The Bullet Catchers are back with non-stop action, high-voltage romance, and an exciting new trilogy launching this week with First You Run.

Happy Spring to all my readers, friends and fans!

I’m absolutely thrilled to emerge from a long winter of hibernation (and writing!) to celebrate the launch of the 2008 Bullet Catcher trilogy. This week, the first of three new books hits bookstores with an all new heart-throb hero, Adrien Fletcher, who is on a mission to track down a baby given up a black market adoption thirty years ago. He has a list of names and one tantalizing clue: the infant girl had been marked with a tiny tattoo.

But when Fletch meets Miranda Lang, all bets are off. The delicate beauty can never be just another name on his list...especially because someone has Miranda on real hit list, and the Aussie bodyguard is the only person who can protect her. Can she trust the Bullet Catcher whose mission it is to trap her? Or will he choose desire over duty?

First You Run launches a trilogy of Bullet Catcher books and you won’t have to wait long for the rest! Look for Then You Hide in July, and Now You Die in September. Connected by one dark mystery, all three are stand-alone romantic suspense novels that can be read by themselves or in any order, and all three feature the men and women of the Bullet Catchers.

And, yes, friends, the rumors are true: the third book in the trilogy features Bullet Catcher owner Lucy Sharpe as the heroine!

Here’s a short excerpt from First You Run, and two more will follow this week. I hope you love my Australian hero and the woman who conquers his heart as much as I do!

Stop by my web site for free bookmarks, a chance to win books, and, of course, pictures and bios of the Bullet Catchers! The url is www.roxannestclaire.com.

Enjoy and thank you for all your wonderful letters and enthusiasm for the books!

Xoxo
Rocki

EXCERPT #1
First You Run

"Ladies and gentlemen, it is the great honor of Page Nine Bookstore to introduce Dr. Miranda Lang, assistant professor of linguistic anthropology at Berkeley, an expert in Maya Studies, and the author of The Cataclysn’t –The End of the Myth, Not of the World. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Lang, who will read a brief excerpt from her work, answer your questions and sign copies of her book."

Miranda nodded her thanks to the store manager and started across the famous floorboards of the "Page Stage." She’d been at the university long enough to know this was a Big Deal. A camera flashed – probably one of her students – as she took her place at the podium and looked out at the crowd of fifty or sixty people. A big turn out, especially considering that most of the anthro faculty would only come if they thought she’d fall flat on her face.

Despite that thought, she smiled at the crowd. With her book finally published and her tour set up, everything was going to be different now. Starting with the fact that Dr. Stuart Rosevich himself was in the front row, beaming at her. She beamed right back, hoping the head of Berkeley’s impressive Department of Anthropology knew of her gratitude for the chance he’d given a young PhD. Next to him, Adam DeWitt smiled more moderately, but it was really sweet of him to show up tonight after their awkward conversation last week.

A few rows behind them were two low-level lecturers from the department, and a few TA’s peppered the second floor room of the revered Telegraph Avenue bookstore.

The rest of the audience? Your basic anthro and linguistic nerds, some Maya enthusiasts and the usual pasty-faced intellectuals who frequented readings at the Nine regardless of the author.

"Good evening." She aimed her gaze right above the last row, giving the appearance of eye contact.

On the podium in front of her, her book was already open to the chapter titled, "The Square Root of Nothing."

"The Long Count calendar," she read, "is the defining touchstone of the ancient Maya civilization, but that’s all it is. It is not a prediction that the world is about to end. On the contrary, studying the calendar can assure us that we will wake up on the morning of December 21, 2012, just as alive as we were on December 20. There will be no asteroid, no Armageddon, no astronomical conjunction in the heavens. There will be no cataclysm, there will be no doomsday, and there will be no cosmogenesis that marks the end of one time and beginning of another." Someone near the front started coughing and she paused, waiting for the pale-haired young man to finish.

"If you study their culture, their language and their symbols, as I have," she continued, "the Maya did not really believe that there would be, either." Did that sound right? The cougher had managed to wreck the rhythm of her text.

She read a few more sentences, finding her writer’s voice again, then looked up to fake some eye contact past the back row.

But there was eye contact. With a man standing in the back, who burned her with a stare so intense, it made her stumble over her words.

Who let him in this mecca of geekdom?

She forced her attention back to the page. "Like their neighbor Pakistan, ancient India had a similar, but rather ineffective, use of the zero concept."

She stole another glance. He mustn’t have realized yet that he’d wandered into a hot bed of linguistic anthropology. He couldn’t belong here. Because men who spent their days analyzing the fine points of language and cultures did not have a body that belonged in the Temple of Warriors, or golden brown hair that curled over their collars and brushed their square, unshaven jaw. They wore glasses, not a gold hoop earring.

And, Lord, they did not look at a woman the way he was looking at her.

Visit www.roxannestclaire.com and meet all the Bullet Catchers

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