Review of Swann’s Down by Charles Salzberg w/giveaway

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Swann’s Down

by Charles Salzberg

on Tour May 1 - June 30, 2019

Synopsis:

Swann's Down by Charles Salzberg

REVIEW

Henry Swann has been asked to find a missing psychic. While this isn’t his normal type of case, Swann can’t turn down the request of his partner. Maybe, while searching for this psychic, he can discover more about his partner’s murky past.

At the same time as he’s searching for the psychic, Swann is asked to find a missing witness. This witness can possibly provide an alibi for a hitman going on trial for a murder he claims he didn’t do.

Swann emerges as an interesting character, in spite of the fact that the overall book didn’t really hold my interest. Swann is prickly, with a wonderfully dry sense of humor. He’s just the type of character that appeals to me.

The reason the book failed to hold my interest is that there really wasn’t much mystery to either investigation Swann was pursuing. The two simultaneous investigations in Swann’s Down weren’t of the hard-hitting, nail-biting, urgent type that generally appeal to me. I’m not quite sure either would qualify as a true mystery, though they might very likely be something a private investigator would be asked to explore.

For readers preferring mysteries that involve a crime with a solution, or a crime of a frightening nature and/or a puzzle to solve (a “who done it”), this book is probably not for you. For readers who like to read books of a tamer nature, or who are more interested in the everyday investigations of a typical (adventurous) private investigator, this book will probably hold your interest.

When Henry Swann is asked by his quirky partner, Goldblatt, to find a missing psychic who’s swindled his ex-wife out of a small fortune, he just can’t say no. Although he doesn’t actually expect to get paid, he figures it might give him a chance to finally learn more about his partner’s mysterious past. His search takes him into the controversial, arcane world of psychics, fortune tellers, and charlatans, while raising questions in his own mind about whether or not there is an after-life.

While working his partner’s case, he’s approached by a former employer, attorney Paul Rudder, to track down a missing witness who might be able to provide an alibi for his client, Nicky Diamond, a notorious mob hitman who’s scheduled to go on trial for murder he claims he didn’t commit in a week. Swann’s search for the missing witness, who happens to be the defendant’s girlfriend, takes him from Brooklyn to a small beach town across the Bay from Mobile, Ala. But what does she really know and will she even come back with him to testify for her boyfriend?

Praise for Swann’s Down:

“Psychics, double-crosses, missing persons–Charles Salzberg’s latest Henry Swann book has it all. Swann’s Down is a gritty, no-frills PI novel that brings to mind greats like Reed Farrel Coleman’s Moe Prager and Michael Harvey’s Michael Kelly. Whether this is your first Swann adventure or the latest, you won’t want to miss the brass-knuckle punch that is Swann’s Down. Trust me.”
~ Alex Segura, author of Blackout and Dangerous Ends

“From Manhattan to Coney Island to the steamy shores of Alabama, Charles Salzberg delivers a top-flight mystery with his latest Henry Swann outing. Highly recommended.”
~ Tom Straw, New York Times bestselling author as Richard Castle

Swann’s Down gives readers two intriguing mysteries for the price of one, as skip tracer Henry Swann pursues a woman who might alibi a murderer and a psychic who swindled the ex-wife of Swann’s partner. Shamus Award-nominated Salzberg does a superb job cutting between the two investigations. I kept turning pages to stay with both chases as the suspense increased to the very end. Whatever is going on, Swann is at the center of this story. His wry wit, quotes from authors and philosophers, genius for questioning suspects, and dark past make him a character readers will follow anywhere as he seeks his quarry. This is another thrilling addition to this excellent series.
~ Rich Zahradnik, Lights Out Summer, winner of the 2018 Shamus Award for Best Paperback Private Eye Novel

Henry Swann dives in where others fear to tread in Swann’s Down: Fast. Funny. And Smart. This time out, Swann crosses paths with a psycho hitman, a phony psychic and Swann’s mysterious partner, a disbarred lawyer. Who could ask for more? I hope we’ll see a lot more of Swann in the future and that this isn’t Swann’s swan song.
~ Paul D. Marks, Shamus Award-winning Author of White Heat and Broken Windows.

Book Details:

Genre: Detective/Noir/Mystery
Published by: Down & Out Books
Publication Date: May 14, 2019
Number of Pages: 300
ISBN: 978-1-64396011-1
Series:Henry Swann
Purchase Links: Amazon | BN.com | Goodreads

Read an excerpt:

1
The Age of Aquarius

“We’re partners, right?”

Nothing good can come from that question when it comes from the mouth of Goldblatt.

“I mean, all for one and one for all, am I right?” he quickly added in an attempt, I was sure, to seal the deal.

“I think you’re confusing us with the three musketeers. May I point out there are only two of us, and I’m afraid that’s not the only fallacy in your declaration. But you might as well finish what you’ve started.”

We were having our weekly Friday lunchtime sit-down to discuss what Goldblatt likes to refer to as “business.” I have another name for it: waste of time.

Our venue changes from week to week but the concept is always pretty much the same: a cheap diner-slash-coffee shop somewhere on the island of Manhattan. Today’s eatery of choice (Goldblatt’s choice, my destiny) is the Utopia Diner, on Amsterdam, near 72nd Street. And as for the business we’d just finished discussing, well, to be honest, there never is very much actual business to discuss and today was no exception.

At this particular moment in time, we were going through a bit of a dry spell, which always makes me a little nervous because no matter how much I banish it from my mind, the rent is due the first of every month and at least three times a day I seem to develop a hunger that must be quenched. Still, a good fifteen, twenty years away from Social Security, and with precious little dough in the bank–okay, let’s be honest, no dough in the bank–and no 401-K to fall back on, I need to keep working. And, as much as I don’t like to admit it, lately it’s been my “partner,” as he likes to refer to himself, as opposed to my preferred albatross, who’s brought in the bulk of our clients.

We’d already finished eating–though technically, Goldblatt never actually finishes eating which means a meal can easily turn into an all-day affair, if I don’t apply the brakes–and we were just waiting for the check to arrive. This is a crucial point of any meal with Goldblatt because it is the opening gambit in what has become our weekly routine of watching the check sit there in no-man’s land somewhere between us until I inevitably give in, pick it up, and pay. Otherwise, I risk one of two things: either we’d be there all afternoon or, worst case scenario, Goldblatt will decide he’s still hungry and threaten to order something else. Neither one of these options is the least bit appealing.

“I’ll get right to the point,” he said.

Just then, out of the corner of my eye I spotted the waiter, like a white knight, approaching with our check in hand. If I acted quick enough I might be able to get out of there before I can be sucked into something I don’t want to have anything to do with.

“That would be nice,” I said, reaching for my wallet. “What is your point?”

“I need to hire you.”

I was stopped in my tracks before I got my wallet halfway out of my back pocket.

“Really? To do what?”

“I want you to find someone for me. Well, to be more precise it’s not really for me. It’s for my ex-wife.”

Wait a minute! Goldblatt married? Goldblatt with a wife? Goldblatt a husband? This was a new one on me, something I’d never even considered.

“You…you’ve been married?” I stammered.

Truth is, I never pictured Goldblatt being in any relationship other than with, yes, as irritating as it might be, me. I mean the guy isn’t exactly anyone’s idea of Don Juan, although I suppose in theory there are women who might find him if not attractive in the conventional way at least interesting in a specimen-under-glass way. Or maybe as a project. Women love a project. They love a challenge. They love the idea that they have the opportunity to remake a man in their image. Maybe that was it. But whatever it was, my world was shaken to the core. And what would shake it even more would be to find that he was actually a father, too. But one shock per meal is more than enough, so there was no chance I was going to pursue that line of questioning.

“Unfortunately, the answer is yes. More than once, in fact.”

“Holy Cow,” I blurted out, channeling the Scooter. “You’re kidding me?”

At this point the same bald, squat waiter who seems to serve us in every diner we patronize, reached our table and dropped the check right in front of me.

“This is not something a man usually kids about.”

“How many times?”

He held up three fingers.

“Three times! You’ve been married three times?”

“Yeah.”

I gulped.

“Are you married now?”

He shook his head. “Nah. I’m kinda between wives. Giving it a rest, if you know what I mean.
But chances are I’ll be back in the saddle again soon enough.”

“Okay, so let me get this straight. You’ve been married three times and now you’re single but you would consider getting married again?”

“Man is not meant to be alone, Swannie. You might consider the possibility that your life would be enriched if you found your soulmate.”

You’re fortunate if you find one soul mate in life and I’d already had mine. She was yanked from my life as a result of a freak accident, a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I didn’t know if Goldblatt knew the circumstances of her bizarre accidental death, but I wouldn’t have been surprised because he seems to know a lot of things he has no business knowing.

“Some men are meant to be alone, Goldblatt. I’m one of them and after three failed marriages maybe you should consider the possibility you are, too.”

He smiled and puffed out his chest. “What can I say, Swann? I’m a friggin’ babe magnet.”

I would have laughed, should have laughed, but I was still processing the scary fact that he’d been married three times. That meant there were three women in the world who not only were willing to marry him but did marry him. I wanted to know more. Much more. Everything, in fact. But this was not the time and certainly not the place to delve into Goldblatt’s mysterious, sordid past. Nevertheless, I promised myself I would revisit this topic in the not too distant future.

Still in shock, I avoided our weekly “who’s paying for this meal” tango, grabbed the check and reached for my wallet…again.

“So, wanna know the story?” he asked.

“Which story would that be?”

“The story of why I want to hire you?”

“Desperately.”

***

Excerpt from Swann’s Down by Charles Salzberg. Copyright 2019 by Charles Salzberg. Reproduced with permission from Charles Salzberg. All rights reserved.

 

Author Bio:

Charles Salzberg

Charles Salzberg is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in New York magazine, Esquire, GQ, Redbook, The New York Times Book Review and other periodicals. He has written over 20 non-fiction books, including From Set Shot to Slam Dunk, an oral history of the NBA, and Soupy Sez: My Zany Life and Times. He is author of the Shamus Award nominated Swann’s Last Song, Swann Dives In, Swann’s Lake of Despair, nominated for two Silver Falchions, Swann’s Way Out, Devil in the Hole, named one of the best crime novels of the year by Suspense Magazine. He was a Visiting Professor of Magazine at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University and he teaches writing the New York Writers Workshop where he is a Founding Member. He is a member of the MWA-NY Board.

Catch Up With Charles Salzberg On:
Charlessalzberg.com, Goodreads, Twitter, & Facebook!

