FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
November 6, 2006

ZUMAYA PUBLICATIONS ANNOUNCES THE RELEASE OF A STYLISH SAN FRANCISCO THRILLER

DEATH GAME, a debut novel by San Francisco author, Cheryl Swanson, will be published by Zumaya Publications, LLC. It will be available in January, 2007, in trade paperback and e-book formats in the English language.

Set in San Francisco, DEATH GAME takes readers to a world where nothing is what it seems, and even videotaped evidence isn’t worth the celluloid it's printed on.

Penned while she was in the middle of breast cancer treatment, the author sends her heroine on a nonstop roller coaster ride through the mean streets of San Francisco, trying to prove her kid-brother is not a killer. “Being in a chemo room is like being in the anteroom of a gas chamber,” Swanson said. “When I wrote DEATH GAME, my challenge was to put that thoroughly awful thrill into words. And then, final step, create a much more entertaining situation than my own, in which those feelings might have happened in the first place.”

In DEATH GAME, a female San Francisco special effects artist is confronted with a videotape showing her kid-brother shooting the heir to a shipholding dynasty. Just out of a highly charged affair with the boy’s father, Cooper O’Brien refuses to believe her beloved fifteen-year-old brother is capable of murder. Cooper’s odyssey to separate reality from illusion takes her from the cool shadows of San Francisco’s wealthiest neighborhoods to the hot and dangerous realm of Internet gaming. And then, one step further, into a world spiraling completely out of control.

As recreated in DEATH GAME, San Francisco is vivid and refreshingly off-kilter, something being terribly wrong in every home, from the ocean cliff mansion of the ship-owning magnate, Walter Ludlow, to the heroine’s “lean out your window and spit in your neighbor’s kitchen” row-house.

Immersed in the underworlds and otherworlds of modern day urban terror, Death Game explores realms most mysteries never touch. With a new set of possibilities opening at every turn, it will have readers asking what is true and even what is real.

This is not the world of the future-it's the world right now. And it’s all here in a thriller that you won’t be able to put down until you turn the final page…

Format: Trade Paperback; Size: 5-1/2" x 8-1/2"; Price: $14.99; Publisher: Zumaya Publications, LLC; Editor: Elizabeth K. Burton, Book design: Martine Jardin.

Available January, 2007. Booksellers, librarians, scouts, and reviewers, for an advance reading copy, email: LIZ BURTON at editorial@zumayapublications.com (while supplies last). Don't miss the game! Visit www.cherylswanson.net for more information about the author or excerpts.

Cheryl Swanson lives with her adopted daughter from Guatemala and her husband in Kauai. Her first novel, Death Game, will be published by Zumaya Publications, LLC in January, 2007 and is available from Amazon and most local bookstores. Her website is www.cherylswanson.net. She can be reached at: cherylaswanson@gmail.com