Saturday, June 13 at 3:00 p.m.
Signing and Workshop with EVA BATONNE, author of RESURRECTION DIVA
Zumaya Enigma, $16.99 (trade paperback original)
Aspiring writers and readers of all kinds should join us for this workshop with Eva Montealegre, who writes as the award-winning editor, Eva Batonne and launches a new series with RESURRECTION DIVA.

RESURRECTION DIVA introduces Joan Lambert, a homicide investigator with a dark past. Joan and her partner, Gus VanChek, investigate the murder of a starlet who later turns up alive.

Learn to read your work whether it is a short story, a novel or non-fiction. If you're not ready to bring your work out in front of others you may bring a favorite 2 pages of work you feel is similar to yours. Using the text as "director" we will create ambiance, character and timing to make your reading do justice to all that hard work.

A recent review of Eva's novel:

Joan’s Dead Diva

Bruce Von Stiers



Eva Batonne has written a lot of short stories. A sometime copy editor, Eva knows her way around the printed word. She co-edited the great gritty crime anthology Techno-Noir.
Now Eva has written a full length mystery that has a lot of police procedural elements to it. The title of this novel is Resurrection Diva. It is being published by Zumaya Publications, the same independent publishing house that published Techno-Noir.
The lead character in the novel is Joan Lambert. She is a detective assigned to one of the top LAPD squads, Homicide, Special Section. Like Brenda Johnson’s Priority Homicide squad in the television show, The Closer, Joan’s squad handles high profile and ultra sensitive cases.
Having come back from an extended vacation, Joan catches an extremely interesting case. Autumn Riley was a young, beautiful, talented opera singer. At least she was at one time back in St. Louis. Now she was just dead, apparently the victim of some kind of crazed sexual encounter.
Trying to get the case jumpstarted, Joan and her partner, Gus VanChek, quickly run down some leads. It seems that Autumn sort of had a boyfriend. He was movie producer Glenn Addams. This guy was so big that his “studio was next to Oliver Stone’s lot off Electric Avenue.”
Depending on who Joan and Gus talked to, Autumn was either a nice girl trying to catch a break or an ego tripping gold-digger who would stop at nothing to get ahead. They find out that Autumn wanted to become an actress, hence the hook-up with Glenn Addams.
As things quickly progress, Joan finds that things aren’t like they look. And that there is a lot of spiritualism involved. A psychic tries to help out, or so they think. She just might be a suspect too. And there is a voodoo element in the story as well.
Things go from bad to worse in the case when Autumn’s body disappears from the morgue. Reports of people seeing Autumn at various places fuels talk of zombies and voodoo curses. But what really happened to Autumn? Is she really alive?
Thrown into the mix are a couple of sub plots; one about a missing little boy and the other about a group of young women who are also missing. And some of the characters in the novel range from being just a little different to downright sick and nasty sexual deviants and predators. Joan also has to contend with an ex-partner / boyfriend who just won’t leave her alone.
Resurrection Diva is a tight, fast paced mystery novel. Eva Batonne gives the reader a glimpse at what the seamy underbelly of sexual deviance could be like. The plot is solid, with totally believable characters and situations. And the police procedures seem to be right on target as well. The bio on Eva at the end of the book tells of her working closely with detectives at the LAPD. That connection and research seems to have paid off.
Resurrection Diva is available at selected book retailers, both online and traditional.
To learn more about Eva Batonne, visit www.evabatonne.com.