 

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Enter To Win!:

This is a rafflecopter giveaway hosted by Partners in Crime Virtual Book Tours for Charles Salzberg. There will be 6 giveaway winners. There will be 1 Grand Prize winner of one (1) Amazon.com Gift Card. There will be five (5) 2nd Prize winners of one (1) Print Edition of Swann’s Down (U.S. Mailing Addresses only). The giveaway begins on May 1, 2019 and runs through July 2, 2019. Void where prohibited.

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REVIEW OF JULIANNE LYNCH’S BENEATH THE LIGHTHOUSE W/GIVEAWAY

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Beneath the Lighthouse

by Julieanne Lynch

on Tour June 25 - August 31, 2018

Synopsis:

Beneath the Lighthouse by Julieanne Lynch

SOME SECRETS ARE MADE TO BE UNCOVERED.

Sixteen-year-old Jamie McGuiness’s sister is dead. Sinking into a deep depression, he frequents the lighthouse where her body was discovered, unaware of the sinister forces surrounding him.

When an angry spirit latches onto Jamie, he’s led down a dark and twisted path, one that uncovers old family secrets, destroying everything Jamie ever believed in.

Caught between the world of the living and the vengeful dead, Jamie fights the pull of the other side. It’s up to Jamie to settle old scores or no one will rest in peace—but, first, he has to survive.

Book Details:

Genre: YA Supernatural Horror, Mystery
Published by: Vesuvian Books
Publication Date: June 26, 2018
Number of Pages: 334
ISBN: 978-1-944109-59-2
Purchase Links: Amazon 🔗 | Barnes & Noble 🔗 | Goodreads 🔗
  REVIEW

Jamie has a rough life. His dad is an abusive drunk, and his mother has become unable to function sometimes due to the abuse. Jamie is a kind teenager, helping his mom take care of his three younger siblings. Jamie is still grief-stricken over the death of his sister, which occurred three years earlier. He’s overjoyed when he discovers that a girl in his class is not the snob he thought and finds that she seems to like him. Maybe his life is actually looking up…. except for the ghost that seems to have attached herself to him.

This book had mystery and action, as well as friendship and bravery. I was rather disappointed in the ghost action and the explanation of the ghost sighting. It left quite a bit to be desired. That aside, the writing was good, and the book is written in a way that this character could appear in a series.

If you enjoy ghost stories combined with a bit of mystery, you’ll probably enjoy this tale. It’s set in Ireland, so that added a bit of character for me.

Read an excerpt:

Jamie sat on the edge of his bed crying. Unable to stem the flow, he pounded his fist against the bed. The guilt-laden emotions swelled until they crushed him from the inside out, battered by the past.

If he had told his parents sooner about the things his sister Emer had been doing, she’d still be alive. Every time he thought of her, all the things he should have done to save her flooded through his mind. But he still ended up facing the harsh reality—he had failed her. It was his fault. A void like no other existed, leaving him in a limbo worse than death.

Jamie took off his school shirt and walked to the dresser. He grabbed a T-shirt from one of its drawers. He looked hard at his reflection in the mirror. How would it feel to not exist? The mirror showed the Jamie everyone knew and loved, yet his blue eyes were empty.

The young lad with dreams of playing for his favorite football team no longer existed. In his place stood a shadow, a living, breathing shell of the person he used to be. The ugliness of his home had become a constant reminder of the person he no longer was, and he hated himself even more. There was no escape or a happy ever after. Desolation and depression lurked in his future, and it hurt almost as bad as Emer’s death.

Jamie closed his eyes for a moment.

A chill, the same kind he’d felt in the library, pricked at his skin. The air grew thick and icy. Each labored breath became sharp. Every nerve in his body stood on edge, his senses on overdrive. He opened his eyes.

A shadow loomed behind him in the mirror’s reflection, its presence dominating him. He stood still, his heart pounding hard.

The shadow flowed, a discordant and uncoordinated swirling mesh of movement.

Jamie’s gaze remained locked on the mirror, unable to break free. The apparition descended upon him, shrouding him in its dark, wet residue. It moved through him.

Thump.

Thump.

Thump.

His heart was in a vise, compressed by whatever moved through his core. His eyes bulged, and he gasped for breath. Cool air washed over him.

Water lapped around his ankles. A strange odor assailed his nostrils. Unsure of where he was, or why he was there, Jamie scrambled to make sense of it. One minute, he stood in his room. The next, he was confined in a pit.

Scream after scream ripped through his throat. Jamie struggled to find a way out. He caught sight of his hands … only they weren’t his. The shock silenced his screams.

He wasn’t in his body.

He saw things through someone else’s eyes. Darkness crowded the edges of his vision.

Back in his room, he stood in front of the mirror, trembling and soaking wet. Jamie searched the room, trying to figure out what had just happened. Nothing was out of place. He shivered. Nothing would ever explain what had just occurred.

Jamie took a few deep breaths and dried off, while sweat trickled down his brow. He put on a fresh change of clothes, doing his best not to think. Taking a step towards the door, he glanced around the room. Unease swarmed within him. He grabbed the door handle and swallowed the tight ball, which had formed in the back of his throat.

He closed the door tight behind him and whispered, “It’s all in your head.”

***

Excerpt from Beneath the Lighthouse by Julieanne Lynch. Copyright © 2018 by Julieanne Lynch. Reproduced with permission from Julieanne Lynch. All rights reserved.

 

Author Bio:

Julieanne Lynch

Julieanne Lynch is an author of YA and Adult genre urban fantasy books. Julieanne was born in Northern Ireland, but spent much of her early life in London, United Kingdom, until her family relocated back to their roots.

Julieanne lives in Northern Ireland, with her husband and five children, where she is a full-time author. She studied English Literature and Creative Writing at The Open University, and considered journalism as a career path. Julieanne has several projects optioned for film.

Catch Up With Julieanne Lynch On: Website 🔗, Goodreads 🔗, Twitter 🔗, & Facebook 🔗!

 

Tour Participants:

Visit these other great hosts on this tour for more great reviews, interviews, guest posts, and giveaways!  

Giveaway:

This is a rafflecopter giveaway hosted by Partners in Crime Virtual Book Tours for Julieanne Lynch. There will be 1 winner of one (1) Amazon.com Gift Card. The giveaway begins on June 25, 2018 and runs through September 2, 2018. Open to U.S. addresses only. Void where prohibited.
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REVIEW w/GIVEAWAY: DOWN TO NO GOOD by EARL JAVORSKY

Down to No Good

by Earl Javorsky

on Tour October 30, 2017 - January 6, 2018

Synopsis:

Down to No Good by Earl Javorsky

Private investigator Charlie Miner, freshly revived from his own murder, gets a call from Homicide Detective Dave Putnam. Self-styled “psychic to the stars” Tamara Gale has given crucial information about three murders, and the brass thinks it makes the Department look bad. Dave wants Charlie to help figure out the angle, since he has first-hand experience with the inexplicable. Trouble is, Charlie, just weeks after his full-death experience, once again has severe cognitive problems and may get them both killed.

Earl Javorsky’s DOWN TO NO GOOD is wildly original, wildly energetic, wildly funny – it’s just straight up wild, and I mean that in the best possible way.
– Lou Berney, Edgar Award-winning author of THE LONG AND FARAWAY GONE

It’s a shame you missed Down Solo:

“Earl Javorsky’s bold and unusual Down Solo blends the mysterious and the supernatural boldly and successfully. The novel is strong and haunting, a wonderful debut.”
– T. Jefferson Parker, New York Times bestselling author of Full Measure and The Famous and the Dead
“Awesome”
– James Frey, New York Times bestselling author
“Don’t miss Earl Javorsky’s Down Solo. It’s kick-ass, man. Excellent writing. This guy is the real deal.”
– Dan Fante, author of the memoir Fante and the novel Point Doom
“Javorksy’s writing reminded me of the Carl Hiaasen novels I’d read sprawled out on the deck on one sunny Florida vacation. Perfect entertainment, with the right amount of action to keep me alert (and to keep me from snoozing myself into a sunburned state). But there’s also a deeper layer in Down Solo, which left me thinking past the final page.”
– Bibliosmiles
“Javorsky’s dark and gritty prose is leavened with just enough humor to make Down Solo a compelling story that will take readers to the outer limits of noir.”
– San Diego City Beat

Review:

Down to No Good is a really weird, strangely captivating mystery revolving around reanimated (for the second time) Private Investigator Charlie Miner. He’s just been killed again, so his brain isn’t working as well as it once did. While he waits for it to (hopefully) kick back into gear, he tries – sometimes – to be a better father to his daughter, drinks a lot, takes drugs, and generally tries to be an unlikable character.

In spite of Charlie’s overall unlikability, I found myself greatly enjoying this book. It’s well written, humorous, with great character development. Charlie is MEANT to be a real jerk. I truly wanted to kick him in the gonads more than once. That shows some great writing.

The mystery was intriguing, and kept me going all the way until the end. In spite of not having read the first book in the series, I was never lost. I have already purchased the first book and plan to read it, too. I need to know how Charlie died the first time, and how his reanimated status began.

If you like quirky, REAL characters, good writing, and interesting mysteries with a touch of the supernatural, this is the tale for you.

Book Details:

Genre: Mystery
Published by: The Story Plant
Publication Date: October 31st 2017
Number of Pages: 224
ISBN: 1611882532 (ISBN13: 9781611882537)
Series: This is the sequel to DOWN SOLO.
Purchase Links: Amazon 🔗 | Barnes & Noble 🔗| Goodreads 🔗

Read an excerpt:

I wake up looking down at my body, naked on a gurney at the morgue.

No.

That’s a memory.

This has happened to me before.

I was riding my bike, working a case, high as a meteorite that doesn’t yet know it’s about to crash and burn, still happily tooling along in space, at night, wrapped in a warm blanket of summer air, Jack Daniels, and a smidgen of heroin. Some creep shot me in the temple, and I woke up hovering above my own corpse.

This time is different.

Not a gurney. Not the morgue.

A bed. My body, eyes closed, on a bed. I’ve got a bird’s-eye view, hovering like a kite, still tethered, but barely, by an invisible string.

Let’s get clear on my condition. I don’t know what it is, but I know what it is not. I am not a vampire, or a zombie, or a ghost. I’m not a thousand years old, I have no superpowers, and I’ve never been a hero. What I do have is a broken life, a broken family, and, so far, an inexplicable inoculation against dying. And a daughter I would die for—or, in this case, return to life for.

The tether reels me in. I descend toward the body, a mirror image to it, my arms at my sides, my feet slightly apart. Three bullet holes in my face—and one in my gut—are going to need some repair. At contact, I am absorbed and no longer looking down at myself but looking up at the ceiling.

