I am thrilled to be hosting a spot on the THE MIND GAME by M.G. Harris Blog Tour hosted by Rockstar Book Tours. Check out my post and make sure to enter the giveaway!

 

About The Book:

Title: THE MIND GAME

Author: M.G. Harris

Pub. Date: April 4, 2024

Publisher: Darkwater Books

Formats: Hardcover, Paperback, eBook

Pages: 298

Find it: Goodreads, https://books2read.com/THE-MIND-GAME

Read for FREE with a Kindle Unlimited membership. 

Years have passed since her childhood friend disappeared, but Roni remains consumed by the mystery. Can she uncover what happened to Maxim Santiago?

Podcast fame thrusts 17-year-old Roni into a perilous quest to find her missing friend, who disappeared from Dulles Airport, Washington D.C. She teams up with tech-savvy Kenzie to crack cryptic messages and unearth a dark secret about trafficked kids. Dodging shadowy agents of the ruthless Russian dictator waging a global ‘Mind Game’ on his enemies, they end up in a sweltering Mexican town, a nexus for refugees.

They shared childhood memories, but Maxim has changed. He’s older, wiser, perhaps even dangerous. Now he seeks their help to rescue enslaved children guarding a world-shaking secret, but time’s running out. Roni and Kenzie dive into Maxim’s risky mission, testing their friendship amid a struggle for control of a key project that could win the ‘Mind Game.’

It’s a journey that brings Roni an astonishing self-discovery. Can she trust in herself to help the rescue succeed?

From “sci-fi author M.G. Harris, creator of the best-selling Joshua Files” (Radio Times Magazine, 5th September 2013) comes an espionage mystery thriller for teens and young adults, set in a world of geopolitical conflicts that sits rather closely to our own post-pandemic world.

Praise for M. G. Harris:

• “MG Harris proves she has a deft touch and a real skill for writing heart-stopping adventure” Vanessa Curtis, 16 February 2008, The Glasgow Herald
• “M.G. Harris is a very skilled storyteller” Ed Fortune, Starburst Magazine, 2014
• “Harris keeps the tension high throughout the action sequences” Paul Simpson, Sci-Fi Bulletin, 2015
• “Harris’s prose is nice and breezy” Michael Cook, Geek Vibes Nation, 2023

 

Book Trailer:

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1. Book Playlist

It’s a short playlist of two!

The first is Chichi Peralta’s hugely successful cumbia track Procura. I knew the song from going out to salsa clubs in London. Last time I went to Mexico, in 2022, it was playing everywhere. The tune features in a dream Roni Padilla has, a dream that influences her to go to Mexico in search of a lost childhood friend. 

When I was discussing an adaptation of the Joshua Files with a TV producer in Mexico, one note from her was that Josh seems to rely overly on dreams for intuitions that lead him to solve certain mysteries. That’s fair! But also it has happened to me quite a bit in my own life, and whilst in the Joshua Files dreams represent an aspect of the magical realism I’m using to tell that story, in ‘The Mind Game,’ there is a solid plot reason for it…

The second is the jazz number, The Forgotten Village by Shai Maestro Trio. Maestro is a pianist who played on a famous jazz album with the Avishai Cohen Trio. His first album with his own band is called The Dream Thief. Our whole family loves both bands, and our son’s first visit with us to Ronnie Scott’s in London, the top jazz club in the UK, was to see Shai Maestro.

Roni Padilla’s backstory involves a brief but impactful experience as a young musician, in a trio directed by Maxim Santiago, something of a child prodigy. I picked The Forgotten Village as the track they rehearse because it sounds simple, the kind of thing budding musicians could play if they worked hard, yet difficult to interpret  well. 

One of my closest friends, Nathan, got married during the lockdown and I was lucky enough to make the list of 15 who were allowed to attend. He and his husband had planned a big fancy wedding but had to shift to something boutique, a small elegant venue, a musical duo for the entertainment and mood. 

The recording of that performance is on YouTube and I listened to it often in 2020, when I first began to outline ‘The Mind Game.’ https://youtu.be/hdgxYKBvoLY?si=ARKPiWpqG_cQCkLE

It struck me that The Forgotten Village could be the emblematic, evocative music that draws the three main characters together, based on a deeply meaningful positive shared childhood experience.

In a lot of ways, Roni Padilla is a side character in Maxim Santiago’s story. I’m intrigued by people who become hugely influential in geopolitics. Could they have done something different? What’s their road not traveled? Through Roni’s eyes I give a glimpse of what Maxim’s could have been, as a musician, correspondingly, how her life has been fundamentally influenced by his.

So The Forgotten Village stands for a pivotal time in the life of Roni, Kenzie and Maxim, for the different and probably happier lives they could have lived, had it not been for their important roles in ‘The Mind Game.’

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