Two thousand years ago, on the delta of the River Nile, there is a city, founded by and named for Alexander the Great. It is the largest city on the Middle Sea, with a population of some 500,000 and a library and a school that is the MIT of its day. All the trade goods of the time flow through the port of Alexandria, from the Egyptian grain which fuels the Roman army to silks and spices from the storied East that clothe and feed Roman patricians. It is ruled by a queen, Cleopatra VII, the last of her line, although she doesn’t know that yet, and she doesn’t rule like it, either.

In a court filled with toadies, spies and traitors, the queen needs that one person she can trust absolutely. For Cleopatra that person is Tetisheri of House Nebenteru, a merchant by day and the queen’s Eye of Isis by night. No job is too small or too dirty, including the theft of an entire minting of new coins, corruption and murder in the building trades, the kidnapping of Alexandria’s most beloved performer, and go-between for Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, fighting his next to last battle just a little southeast  of Carthage.

Buy links above. Kalí anágnosi!

Four more days to go in Storyknife’s Founder’s Match! Which means you have until midnight Wednesday night to have me match your donation dollar for dollar up to $16,500.

Those beautiful faces in the photo above belong to last October’s residents. These are the writers your contribution supports. While at Storyknife they are starting poems, continuing scripts, and finishing novels. They are finding agents and editors and even signing publishing contracts, and best of all they are becoming a community that will benefit them for the rest of their professional lives.

Any amount is welcome and we are grateful for every donation. Thank you all!

This just in:

Alert fans will already have noticed that I have left most of social media behind, except for my author page on Facebook. Although for a moment there, when Facebook shut down that page for 24 hours because I called an Irish sausage by its proper name, i.e. banger, and when I finally got a response it was from a bot, and when that bot deemed such language pornographic? I did start looking for the exit.

Kelsey, my social media maven, wisely pointed out that all that meant was that some troll could start pretending they were me to my 35,000 followers. So I’m sticking. For now.

I encourage you instead to follow my WordPress blog. Every post you see on my Facebook page originates on stabenow.com, a website that doesn’t disappear at the whim of a bot, and where you can comment at the bottom of every post and expect a reply. Since I don’t pay to "boost" my posts on Facebook, you aren’t seeing most of them anyway. If you’d like to see more, stabenow.com is the place to start.

I will continue to be active on the Danamaniacs page on Facebook. The conversation there is all about books, recent reads, favorite reads and favorite authors, conversations about single titles and series, and participatory memes like “You have been transported to the location in the last book you read. Where are you?” It’s pretty much its own book club. Join and enjoy!