I stretch my fingers, curl them into fists, and stretch them again.

“Jesus holy fucking Christ!”

I know that voice.

I turn my head. It’s awkward, after the lightness of floating, to be in the body, to know its heaviness and vulnerability. There’s a man sitting in a chair next to the bed. He’s a cop, and the first thing I think is: He knows my secret. Now he really knows it. But it’s okay, because he’s also my friend and I trust him. I have to.

“Hey, Dave, how’s it going?” My voice sounds artificial—a forced process of pushing air, modulating vibrations with my vocal cords, shaping syllables with my mouth and tongue. I make my lips grin.

Dave sits there like a stuffed panda in his rumpled white shirt and cheap black sports coat. There’s blood on his clothes. It’s in his fingernails—my blood, dried and caked on his hands. His right hand is clasped around a Heineken, which he finally tilts to his mouth and drains.

I force the body up and into a sitting position, feet on the floor. I flex my fingers a few more times, roll my shoulders, and look at Dave. For a moment, I close my eyes and leave the body, just as an experiment, and roam around the room. From over Dave’s shoulder I watch it slump back into the pillows like a marionette whose strings have been cut. Dave stands and moves toward the bed, but I slip back into the body and work my mouth and tell him it’s okay.

I sit back up and ask Dave, “Why am I naked?”

“Because you were shot full of holes and clinically dead. I brought you back to my place and cleaned you up. I took off your clothes to see how many more bullets there might be in you. Your things are right over there.” He points to a chair in the corner.

“You’re taking this pretty well.”

He shrugs. “I feel like I’m in a bad movie, but hey …”

“I appreciate your bringing me here.”

“I knew if I called the paramedics you’d have been sliced and diced at the coroner’s.”

“How long have I been here?”

Dave looks at his watch. “It’s noon. Call it thirty-six hours.”

“What day is it? And date?”

“Wednesday. Last day in August.”

I stand and walk to the chair to get dressed. Roaming—moving freely out of the body—is easier than this, but I’ll adjust. I have before. The gorilla-suit quality of living in the body becomes commonplace, the intentional management of operating the system, beating the heart, making the blood run in the veins, the conscious act of breathing: all of it becomes second nature.

It’s almost like being alive.

***

Excerpt from Down to No Good by Earl Javorsky. Copyright © 2017 by Earl Javorsky. Reproduced with permission from The Story Plant. All rights reserved.

Author Bio:

Earl Javorsky

Daniel Earl Javorsky was born in Berlin and immigrated to the US. He has been, among other things, a delivery boy, musician, product rep in the chemical entertainment industry, university music teacher, software salesman, copy editor, proofreader, and author of two previous novels, Down Solo and Trust Me.

He is the black sheep of a family of high artistic achievers.

Catch Up With Our Author On: earljavorsky.com 🔗, Goodreads 🔗, Twitter 🔗, & Facebook 🔗!

 

Tour Participants:

Visit the other great hosts on this tour for more great reviews, interviews, guest posts, and giveaways!  

Giveaway:

This is a rafflecopter giveaway hosted by Partners in Crime Virtual Book Tours for Earl Javorsky and The Story Plant. There will be 1 winner of one (1) Amazon.com Gift Card and 2 winners of one (1) eBook copy of Down Solo by Earl Javorsky. The giveaway begins on October 30 and runs through January 8, 2018.
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REVIEW: SNIFTER OF DEATH by CHRIS KARLSON w/GIVEAWAY

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Snifter of Death

by Chris Karlsen

on Tour November 1 - December 2, 2017

Synopsis:

Snifter of Death by Chris Karlsen

The summer of 1889 was proving to be a strange one for Detective Inspector Rudyard Bloodstone and his partner.

They had a sexual pervert loose. The man didn’t actually harm women but threatened them at knife point, fondling them, and ultimately stealing their stockings.

Far more serious were the murders of influential men, which appeared random other than they were all killed by arsenic poison. Never had he and his partner had cases with so little workable evidence.

Also, the rivalry between him and his detective nemesis at London’s other police department was intensifying. That nemesis was the boxing champion of their department and looking to challenge Rudyard, who never trained as a boxer.

Besides Rudyard’s pride being at stake, and the pride of his station, his nemesis also had in his possession a photograph of the woman Rudyard cares very much for. The new lady in Rudyard’s life had captured his heart and he’d fight the devil himself to save her reputation.

REVIEW

Snifter of Death should have been a compelling serial killer mystery. According to the information provided, the murderer had plotted for more than a decade and a half to seek revenge. Instead of focusing on this (to me, very interesting) plot, the book was filled with numerous and divergent subplots pulling the reader away from what should have been the major topic of the book.

I found myself quickly becoming disinterested in the story, and increasingly bored with the ongoing details of the lead detective’s social life. There was far too much extraneous activity, and far too little investigating murder. There was, to my (possibly bloodthirsty) mind, also not enough actual murder occurring.

Additionally, I never became attached to any of the characters. I found them mostly annoying, with the exception of the attempted serial murderer, who was given little real attention. I also found the end to the book to be dissatisfying.

The author has fairly strong writing skills, and for those who don’t mind rather disjointed plotlines with topics other than murder, this book should have great appeal.

I do want to emphasize that lovers of cozy historical mysteries will probably like this book much more than I did.

I give the book a solid three stars.

Book Details:

Genre: Historical Suspense
Published by: Books to Go Now
Publication Date: May 16, 2017
Number of Pages: 376
ISBN: 9781545211090
Series: The Bloodstone #2 | This is a Stand Alone Novel
Purchase Links: Amazon 🔗 | Barnes & Noble 🔗 | Kobo 🔗 | Goodreads 🔗

Read an excerpt:

“What address do you show for the Cross family?” the Vicar asked. Her mind went completely blank. Finally, she blurted the only one that came to her, which was no doubt wrong. “Park Lane.”

The Vicar smirked. Not smiled. Smirked. That meant it had to be wrong.

“I suggest you start there. In the meantime, I will have my housekeeper escort you out. I don’t know what you’re playing at but I don’t care for mischief. You’ll do your soul a good turn to drop a coin in the poor box on your way to the street.” He rang a small bell on his desk and the housekeeper came. “See this lady out.”

Graciela stood on the top stair of the chapel cursing her luck when a man’s disturbingly familiar laugh interrupted her thoughts. She took a quick step to the left and flattened herself against one of the portico pillars. The horrible laugh rippled over from close by. It sounded like Detective Bloodstone’s from the morning she’d bailed out Addy. He’d said something that sent the shine boy scampering away and had all the detectives snickering, including Bloodstone.

Taking a deep breath, she peered around the edge of the pillar expecting to see the detective. His presence would’ve been the perfect end to this entire St. Jude’s Chapel mission-turned-catastrophe. To her great relief, it came from a carriage driver. She hadn’t noticed a group of them gathered at the corner waiting to be hired. Graciela, you had no reason to be frightened. You’d done nothing wrong. Stop being such a ninny.

She left the church and headed home. Zachary would be getting up from her nap soon. The whole way home she questioned her luck. A dozen people are murdered every day in London.

How hard can it be to kill someone?

***

Excerpt from Snifter of Death by Chris Karlsen. Copyright © 2017 by Chris Karlsen. Reproduced with permission from Chris Karlsen. All rights reserved.

Author Bio:

Chris Karlsen

I was born and raised in Chicago. My father was a history professor and my mother was, and is, a voracious reader. I grew up with a love of history and books.

My parents also love traveling, a passion they passed onto me. I wanted to see the places I read about, see the land and monuments from the time periods that fascinated me. I’ve had the good fortune to travel extensively throughout Europe, the Near East, and North Africa.

I am a retired police detective. I spent twenty-five years in law enforcement with two different agencies. My desire to write came in my early teens. After I retired, I decided to pursue that dream. I write three different series. My paranormal romance series is called, Knights in Time. My romantic thriller series is Dangerous Waters. The newest is The Bloodstone Series. Each series has a different setting and some cross time periods, which I find fun to write.

I currently live in the Pacific Northwest with my husband and five wild and crazy rescue dogs.

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REVIEW: THE GRAND by DENNIS D. WILSON w/giveaway

HTML | The Grand by Dennis D. Wilson

The Grand

by Dennis D. Wilson

on Tour October 1-31, 2017

Synopsis:

The Grand by Dennis D. Wilson

Chicago cop Dean Wister takes a forced vacation when he is on the brink of a breakdown after the death of his wife. During his summer solstice in Jackson Hole, where he met her years before, he is called in to consult by local police when a notorious Chicago mobster is found dead in the Snake River. Dean’s investigation threatens to uncover the secrets of a group of memorable suspects, ranging from rich tycoons to modern day cowboys, and threatens to derail the Presidential prospects of the Senator from Wyoming. As Dean follows the leads from Wyoming to Chicago to Washington D.C., he also struggles to cope with the personal loss that threatens his mental stability, as the nocturnal visits from his deceased wife suppress his will to let her go and make him question his purpose in life. The climactic scenes contain reveals the reader will never see coming. A funny, romantic, sexy, roller coaster thriller.

Book Details:

Genre: Crime Thriller
Published by: Water Street Press
Publication Date: December 2016
Number of Pages: 304
ISBN: 978-1-62134-330-1 (ASIN: B01N682LXW)
Purchase Links: Amazon 🔗 | Kindle 🔗 | Barnes & Noble 🔗 | Goodreads 🔗

REVIEW:

This is an interesting mystery/thriller filled with intriguing characters. The primary character has been forced to take an extended absence from his work as a police detective in Chicago to mourn his wife’s death. Almost immediately upon his arrival in Jackson Hole, he is called upon to assist in the investigation of a death, a murder, a mysterious disappearance, and to determine the possibility of mob involvement in the crimes.

The author has created a compelling mystery, filled with danger, and exciting twists and turns. It’s not only exciting, but also amusing. The book isn’t afraid to show the depths politicians and their lackeys will go to ascend the throne of power while simultaneously protecting their many secrets. At the same time, the author writes about the pain of grief, and how it can cut deeply and affect our will. The beauty of the relationship between the main character and his wife is moving. Her otherworldly visits provide him much-needed hope, as well as companionship and wisdom.

This is a book that isn’t easy to define, but is well-written, and quickly envelops the reader in its murky depths. It’s a great adventure for those who love mysteries; definitely a solid 4-star read.

