhilarated by her daughter and stifled by her wife's threats of taking her child away. She drowns herself in remorse, cognac, and jazz, tortured by longing for another time when she painted the Crescent City red with bold strokes of her pen. Grey's infatuation with the dark author grows into longing, which neither can resist. Their mounting tension opens a flood of inspiration for Zoë, yet threatens everything she holds dear. Is it possible to love someone so much, you would risk everything you have ever loved? Zoë and Grey are on a collision course to find out.
About the Author: It is particularly rare among writers to find someone with whom you can write with a complete lack of ego-to find a coauthor who can correct, add, conform, or criticize something you have just written, and you have absolutely no desire to reach across the table and smack the living crap out of her. Both Caren Penland and Elizabeth Parmer were authors in their own right before attempting to write together. Likewise, both had attempted at previous times to write with other people without success. That is not to say that either of these women were possessive of their work-ahem-okay, maybe they were. But together, each finally found another person who could cut, disregard, delete, or completely dissect her writing, and she would be forced to say, "Yeah, you're right, that sex scene was entirely too short," or, "Okay, I see your point, I should provide some descriptive narrative of some sort there," -and all of this over a fantastic bottle of Moët! Night after night, these two women simply handed the computer back and forth to each other and created what has been described as seamless plots and characters. After a while, they realized they didn't know where one writer's prose stopped and the other's began. Their characters began to build themselves. And that was when they both knew they'd met their match. In writing, at the very least. Caren Penland is a former journalist who fell in love with the coffee shop scene and runs a busy store in downtown Fort Worth, Texas. Her best story ideas are spawned while running along the Trinity River trail or over a glass of red wine with her writing partner, Betsy. Caren lives with her wife, Sarah, and pit bull, Zak, in a quiet neighborhood in the cultural district. She has previously published three novels under the pen name Kimberly LaFontaine. Elizabeth Parmer is a practicing litigation attorney who escapes the monotony of the courtroom by writing erotic fiction with her coauthor, Caren. When she is not berating opposing counsel with stiff and organized constitutional arguments, she is drunkenly insisting that Caren add more moisture and folds to the most recent sex scene. She lives with her husband, artist James, and daughter, singer Claire. She is the least talented of the family. She went to Yale, it was boring.