A letter for May — Wild Flowers begins
New on KU this month
Nightshade (Wild Flowers Book 1) went live on May 6 — the first of a five-book thriller series I have been quietly working on for almost two years. A florist in Yorkshire who is not a florist. A consortium that began at a Scottish kitchen table in 1994. Eleven women with code names from the garden, and one who was supposed to be retired.
If you are coming over from Fallen Hearts, ma chère, this is a different texture — colder, sharper, fewer ballrooms and more cottage kitchens. The slow burn is still here. The stakes are just outside the bedroom door now.
Oleander (Wild Flowers Book 2) drops May 20 — five days after this letter lands in your inbox. Available to preorder right now if you want it the morning it goes live. Book one was the door. Book two is what was waiting on the other side, and I will not say more than that.
KU pick of the month
Fallen Hearts, mon amie. All seven books, finished, on the same Kindle Unlimited subscription you are already paying for. If Wild Flowers is the new series, Fallen Hearts is the closed one — the Stormborn dynasty, Aria and Darius, twenty-two years across one kingdom and the small kindnesses that survived it. Read it now and you will have something to hold onto in the gap between Oleander and Hemlock in June.
From the site this month
A small confession from earlier this month — I wrote an essay about why I cannot write a love scene without my face going the color of a fire truck. It is on the site for free, no subscription required. The honest answer is that I write them like fight scenes. With choreography, stakes, and sheer willpower. I think it is one of the truer things I have put down about the work.
Thank you for being here, truly.
All my love,
Elara
P.S. If you read Nightshade and have a reaction — good, bad, the one paragraph that worked, the one that did not — write me back. I read everything. The first two weeks of a launch are the ones I learn the most from.