Read an excerpt:

1

SENATOR THOMAS MCGRAW sat back in the hand-distressed, buffalo-hide easy chair and contemplated the room around him. This was his first visit to the brand new, custom-designed mountain home of his lover. When their affair started a little over a year ago, what a sweet and savory surprise it had been to both of them. A business relationship grew into friendship, and then suddenly and unexpectedly exploded into something else— a red-hot, cross-country, obsessive romance fueled by shared erotic tastes. The senator felt sexually liberated under the spell of his exotic lover, and he was pretty sure those feelings were mutual. True, they needed to be discreet for a variety of reasons— indiscretion had nearly cost them everything— but they had worked it out. Although hectic schedules limited their rendezvous to only a couple of weekends a month, the deprivation and anxiety of anticipation made these weekends that much more satisfying. He was generally in a frenzy by the time he could get to her.

Hayden Smith was running late. He was always running late. It was common knowledge in town that you had to book every appointment with Hayden an hour early to get him to show up on time. Attorney, county commissioner, real estate broker and developer, owner of a property management company— all that, plus trying to live up to the moniker of Teton County’s most eligible bachelor as determined by Mountain Woman magazine, well, that could take a toll on a man, even a man as fit and athletic as Hayden. And it was taking its toll on Hayden today. Sometimes he thought there was little point in taking any time off because you had to work twice as hard just to clear your schedule.

The last item of the day on his long list was to make sure all was in order in the home of his newest property management client before their arrival the next morning. But what he really was thinking about, as he put the key in the door, was that he was already an hour late for a dinner date at the home of one of Teton County’s richest and most beautiful socialites. And so if he hadn’t been fantasizing about the evening’s upcoming sensual activities, and if he hadn’t assumed that it was his cleaning crew that had left that open bourbon bottle on the counter, and if he hadn’t been formulating the words he was going to use to chew Pablo’s ass about getting control of his maintenance team, and if he had checked his voicemail after his last two meetings instead of engaging in licentious banter on the phone with the young socialite, then he might have reacted differently to the pounding bass of one of the most iconic rock anthems of the 1980s. He might not have followed the mesmerizing sound of Brian Johnson’s sandpaper voice into the den, assuming that he would find some of his employees having an unauthorized party; and he might not have witnessed the sight in front of him that would not only drastically change his life but would also set in motion a chain of events that had the potential to change the course of American history.

If he had looked directly at the man’s face, he almost certainly would have recognized one of the most well-known faces in Wyoming, soon to be equally famous throughout America.”

Tom jumped up with impressive agility considering his exertion and girth, partly hopping, definitely bobbing. “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.”

Charlotte rolled over onto her side. “What the fuck, I left him a message that I was coming in today. What was he thinking?”

THE FIRST TIME Dean Wister had visited the Tetons was twelve years ago, the summer before his senior year in college. Although he said it was adventure he was looking for, it was escape that he was really seeking when he answered an ad to guide for one of the rafting companies that run whitewater trips down the Snake River, just south of Teton National Park. It was a grueling twenty-four-hour drive from his home in Chicago to Jackson Hole, the mountain town at the foot of the spectacular Teton Range, and the route that he was taking, I-90 across Illinois, Wisconsin, and South Dakota, was one of the most monotonous and boring stretches of highway across America. Hour after hour he would stare at the road between truck stops, trying to keep alert for the highway patrol and the erratic driving of drowsy long-distance truckers. He tried listening to music and audio books, but his mind wouldn’t let him focus. Lately, he had a lot of trouble focusing. He’d once tried meditation, taking a Transcendental Meditation workshop with his wife, Sara, but meditation wasn’t for him. His mind would inevitably wander from the rhythm of his breathing to some problem from work that he was trying to solve. Dean had always been more of a ruminator than a meditator. And so he ruminated for hour after hour. He ruminated about all that had happened over the last twelve years. He ruminated about the horror of the last year. And he ruminated about what the future might, or more importantly, might not, hold.

That first trip had also been a time of transition for him. His mother died after his freshman year in high school, and his dad was killed in a work accident at the lumber yard just before Dean started college. As an only child he had led a solitary existence growing up, but by the time he left for college he was officially an orphan, no parents to cheer him as the starting safety on the University of Illinois football team, and no siblings to share the empty and confused feelings of losing the only responsible adults he had ever known. His hometown of Summersville, West Virginia, was near the banks of the Gauley River, one of the most famous whitewater-rafting rivers in the East, and the gray, small-minded, and cruel little town resembled what Mayberry may have looked like if Andy hadn’t been born. Until he was seventeen, Dean had never met a college graduate outside of a classroom, and growing up with his nose stuck in a book most of the time, his peers, and even most of the adults he knew, looked down on his habit as a sign of either homosexuality, laziness, or both. Maybe it was resentment for not living the fantastic and interesting life of the characters in the books that he read, or maybe it was the bullying that he experienced from his literature-averse peers, or maybe it was his sense of insecurity and inferiority from his hillbilly background, or maybe it was just his nature— for whatever reason, there was a well of anger deep inside of Dean.

The bullying stopped the first time he stepped on a football field. He loved to play defense, and putting the hammer to the ball carrier or receiver was equally pleasurable to him, whether in practice or during an actual game. He loved the rush of power he felt when a body crushed beneath him as he delivered the blow. As he would take aim at his target coming across the field, he imagined his body as a sledge hammer and he would launch himself, helmet first, at his opponents, relishing the pain he received nearly as much as the pain he delivered. As his scrawny adolescent body matured into a six-foot, one-hundred-ninety-pound defensive back, his football hits became ever more fearsome, and attracted the attention of a recruiter for the University of Illinois. Football would end for him upon college graduation for, as a pro scout told him, “Son, you sure have the meanness for pro football, but not the speed.” But that was all right; football had served its purpose.

The first time his dad had taken him along to run the rapids of the Gauley he was only nine years old, but after that he was addicted to the river. Working as a gofer for one of the rafting companies, imagining himself as one of the cocky swaggering guides, he would do anything to be near the river. The owner of the company took a liking to him, and broke the rules to put him on as a guide at sixteen. He worked on the Gauley through high school and college. But, with the death of his father, West Virginia held too many painful memories; he needed to get away. He heard from some fellow guides that the Snake River in Wyoming, south of Jackson, could be fun. Sure, its mostly Class 2 and 3 rapids were nothing compared to the Gauley, but he had always wanted to see the Rockies, and it was about as far away from West Virginia as he could imagine. That summer on the Snake, in the Tetons, revealed another side that he didn’t know he had. He learned how to cap that well of anger, to regulate the flow, to use it instead of letting it use him, and for the next decade was able to let it out only when his job demanded it. He discovered that there was another well, an untapped well, within him. A well of love and sweetness, of kindness and generosity. And the auger that tapped that well was Sara.

He’d just sent some food back at the Pioneer Grill, the coffee shop in Jackson Lake Lodge in Teton National Park. His order of sautéed Rocky Mountain rainbow trout appeared on his plate as buffalo meatloaf. His anger rising at this inexcusable display of disrespect and incompetence, he called over the pretty blonde server and pointed at the food in front of him. “Miss, do you think you would recognize a Rocky Mountain rainbow trout if you saw one?” She’d looked first at the gravy-smothered brown glob, and then directly into his twisted angry face, and behind her best smile said, “Apparently not, but I can recognize an asshole when I see one.”

Dean was overmatched by the spunky girl with eyes of a deeper blue than the summer skies over the Grand Tetons, and he fell in love on the spot. They laughed at the story forever, and she still called him “meatloaf asshole” on occasion, either when she was feeling especially fond or, more often, particularly annoyed with him. She loved to tease him and ridicule his quirks, calling him “schizo” for the many paradoxical elements in his personality: jock/ intellectual, hot head/ sentimentalist, loner/ showoff. But when she would call him “schizo” and flash him her irresistible smile, it would always soften his mood, and he was able to laugh at himself.

As a trust-fund baby of a power couple in Chicago’s legal community, Sara’s suburban childhood was exactly the opposite of Dean’s. Her bookworm ways were admired by her parents, friends, and her community. The vivacious blond with the sharp wit and the ability to fit in with every social group was a psych major at the University of Chicago, less than a two-hour drive up the interstate from Champaign if you are a hormone-crazed college boy, more like three hours for everyone else. Her well of anger was only a fraction of Dean’s and reserved exclusively for bullies and people who abused children, animals, and the less fortunate. But if you happened to occupy that territory, her fierceness could make even Dean flinch.

When he thought of their first summer, it played back in his head like some film made from a Nicolas Sparks novel. As he watched the movie, alone in the theater seat of his Jeep Cherokee, he smiled at the “meet cute” first scene in the coffee shop, marveled at the on-location, awe-inspiring backdrops of the Snake and the Tetons, was moved to tears by the scene where he makes love to Sara for the first time. And he couldn’t criticize the filmmaker’s decision to leave every sex scene of the summer in the movie. There they are making love on the window seat in the tiny apartment shared by Dean and his four other river rat roommates. There they are making love after a picnic at Schwabacher’s landing, the Tetons reflected like a painting in the beaver pond. And there they are on their last day of the summer, on a picnic in the alpine meadow they had discovered on their long hike into the mountains. The meadow they had named “Sara’s Meadow.” The meadow where Dean proposed. The meadow they pledged to return to each year on their anniversary. They talked of it often, and relived the moment every year on that special day. But they never came back. Life, and careers, and bullshit got in the way.

Careers included the single-minded ambition they shared. Dean’s resulted in a meteoric rise to detective in the Chicago Police Department and, after being handpicked to join the Midwest Organized Crime Task Force as the only local police detective among FBI and ATF agents, his days and weeks became an unending blur of clues, criminals, and cases. Sara’s graduate degree at Northwestern led to a tenure track appointment at Loyola University. But tenure track meant running never-ending, back-to-back-to-back marathons of teaching, research, and publishing. Their career ambitions allowed no room for children, or travel, or a return to Sara’s Meadow.

And then, over the last year, came the bullshit. Dean was working eighty-hour weeks on a high-profile case involving government and police corruption, and many of the Chicago cops whom he considered friends turned away from him. And then, just when they thought they were getting close to breaking the case, the investigation was shut down and he was reassigned. He was exhausted, disappointed, stressed, and his friends treated him like a traitor.

And then there was Sara. She had been diagnosed with cancer just as Dean began the investigation from hell. After her initial treatment, she received a clean report, and he was too preoccupied to notice when she continued to lose weight. A check-up a few months later showed that the cancer had returned. The rebound was aggressive, additional treatment failed to stop the spread, and she continued to get weaker and weaker in spite of what she would call “frequent invitations for happy hour cancer cocktails with my oncologist.” She even made up names for the cocktails based on the side effects she would experience afterward. There was the Diarrhea Daiquiri, the Migraine Martini, and the Vomit-rita. No subject was out of bounds for her wicked and irreverent sense of humor. Once, when she was bedridden near the end, Dean asked her how she was feeling, and in her best Sally Field Mama Gump imitation, she said “Well, Forrest, I’ve got the cancer.”

