The Kiss of Deception Blog Tour: Guest Post + Giveaway

In this timeless new trilogy about love and sacrifice, a princess must find her place in a reborn world.

In a society steeped in tradition, Princess Lia’s life follows a preordained course. As First Daughter, she is expected to have the revered gift of sight—but she doesn’t—and she knows her parents are perpetrating a sham when they arrange her marriage to secure an alliance with a neighboring kingdom—to a prince she has never met.

On the morning of her wedding, Lia flees to a distant village. She settles into a new life, hopeful when two mysterious and handsome strangers arrive—and unaware that one is the jilted prince and the other an assassin sent to kill her. Deception abounds, and Lia finds herself on the brink of unlocking perilous secrets—even as she finds herself falling in love.

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Defining Evil and Finding it in The Kiss of Deception

Everyone’s definition of evil is going to vary, but for me there is bad, wrong, awful, nasty, horrible, and then there’s EVIL.  It’s in a class of its own.

Evil is the blackest of the black. Empty, void, voracious, unredeemable. When it comes to people, I think there are very few who are purely evil. Like a star that’s collapses in on itself and becomes a black hole, they only suck in light with a deadly force, but emit none.  For them there is no redemption, there is no going back.

I think we come across very few purely evil people in life, but we do encounter a whole lot of the bad ones—and even that can all be a matter of viewpoint. If you’re a long term reader of mine you know that I tend to explore gray areas in my stories.  The really good and the really evil are easy to identify, but that whole in between realm, the gray area, is murky and harder to navigate—and infinitely the most fascinating to explore.

In The Kiss of Deception we get to experience a story from three viewpoints, Lia’s, Kaden’s, and Rafe’s. We might be in one character’s cheering section in one chapter, but then in the next we get to see things from another point-of-view. We get to see the inner workings of why each has made the choices they have.  It is a privileged point of view the other characters can’t see. Suddenly our judgments aren’t as clear as they once were.

In particular, from the outside, we get to see a princess who shirks her duty, a prince who couldn’t be bothered to answer a simple note, and an assassin who hunts down his victims and never fails in his duty.  But then we get the inside scoop—we get see the world through their eyes and understand their motivations and what brought them to this point as we step into their lives.

With the three main characters and many secondary characters, there is the very good, the very bad, and a whole lot of gray territory, but there is evil too. Pure evil. The greedy voracious kind that is never sated, and we get an underlying sense that this evil is lurking, waiting, building, coming.  Hungry. Because sometimes those black unredeemable holes do exist.

Thanks so much for letting me stop by, Jenna!

About Mary E. Pearson

Mary E. Pearson is the award-winning author of The Jenna Fox Chronicles, The Miles Between, A Room on Lorelei, and Scribbler of Dreams. She writes full-time from her home office in California where she lives with her husband and two golden retrievers.

Mary has always been enamored with story and character. Her mother tells her she could be the most annoying little kid, waking up each day as a new character. Every morning she would have to ask Mary "who" she was for that day, because unless properly addressed she refused to answer anyone.

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