SAVANT’s November 2009 release

DARE TO LOVE IN OZ

catapults author WILLIAM MALTESE

back into mainstream romantic/adventure fiction


“It was like returning to my home country after having lived abroad for several years,” says internationally best-selling author William Maltese in regard to his writing of Savant Book’s November 2009 release, Dare to Love in Oz. “After having written six very successful romantic/adventure novels in the eighties, followed by three more that were genuinely major multi-country best-sellers (Love’s Emerald Flame, From this Beloved Hour, and Love’s Golden Spell), I decided to take a hiatus and move on to other things.”

Not that by “other things” Maltese means retirement from the publication arena. With over 200 published books to his credit, 30 of those were written after his last official mainstream romantic/adventure (not counting a “sweet-romance” — Heart on Fire — in 2007), and range in subject matter from the psycho-sexual (Anal Cousins: Case Studies in Variant Sexual Practices), to male/adventure/espionage (The Gomorrah Conjurations), to historical (Ardennian Boy, written with Professor Drewey Wayne Gunn), to his popular Stud Draqual mystery series (A Slip to Die For and Thai Died), to sci-fi (Bond-Shattering), to trivia (Catalytic Quotes: Some Heard Through a Time Warp), to help- and cookbook (The Gluten-Free Way: My Way written with Adrienne Z. Milligan) … even to his children’s tale (Dog on a Surfboard and the Rest of the Adventure).

“Having always been fond of Australia, and finding myself there, yet again, not too long ago,” Maltese continues, “I just suddenly decided that I’d been away from mainstream romantic/adventure way too long, and it was time for me to return to it. That I had just attended a seminar on how many “things poisonous” were part and parcel of the Aussie land- and seascapes…as well as having traveled the outback and personally experienced one of that continent’s major sandstorms…I pretty much had my Dare to Love in Oz plot line presented to me on the proverbial silver platter.”

What resulted is a rip-roaring, hold onto your chair, non-stop action/adventure romantic thriller, set at an isolated toxicology laboratory in the Oz outback, during a sandstorm, with a serial killer on the loose, and a romance between the book’s two chief protagonists doing its best to blossom and survive amidst deteriorating circumstances.

Maltese, who has hunted Inca treasure and hiked the Inca roads to and from South America’s Machu Picchu, scaled the Great Pyramid of Giza at dawn, been to the depths of a South African gold mine, and spent time with the Bedouins in North Africa…knows all about how to put chockablock been-there-done-that adventure into his novels; Dare to Love in Oz is no exception.

As for love? “It’s not a hot-house flower,” Maltese says with equal authority. “It can tenaciously take root and thrive just about anywhere, under the most adverse conditions, even in the Australian wilderness, a debilitating sandstorm on the rampage, and a killer murdering people left and right.”

Savant and Maltese fans, word-wide, are very pleased to welcome this exceptional, skillful, and captivating writer back onto his obviously familiar and comfortable stomping grounds!