Dean wanted to take a leave to stay at Sara’s bedside, but she made up her mind that that was not an option. And when Sara made up her mind about something, he had learned to let her have her way. So Dean was relegated to spending every hour that he wasn’t working by her side, holding her close, imagining how they would live their lives differently when she was well. The night she died, she asked him to describe that day in Sara’s Meadow. And when he finished, she said, “Promise we can go there when I get well. Will you take me there next summer?” He nodded, unable to speak. She slept peacefully that night for the first time in quite a while, and in the morning she was gone.

Strangely, although she was the center of his universe, the only person that he could say he ever truly loved, he showed little emotion when she died. He didn’t cry. He felt almost as if he were an outside observer of these terrible events. He experienced only numbness. An unrelenting, withering numbness. A numbness interrupted only by random bursts of anger that disturbed even the hardened cops he worked with. Dean was not unaware of his problem, and tried to channel the anger by hooking up with Manny Cohen, a mixed martial arts coach and self-proclaimed king of “Jew-Jitsu”. He loved the physicality of the MMA bouts, and that the jiu-jitsu moves he learned permitted him to disable much bigger and stronger fighters, even if he was on the ground being pummeled. He justified the training as part of his law-enforcement skills, but he knew what it was really about— the ability to inflict some of the horrible hurt he was feeling on others.

The changes in Dean since Sara’s death were most troubling to his boss, Carlos Alvarez. Carlos had been crushed when, on the verge of busting a Chicago mob guy who had both political and police connections, which evidently reached all the way to Washington, the whole operation had been shut down. In his heart, he knew it was those same connections he was investigating that had defeated him. He looked at Dean and watched one of the most competitive spirits he had ever known flicker out, starved for the oxygen that Sara could no longer supply. The case they had put their hearts and souls into for the last year was ripped out of their hands and Dean, who normally would be just as pissed off as he was, seemed to be only going through the motions.

But the most disturbing problem, as far as he was concerned, was Dean’s refusal to mourn Sara. Carlos watched as Dean’s isolation became extreme, and he refused all offers to talk or socialize. Dean’s robotic demeanor and increasingly unpredictable violent outbursts were scaring him. When Carlos sent him to meet with the psychologist assigned to their department, he refused to cooperate. He insisted that he was fine. But Carlos knew he wasn’t fine. He saw a man on the brink of a breakdown and finally decided that drastic action was needed to rescue the man from himself. One morning he walked into Dean’s office and handed him a letter worded as an authorization, which was actually an order, to take a three-month leave of absence.

“But where will I go? What will I do?” Dean said, seemingly incapable of entertaining any change to his barely functional routine. Carlos looked toward the picture on his desk, the one taken twelve years earlier. It showed Dean standing on a whitewater raft. Sara was sitting in the boat looking up at him with a combination of love and lust in her eyes. In the background, the grandeur of the Tetons loomed. “You have to get out of town. You have to get away from here, from all this. And I know where I would go if I had no obligations and three months off. I’ve been envying that picture since the day you moved in here.”

What his boss didn’t know, and what Dean couldn’t tell him, or anyone else for that matter, was the real reason that he wouldn’t see the psychologist— something that would make him seem crazy to outsiders. Hell, he often had that thought about himself. Not every evening, but maybe two or three nights a week, he would spend the night with Sara. He would wake up a couple of hours after he went to sleep, and she would be there, sitting in the chair next to his bed. He would get up, and they would talk just like they used to, about everything, what was happening in his life and in his job, or what was going on in the news. They would make love, and it was every bit as passionate and real as before she was sick. When he would wake up in the morning, she would be gone. At first, he tried to convince himself that it was all a dream, until one night he washed the sheets before he went to bed, and the next morning her perfume lingered on the bedding. She was really there, and she was as real as anything he had ever experienced.

He had nothing against psychologists. He had seen a therapist in college after a particularly hard break-up and had found it very helpful. In fact, he visited that same therapist when Carlos was pushing him to see the department shrink— he wasn’t about to have his craziness officially certified to his employer. And his own therapist confirmed what he instinctively knew himself. “Your hallucinations of your dead wife will go away when you allow yourself to fully mourn her.” But that was exactly the problem. Her very real apparition was the only tangible thing he had left of her. Her visits were the only thing that let him get through the day, that kept him from becoming totally out of control, and he wasn’t going to let anyone take that away from him. He was determined to hold on to whatever was left of her, for as long as he could.

Sara was the one that convinced him to take the trip. She told him during one of their nocturnal visits that he could use the time off; that she knew he was stressed out. He agreed on one condition. That she would come with him. She gave him her mischievous smile, the one that had captured him that first day in the coffee shop, and said, “That’s not a problem. I’m not going without sex for three months. And the ghosts here are too creepy to sleep with.”

That first summer twelve years ago, he had come into town from the south, getting off I-80 west of Rock Springs, approaching Jackson via Alpine and driving up through the Snake River canyon so that he could view the whitewater section he would be working. Wyoming is mostly high plains except for the northwestern part, which is an endless vista of scrub grass, prickly pear, sage brush, with occasional red-rock battleships and gargoyles. On that first trip he was able to view the Wind River Range in the distance outside his window, but he didn’t really get a good view of the Teton Range until he reached the outskirts of the town of Jackson. This time he had decided to take the Northern route via I-90, because he wanted to see the Black Hills, one of the few topographic areas of interest that is easily accessible from the interstate. So he was not really prepared for what happened when his Jeep rounded the bend on Route 26, east of Teton National Park, and he looked west. The fragrance hit him first. He had the windows in his Jeep rolled down and, as the road increased in elevation, the air turned cooler and became infused with snow runoff blended into mountain streams and the bouquet of lodgepole pine forests to form the unique perfume that his unconscious associated with his first summer there. He was looking down for a station on the radio when he felt the jolt, as if a switch was flipped in his brain, and when he turned his face back to the road, the windshield was suddenly and magically filled with the panorama of the majestic purple, snow-tipped peaks of the mountain range that symbolized all that had been true and pure in his life. All that was lost and would never ever return. The image struck him like a bullet in his chest, sucking all the air from his body. The next thing he knew, he was out of his car, on the side of the road, on his knees, gasping for air, heaving, sobbing. “Oh, Sara. My sweet, sweet, Sara.”

***

Excerpt from The Grand by Dennis D. Wilson. Copyright © 2017 by Dennis D. Wilson. Reproduced with permission from Dennis D. Wilson. All rights reserved.

Author Bio:

Dennis D. Wilson

After a career working in an international consulting firm and as a financial executive with two public companies, Dennis D. Wilson returns to the roots he established as a high school literature and writing teacher at the beginning of his career. For his debut novel, he draws upon his experiences from his hometown of Chicago, his years living, working, hiking and climbing in Jackson Hole, and secrets gleaned from time spent in corporate boardrooms to craft a political crime thriller straight from today’s headlines. Dennis lives in suburban Chicago with his wife Paula and Black Lab Jenny, but spends as much time as he can looking for adventure in the mountains and riding his motorcycle.

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This is a rafflecopter giveaway hosted by Partners in Crime Virtual Book Tours for Dennis D. Wilson. There will be 1 winner of one (1) Amazon.com Gift Card AND 5 winners of one (1) eBook copy of The Grand by Dennis D. Wilson. The giveaway begins on September 30 and runs through November 2, 2017.
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REVIEW: EVERYBODY HAS A STORY…THESE ARE OURS

Everybody has a story... These are ours...
Everybody has a story… These are ours… by Audrey N. Lewis
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In this touching book of prose, the author has a way of quickly engaging the reader in the lives of the characters. Each story, through writing that is clear and compelling, brings to life a different aspect of family dynamics, relationships, or basic living.

It is refreshing to see an author able to use words to create such vivid imagery. The lives of the characters became real to me. The feelings evoked in the poetry stayed with me, giving me something to think about, long after the last page was turned. This is a book to cherish, to hold onto, to re-read again and again.


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REVIEW W/GIVEAWAY: THE NAMES OF DEAD GIRLS BY ERIC RICKSTAD

The Names of Dead Girls

by Eric Rickstad

on Tour from September 18 - October 2, 2017

Synopsis:

The Names of Dead Girls by Eric Rickstad

William Morrow is thrilled to present the sequel to the New York Times and USA Today mega-bestseller The Silent Girls, which went on to sell more than 300,000 copies. The Names of Dead Girls is a dark, twisty thriller that once again features detectives Frank Rath and Sonja Test as they track a perverse killer through rural Vermont. By popular demand, the story picks up after the shocking cliffhanger on the last page of The Silent Girls and reveals what exactly happens between Rath and his nemesis, Ned Preacher. Although The Names of Dead Girls is a sequel, it reads perfectly as a standalone – new readers can dive in seamlessly.

After years spent retired as a private investigator, Frank Rath is lured back into his role as lead detective in a case that hits far too close to home. Sixteen years ago, depraved serial rapist and killer Ned Preacher brutally murdered Rath’s sister and brother-in-law while their baby daughter, Rachel, slept upstairs. In the aftermath, Rath quit his job as a state police detective and abandoned his drinking and womanizing to adopt Rachel and devote his life to raising her alone.

Now, unthinkably, Preacher has been paroled early and is watching—and plotting cruelties for—Rachel, who has just learned the truth about her parents’ murders after years of Rath trying to protect her from it. The danger intensifies when local girls begin to go missing, in crimes that echo the past. Is the fact that girls are showing up dead right when Preacher was released a coincidence? Or is he taunting Frank Rath, circling his prey until he comes closer and closer to the one he left behind—Rachel? Rath’s investigation takes him from the wilds of Vermont to the strip clubs of Montreal, but it seems that some evil force is always one step ahead of him.

Eric Rickstad is a master of the bone-chilling, nightmare-inducing thriller, and The Names of Dead Girls is one you won’t want to miss.

Book Details:

Genre: Mystery / Thriller
Published by: HarperCollins Publishers
Publication Date: September 12th 2017
Number of Pages: 400
ISBN: 0062672819 (ISBN13: 9780062672810)
Series: The Silent Girls #2
Purchase Links: Amazon 🔗 | Barnes & Noble 🔗 | Goodreads 🔗

Review:

This is a mystery that couples a parent’s worst nightmare with brutal crimes committed upon young girls. As a detective races to find a released murderer in order to protect his daughter, he finds that there might be more than one mystery he needs to solve before his worst nightmare finally be laid to rest.

This is a relentless read, the pace is rapid-fire, with high tension and drama. Most of the characters are vividly created, with a villain that is chilling and believable. The crimes mentioned in the book commonly occur and I was glad to see an author addressing the issue head-on (you’ll have to read the book if you want to know what those crimes are…no spoilers here).

The book was well-written and gripped me by the throat and held me there until I finished the book. The grip was so tight, I read the book in one sitting. This is an outstanding read that I recommend for those who love a good crime story or who are searching for a great writer of thrilling mysteries.

Read an excerpt:

Rath drove the Scout as fast as he could without crashing into the cedars along the desolate stretch of road known as Moose Alley that wound through thirty miles of remote bog and boreal forest. The rain was not as violent here, the fog just starting to crawl out of the ditch.

Rath hoped the police were at Rachel’s and had prevented whatever cruelty Preacher had in store; but hope was as useful as an unloaded gun.

The Scout’s temperature gauge climbed perilously into the red. If the engine overheated, Rath would be stuck out here, miles from nowhere, cut off from contact. In this remote country, cell service was like the eastern mountain lion: its existence rumored, but never proven.

Finally, Rath reached the bridge that spanned the Lamoille River into the town of Johnson. His relief to be near Rachel crushed by fear of what he might find.

At the red light where Route 15 met Main Street, he waited, stuck behind a school bus full of kids likely coming from a sporting event.

He needed to get around the bus, run the light, but a Winnebago swayed through the intersection.

The light turned green.

Rath tromped on the gas pedal. The Scout lurched through the light. On the other side of the intersection, Rath jammed the brake pedal to avoid ramming into the back of the braking bus, the bus’s red lights flashing.

A woman on the sidewalk glared at Rath as she cupped the back of the head of a boy who jumped off the bus. She fixed the boy’s knit cap and flashed Rath a last scalding look as she hustled the boy into a liquor store.

The bus crept forward.

No vehicles approached from the opposing lane.

Rath passed the bus and ran the next two red lights.

The rain was a mist here, and the low afternoon sun broke briefly through western clouds, a silvery brilliance mirroring off the damp asphalt, nearly blinding Rath.

Rachel’s road lay just ahead.

Rath swerved onto it and sped up the steep hill.

A state police cruiser and a sheriff’s sedan were parked at hurried angles in front of Felix and Rachel’s place.

He feared what was inside that apartment. Feared what Preacher had done to Rachel.

Sixteen years ago, standing at the feet of his sister’s body, Rath had heard a whine, like that of a wet finger traced on the rim of a crystal glass, piercing his brain. He’d charged upstairs into the bedroom, to the crib. There she’d lain, tiny legs and arms pumping as if she’d been set afire, that shrill escape of air rising from the back of her throat.

Rachel.

In the moment Rath had picked Rachel up, he’d felt a permanent upheaval, like one plate of the earth’s lithosphere slipping beneath another; his selfish past life subducting beneath a selfless future life; a niece transformed into a daughter by acts of violent cruelty.

For months, Rath had kept Rachel’s crib beside his bed and lain sleepless as he’d listened to her every frayed breath at night. He’d panicked when she’d fallen quiet, shaken her lightly to make certain she was alive, been flooded with relief when she’d wriggled. He’d picked her up and cradled her, promised to keep her safe. Thinking, If we just get through this phase, I won’t ever have to worry like this again.

But peril pressed in at the edges of a girl’s life, and worry planted roots in Rath’s heart and bloomed wild and reckless. As Rachel had grown, Rath’s worry had grown, and he’d kept vigilant for the lone man who stood with his hands jammed in his trouser pockets behind the playground fence. In public, he’d gripped Rachel’s hand, his love ferocious and animal. If anyone ever harmed her.

Rath yanked the Scout over a bank of plowed snow onto a spit of dead lawn.

He jumped out, tucked his .22 revolver into the back waistband of his jeans, and ran for the stairs that led up the side of the old house to the attic apartment.

He hoped he wasn’t too late.

***

Excerpt from The Names of Dead Girls by Eric Rickstad. Copyright © 2017 by Eric Rickstad. Reproduced with permission from Eric Rickstad. All rights reserved.

Author Bio:

Eric Rickstad

Eric Rickstad is the New York Times, USA Today, and international bestselling author of The Canaan Crime Series—Lie in Wait, The Silent Girls, and The Names of Dead Girls, psychological thrillers set in northern Vermont and heralded as intelligent, profound, dark, disturbing, and heartbreaking. His first novel Reap was a New York Times Noteworthy Novel. Rickstad lives in his home state of Vermont with his wife, daughter, and son.

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REVIEW: THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY CHILD BY PATRICIA HALE

Today, I’m thrilled to be presenting a wonderful book by Patricia Hale, The Church of the Holy Child. This is a relatively quick read (a bit more than 200 pages), but it’s one of those books that simply cannot be put down once begun. I absolutely inhaled this novel. I’ve written a review for you; you’ll find it after the synopsis. There’s also an excerpt for your reading pleasure. Thank you for visiting today. Don’t forget to enter the giveaway, hosted by PICT. Scroll to the bottom for the Rafflecopter and information.

The Church of the Holy Child

by Patricia Hale

on Tour August 15 - October 15, 2017

Synopsis:

The Church of the Holy Child by Patricia Hale

A woman with a history of domestic abuse is missing. Her sister hires private investigators Cole and Callahan.

When the woman is found dead, her husband is charged but when a second body appears showing the same wounds, questions arise and what looked like a slam-dunk becomes anyone’s guess. The case goes to John Stark, a veteran cop and close friend of Griff Cole.

The bodies are piling up, and one person knows where the killer is. Father Francis, a priest at The Church of the Holy Child, listens to the killer’s disturbed account of each murder and wrestles with the vows that bind him to secrecy.

The case takes an unexpected and personal turn when Cole’s ex-wife goes missing and a connection to his past points to the killer.

Book Details:

Genre: Mystery/Suspense
Published by: Intrigue Publishing LLC
Publication Date: August 15th 2017
Number of Pages: 259
ISBN: 1940758599 (ISBN13: 9781940758596)
Purchase Links: Amazon 🔗 | Barnes & Noble 🔗 | Goodreads 🔗

REVIEW:

The Church of the Holy Child by Patricia Hale

This is a tale of domestic abuse and murder – but not in the way you might think. It’s also a story that discusses the moral issues and obligations surrounding the relationship between a priest and his/her confessor. Does the relationship to God trump the sanctity of human life?

The author is able to keep this mystery alive and engrossing, with an interesting P.I. team and a cast of supporting characters. Her knowledge of abuse statistics and the effects are effectively dotted throughout the novel in a way that adds to the overall text.

For those who enjoy their crime stories with a bit more grit, this book is for you. It’s not crude or particularly gory, but it’s definitely not a cozy mystery. It’s a full 4-star tale that deserves a read by crime/serial-killer enthusiasts.

Read an excerpt:

Inside the wooden confessional there’s a man who talks to God. At least that’s what my mother told me the last time we were here. But a month has passed since she disappeared so today I’ve come to the church alone. I no longer believe that she’s coming back for me like she said. Instead, I’ve become her stand-in for the beatings my father dishes out. That’s what he calls it, dishing out a beating, like he’s slapping a mound of mashed potato on my plate. He swaggers through the door ready for a cold one after coming off his seven to three shift, tosses his gun and shield on our kitchen table and reaches into the refrigerator for a Budweiser. I cringe in the corner and make myself small, waiting to hear what kind of day he’s had and whether or not I’ll be his relief. More often than not, his eyes search me out. “’C’mere asshole,” he says, popping the aluminum top, “I’m gonna dish out a beating.” If anyone can help me, it has to be this guy who talks to God. I open the door of the confessional with my good arm and step inside.

Twenty-three years later

ONE

His breath was warm on my neck, his lips hot and dry. His tongue searched the delicate skin below my ear. Heart quickening, back arching, I rose to meet him.

The phone on the nightstand vibrated.

“Shit,” Griff whispered, peeling away from me, our clammy skin reluctant to let go. He swung his feet over the edge of the bed and flashed me his bad-boy, half-smile. “Cole,” he said into the phone.

At times like this, cell phones rate right alongside other necessary evils like cod liver oil and flu shots. I leaned against his back and caressed his stomach, damp dunes of sculpted muscle. Not bad for a guy north of forty. Griff still measured himself against the hotshots in the field. But in my book he had nothing to worry about; I’d take the stable, wise, worn-in model over a wet behind the ear, swagger every time.

He pried my fingers from his skin and walked toward the bathroom still grunting into the phone.

I slipped into my bathrobe and headed for the kitchen. I have my morning priorities and since the first one was interrupted by Griff’s phone, coffee comes in a close second.

Twenty minutes later he joined me dressed in his usual attire, jeans, boots, tee shirt and sport jacket. Coming up behind me, he nuzzled my neck as I poured Breakfast Blend into a travel mug. Coffee splashed onto the counter top.

“Gotta run,” he said taking the cup from my hand.

“What’s up?”

“Not sure yet. That was John. He said he could use a hand.

“Sobering up?

Griff flinched like I’d landed one to his gut.

“Sorry,” I said. “Cheap shot.”

“Woman found dead early this morning.”

“When’s he going to admit that he can’t run the department with a pint of scotch sloshing around in his gut?”

“The job’s all he’s got left, makes it hard to let go.”

“I’m just saying that he shouldn’t be head of CID. Not now. I’m surprised Haggerty has put up with it this long.”

“There’s a lot going down at the precinct. Internal Affairs is having a field day after that meth bust.

They’ve got so many guys on leave right now that a bottle of Dewar’s in John’s desk is the least of Haggerty’s problems.”

“I just don’t want you to get sucked into CID.”

He slipped his hands inside my robe and nuzzled my neck. “No chance of that. Nobody on the force feels like this.”

I pushed him away halfheartedly.

I’ll call you when I know what’s going on.”

The door closed behind him.

I sank onto a kitchen chair and flipped open the People magazine lying on the table. Griff and I had just finished an investigation for an heiress in the diamond industry whose sticky handed husband had resorted to blackmailing her brother as a way around their pre-nup. The ink on her twenty-thousand-dollar check made out to Cole & Co. was still wet. And being that I was the & Co. part of the check, I’d earned a leisurely morning.

The phone rang just as I was getting to the interview with Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell on the secrets of a long-term relationship. Caller ID told me it was Katie Nightingale, our go-to girl at the office. Katie kept track of everything from appointments to finances to take-out menus.

I lifted the phone and hit ‘answer’.

“Britt?” Katie spoke before I had a chance, never a good sign.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“Missing woman.”

“Since when?”

“Last night.”

“What makes her missing? It hasn’t even been twenty-four hours.”

“The woman who called said her sister was leaving an abusive husband and was supposed to let her know when she was safe by ringing the phone once at seven-thirty. The call never came. Now she can’t get hold of her. She said her sister carries your card in her wallet.”

“What’s her name?”

“The woman who called is Beth Jones. Her sister is Shirley Trudeau.”

I nodded into the phone. I can’t remember every woman I encounter, but Shirley’s name rang a bell. Since giving up my position as a Family Law attorney with Hughes and Sandown, I’d been offering free legal aid for women who needed advice but couldn’t afford it. Mostly I worked with wives trying to extricate themselves from abusive marriages. Given the reason I’d abandoned my law career, it was the least I could do. Shirley hadn’t been living at the women’s shelter, but she’d spent enough time there to have Sandra, the shelter’s director, hook her up with me.

“And Beth thinks Shirley’s husband found her?”

“That’s what it sounded like once she’d calmed down enough to form actual words.”

“I’m on my way.”

I set the phone down, making a mental note to call Sandra. She’d upgraded from a caseworker in Connecticut to Director in Portland, Maine a few months ago. I’d stopped by her office to introduce myself when she started and left my business cards. Our paths didn’t cross that often but we respected each other’s work and always took a few minutes to chat. I knew she’d been on the swim team in college and that she could bench-press her weight. We were close in age and like minded when it came to the politics of non-profits. No doubt Beth Jones had called her too.

After a shower and a quick clean up of last night’s wine glasses, Chinese takeout containers and clothes that we’d left strewn around the living room, I locked the apartment door and began my fifteen-minute trek to our office on Middle Street. I savored my walk through the Old Port, the name given to Portland, Maine’s waterfront. The summer heat that a month ago had my shirt stuck tight against my back was a thing of the past and the snow and ice that would make walking an athletic event had not yet arrived. The cool, crisp air was like a shot of espresso. As long as I didn’t let my mind wander to what nature had in store, I could enjoy the rush.

I hit “contacts” on my phone and scanned the names for Sandra’s.

“Sandra, it’s Britt,” I said when she answered. “I wish this was a social call, but it’s not. Shirley Trudeau is missing.

“I know. Her sister called this morning. I’m on my way in now. How did you find out?”

“Her sister hired us to find her. “Was someone helping her leave?”

“She had a caseworker, but I wasn’t in on the plan. I’ll know more once I get to my office and talk to the person she was working with.”

“Okay if I call you later?”

“I don’t know how much I’ll be able to tell you. You know the rules. If she was on her way…”

I stopped mid-stride and lowered the phone from my ear. Sandra’s voice slipped away. That dead body that Griff went to look at… my gut said, Shirley Trudeau.

***

Excerpt from The Church of the Holy Child by Patricia Hale. Copyright © 2017 by Patricia Hale. Reproduced with permission from Patricia Hale. All rights reserved.

 

Author Bio:

Patricia Hale

Patricia Hale received her MFA degree from Goddard College. Her essays have appeared in literary magazines and the anthology, My Heart’s First Steps. Her debut novel, In the Shadow of Revenge, was published in 2013. The Church of the Holy Child is the first book in her PI series featuring the team of Griff Cole and Britt Callahan. Patricia is a member of Sister’s in Crime, Mystery Writer’s of America, NH Writer’s Project and Maine Writer’s and Publisher’s Alliance. She lives in New Hampshire with her husband and two dogs.

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Giveaway:

This is a rafflecopter giveaway hosted by Partners in Crime Virtual Book Tours for Patricia Hale. There will be 1 winners of one (1) Amazon.com Gift Card! The giveaway begins on July 16 and runs through October 19, 2017.
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chronicallypainful:

Even with treatment, I am still sick.

Even with accommodations I am still disabled.

(via spooniestrong)

GENOCIDE BY PAT KRAPF: A REVIEW, EXCERPT, & GIVEAWAY

Genocide

by Pat Krapf

on Tour June 1-30, 2017

Synopsis:

Genocide by Patricia Krapf

Sean Ireland, the first gay presidential candidate in US history, is guaranteed the election—until he’s found dead at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco.

Stunned by her friend’s murder, private investigator Darcy McClain is determined to hunt down Sean’s killer. In shock, she returns home to find someone has broken into her home, assaulted her sister, and stolen Bullet, her giant schnauzer.

After Sean’s death, more grisly murders follow, leading the police to suspect a serial killer, but Darcy isn’t convinced. In the course of her investigation, she’s astounded to discover evidence of a high-level government conspiracy to exterminate gays and lesbians. Is Sean’s murder tied to this conspiracy? Could someone in the government have killed him? Darcy vows to track down her friend’s murderer, save Bullet, and discover the truth.

Krapf weaves a captivating tale that will leave readers wanting more of Darcy McClain’s shrewd investigative adventures as she and her bold canine sidekick, Bullet, navigate the clever plot twists in her thrillers.

REVIEW:

Sometimes you find a book that is so terrifying, it doesn’t just give you nightmares, it prevents you from sleeping altogether. Genocide is one of those books. While it’s written as a mystery, and is a darn good one, too, the ideas put forth within the book are a bit too close to the realm of possibility for comfort to allow the intelligent person to ignore the potential implications of the progressions of modern science and what could happen should wicked people choose to play God. This book has given me much to think about, worry about, and study about.

When I opened the book, I expected a bit of a light read, something a bit heavier than a cozy mystery, but still not a hardcore story. I was only a few pages in before I happily realized Genocide was NOT a cozy mystery. I read the entire novel in a massive gulp, appreciating the research that went into such an involved tale. There are mysteries galore, not just a single unsolved crime, and amid all the murders lurks the overwhelming worry of the private investigator’s stolen Giant Schnauzer.

This is a book for conspiracy theorists, people who love involved mysteries, those who love well-written and well-researched mysteries, and anyone who enjoys a really thought-provoking story.

Book Details:

Genre: Technothriller
Published by: Thunder Glass Press
Publication Date: June 2017
Number of Pages: 502
ISBN: 978-1-941300-05-3
Series: A Darcy McClain and Bullet Thriller, #3 (These are Stand Alone titles)
Purchase Links: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Goodreads

Read an excerpt:

Chapter 1

Darcy rose at dawn, descended the stairs two at a time, and yanked open the front door, eager to read the headlines of her morning Chronicle. She scooped the newspaper off the walk and chuckled as she saw the faces of her two friends plastered across the front page. Never had she been so absorbed in a presidential election.

Before she headed back indoors, she paused to survey the quiet cul-de-sac with its houses stacked close together, their gray outlines awash in the jaundiced glow of the streetlights. No one stirred in the neighborhood. Too early. Even the local cat who loved to sleep on the front porch was nowhere in sight.

A light breeze kicked up. Dead leaves cartwheeled over mowed lawns, and the cold spray from the neighbor’s automatic sprinklers misted her from head to toe. She dodged a second dousing and ducked into the house, collecting Charlene’s skateboard as she entered the foyer.

Freshly brewed coffee drew her to the kitchen. She poured a cup and slid onto the window seat in the breakfast nook to devour every word of the three-page article. Most of the content she already knew, but she never tired of reading about Governor Sean Ireland and Senator Magdalena “Mags” Cortés. Even though Darcy thought she knew her friends, the past few months had brought one shocking piece of information after another. In all the years Darcy had known Sean—dating back to their college days at Stanford Law School—not once had he ever alluded to running for the presidency. When he became governor of California, he claimed he was more than satisfied with his current role and had no intention of running for any other office. Yet a year ago, he declared his candidacy, and in a bold (and some said premature) move, announced his vice presidential candidate, Senator Mags Cortés. Mags and the Latino community had a long-standing love affair, and pundits predicted she would sweep seventy percent of their vote.

While it came as a surprise Sean aspired to be president, it was no revelation Mags was his vice presidential pick. Separately, the two possessed the talent and power to accomplish anything they set their minds to. Together, The Formidable Two, as they had been dubbed by the press, packed an unbeatable punch. Before the election campaign had even started, their opponents admitted their own victory would not come easily, if at all.

Only one factor bothered the American public: the personal relationship between Sean and Mags. Not everyone was keen on the idea of a presidential candidate and his VP running mate potentially marrying. “Conflict of interest,” the opposition protested publicly and frequently, for most assumed the lifelong friends and reported sweethearts would marry one day. Neither refuted the rumors, so they persisted for years—until last month’s press conference, when both had dropped mind-blowing bombshells.

In a secret ceremony, Mags had married billionaire Gaspar Cruz. At the time of her “bolt from the blue,” as the press called it, she and hubby had been married more than six months. But Mags’s revelation paled in comparison with Sean’s shocker: a public proclamation of his sexuality. The majority of his constituents thought the decision to come out was political suicide, but they were wrong. Instead, he clinched the majority of the gay and lesbian vote and won over those who trended liberal, and because of his exemplary track record as senator and then governor, most conservatives chose to overlook his orientation in favor of his ability to bring about real change in government—a talent already proven at the state level.

The mudroom door opened and shut, cutting into Darcy’s thoughts. Charlene strolled into the kitchen with Bullet. The giant schnauzer frogged out on the tiled floor while her sister washed a handful of herbs picked fresh from their garden. Charlene looked relaxed in floral yoga pants, a pink sweatshirt, and pink flip-flops. She wore her long brown hair swept into a ponytail, and a pink headband kept the loose strands away from her oval face. Today her fingernails and toenails sparkled with pink polish.

Darcy inspected her own fingernails, next her toes. Maybe she should take a cue from Charlene and invest in a manicure and pedicure. Or a trip to the salon for highlights. She glanced at her sister. No, one high-maintenance person in the family was enough.

Charlene lowered her sunglasses and leveled her hazel eyes at Darcy. “You aren’t reading about that campaign again, are you?”

Darcy folded the newspaper. “I am.”

Charlene opened the refrigerator door and began setting items on the countertop in preparation for the brunch she promised to fix while on spring break from Stanford. “I’ve never seen you so absorbed in an election. Sean should hire you as his campaign manager. Do you think he stands a chance? Being gay, that is.”

Often her sister took the opposing view simply to create conflict or to get a rise out of Darcy, but today she refused to bite. “Why not? We’ve had a black president and a Catholic president, so why not a gay president with a Hispanic VP? What I care about is his ability and whether he has the intestinal fortitude and bipartisan support to do the job he pledged to do.”

“He’s certainly made a great governor.”

“Yes, he has. By the way, thanks for fixing brunch … on your first day of vacation.”

“Better to do it today or I’ll be off doing a gazillion other things and will forget completely.” She placed her hands on her hips. “Tell me, when do you plan to move into the digital age? As in ditch the newspaper and read it online?”

“Never. I love the smell of newsprint in the morning.”

Metal clanged.

Bullet cocked his head.

Charlene frowned. “Mail? At this hour?”

Light spilled across the entry. An envelope sailed through the mail slot and landed on the tile. In a barking frenzy, Bullet scooted off the floor and limped into the foyer.

Darcy sprang out of her seat and snatched up the letter before Bullet could pounce on it. Baffled by the early delivery, she flung open the front door. “Stay.” Bullet sat. Darcy jogged to the curb and glanced down Mandalay Lane, expecting to see a courier or a departing vehicle of some kind, but the neighborhood of mostly elderly people still slept.

She examined the envelope. Plain white and nothing written on the outside. No courier service had delivered it. She ripped the seal with her fingernail and removed a card along with a check. The note read, “Meet me. 9:00 a.m. Palace of Fine Arts.” No date?

She flipped the check over and whistled low and long. Why would Sean write her a check for 250 grand? A retainer, no less—for the word was scrawled in the memo section. And why hadn’t he rung the bell and stopped in for coffee, or at least for an explanation?

On her way back into the house, she petted Bullet on the head and said, “Good boy,” releasing him from his stay.

The hall clock chimed as she locked the front door. She had better get moving if she planned to be home in time for brunch. And, she was dying to hear why Sean had written her a retainer for a quarter of a million dollars.

“Time to go.” Darcy placed the check and note in the writing desk in the kitchen.

“You haven’t been for your run?”

“Too busy reading the paper. Need anything from the store? Nothing big, of course.”

“Nope,” said Charlene. “I have everything planned, including dessert. Oh, and I gave Bullet his meds for his cut paw.”

“Thanks.” Darcy wiggled into a nylon Windbreaker, grabbed her water bottle off the butcher block, and kissed Bullet between the eyes. He followed her into the mudroom and waited expectantly at the side door that opened onto the driveway. She hated leaving him behind, but the vet had said no running until the cut on his pad healed. She latched the screen door and tested the handle. Lately, Bullet had gotten into the habit of letting himself out of the house. As she walked down the drive, his whines tugged at her heart.

Darcy warmed up with a slow jog as she left Mandalay for Lombard—the most crooked street in the city—and raced up the steep stairs, her knees pumping high, clearing each step with ease.

Leaving Lombard, she sprinted onto Hyde, and ran at a lung-bursting speed toward the fog-shrouded streets of Fisherman’s Wharf. On the harbor, she shot down the waterfront and quickly approached the docks, the slips veiled in white. Although she couldn’t see many of the yachts or sailboats that bobbed in the water, she heard the lap of the surf against their sides and the rasp of metal against wood as they tugged at their moorings.

She peeled away from one pier after another, until the Ferry Building came into view. She reached it and slowed a bit, mindful of the crowds of city workers pouring from the boat terminal, everyone in a hurry to reach their jobs in the downtown districts. She conducted a U-turn, and flew back up the Embarcadero, cutting her normal route short so she wouldn’t miss Sean.

At Pier 23 Charlene crept into Darcy’s mind. Her sister’s friendship with Vicky Lord, a young woman Darcy distrusted, continued to worry her. She had hoped that once Vicky and Charlene no longer roomed together at Stanford, the two would go their separate ways. But no. Vicky had rented a house near campus and had asked Charlene to move in rent-free. In every aspect, Vicky spelled trouble. Dan Gruet, Darcy’s former partner at the FBI, called the tattooed and pierced kid Wild Child.

Darcy’s thoughts skipped from Charlene to Sean’s double shocker. What had prompted him to come out now? “Honesty,” he had said. And what had triggered this sudden decision to run for the highest office in the land? Even more of a mystery, why did he want to hire her and for what, especially at a quarter of a million dollars? She couldn’t think of what service she could be to him.

Her favorite pier came into view. She sidestepped a man power washing the sidewalks and maneuvered around a refrigerator truck parked at the rear of a chowder house. From Pier 39 rose the sharp barks of sea lions. She circled the jetty, sucking in the salty air and pausing briefly to bid a silent good morning to the noisy mammals she had grown so fond of. Life was good. The tension in her neck eased as she again bore down on Fisherman’s Wharf.

Easy, methodical strides propelled her past the shops and restaurants waking to another day. She steered clear of milling tourists, navigated around a group of cyclists, and avoided a collision with a rollerblader preoccupied with texting. Two hours earlier, her normal run time, she would have owned the wharf. Few people appeared before dawn.

Maintaining a steady pace, she sailed along Jefferson until the pavement gave way to the Bay Trail. Flying by the shoreline at a pulse-pounding speed, she navigated around a pedestrian and gained momentum as she set her sights on Fort Mason, gearing up for the trail detour she had been taking ever since the city started their repairs on the retaining wall. She would be glad when they finished. The bypass route led her up a narrow, steep concrete staircase and then connected to an equally narrow walkway before disgorging its occupants onto Upper Fort Mason. Darcy managed the detour without crashing headlong into anyone, or vice versa, and breathed a sigh of relief as she left the park for Marina Boulevard.

Rejuvenated, Darcy increased her tempo as she neared the intersection of Scott and Marina, her feet striking the pavement in a rhythmic thump, thump, thump, the sound suddenly overridden by the louder, heavier slaps of sneakers on pavement. Another runner. She glanced over her shoulder.

Someone barreled into her. She hit the sidewalk. Pain shot through her lower back as her butt landed on concrete. Dazed, she stared at the black man towering over her. Without a word of apology or any attempt to help her, he dashed into the busy boulevard. Horns honked and someone cursed the man.

“Jackass,” Darcy muttered. She scrambled to her feet, retrieved her water bottle, and brushed dirt from her shorts, eager to be on her way. She didn’t want to miss Sean, assuming the note meant today. This was her normal running route, and he knew it since they often ran together, so on any given day she was likely to bump into him anyway.

As Darcy stood across from Lyon Street, waiting for the signal light to change, an orange sun cut through the lifting fog. Ahead loomed the Palace of Fine Arts, its ornate dome glowing copper red under the morning rays. She dropped to a walk, surprised to see the entire area cordoned off with barricades and a phalanx of San Francisco’s finest blocking all avenues into the monument.

Two officers broke from the crowd and said in unison, “Presidio is closed, ma’am.”

“What happened?” she asked, not expecting an answer.

“Come back another time,” the traffic cop said, his hand resting possessively on his holster.

Darcy turned to retrace her steps, hoping to approach the rotunda from a different route. In the distance, sirens shattered the peace. Their shrill whines grew louder as wave after wave of emergency vehicles and squad cars flooded the Presidio, choking off every artery. The invasion continued until the peaceful community swarmed with law enforcement. Front doors opened, and residents gathered on their porches or the sidewalks to gawk at the commotion.

She zipped her Windbreaker to conceal her shoulder rig and snuck between the vehicle-flanked streets to where a crowd had assembled at a police barrier. “What happened?”

“Cops won’t say,” said one of the cyclists milling around the barricade. “All I know is, the streets are crawling with cops.”

“We should’ve stayed at the Golden Gate,” complained another cyclist, her head bent as she examined the toe clips attached to her bicycle pedals.

A jogger stopped in front of the growing crowd of onlookers. “Hey, what’s going on?”

“Not sure,” Darcy answered.

“Must be serious,” he said, panting. “Police are going door-to-door asking if anyone saw anything, and I heard they’ve sealed off all roads within a one-mile radius. Whatever happened must be big.”

An ambulance nosed past them, tailed by a white SUV with San Francisco Medical Examiner on the side. The vehicles parked at the curb just as two vans careened onto the grounds. The letters stenciled on the compartment doors read kxtv.

A young policeman posted at the barricade shouted, “Tell them to get lost!”

A fellow officer who looked like he’d been on the force since the Kennedy administration gave the younger policeman a tired look. “At least keep them at bay.”

Someone called out a hello to Tony Barazza, the chief medical examiner and a friend of Darcy’s. Not wanting to be seen by Barazza at this particular moment, she blended into the crowd and watched him elbow his way through the throng along with Martinez, an investigator from the coroner’s office.

“Geary ordered the area sealed off,” an officer passed the word. “The entire palace area. Understood?”

“Got it,” another officer answered.

Darcy moved to the sidelines, searching for a weak point in the stronghold of blue, but all she saw were reinforcements and medics arriving by the minute. The chaos escalated. She slunk to the rear of the crowd, and crossed the pavement to Palace Drive. The street wrapped the back side of the palace grounds. No one confronted her, so she walked on and had almost reached the other side of the monument when she spotted two uniformed officers patrolling Lyon and Bay and another two loitering on the last stretch of lawn between her and the palace. To avoid suspicion, she met them midway.

“Officers, hi. Maybe you can help me.”

“The grounds are closed,” said the taller of the two. “You have to leave. Now.”

“Sorry, I didn’t know.” She headed back up Palace Drive, mind busy working out her next move. She glanced behind her. The officers were gone, so she walked briskly toward Bay, not at all surprised to see the policeman chatting with fellow officers at a police barricade on Lyon. She slipped among the parked cars and spied on them.

A man wearing a khaki jacket and pants appeared on the sidewalk. He took keys from his pocket and crossed the street to a row of cars. One of the officers at the Lyon roadblock homed in on him.

“Hey, you. Yes, you!” the policeman hollered. “Who gave you permission to enter the area?”

“I didn’t realize I needed permission, Officer …?”

“Osborn. Let’s see some identification.”

“Sure.” The man handed over his driver’s license.

Osborn studied the stranger’s face against the photograph on the license. “Jesús Santiago?”

“Yes, sir. Can I go now?”

“Are you in a hurry?” Osborn handed back the license.

“Frankly, yes sir, I am. My client needs ten blowups—enlargements—and they’re due tomorrow.” Santiago unlocked a dilapidated Volkswagen van and leaned into the driver’s side.

“When did you arrive at the palace?”

“Dawn. And I’m not here to tour the palace, but the Presidio.” Santiago sneezed twice. “Allergies.”

“What have you been doing all this time?”

“Shooting birds. With a camera, of course. I’m a professional photographer. My client owns Tweety Bird Feeds, a seed company outside Oakland.”

Osborn grunted. “Open your backpack.”

Stiff from crouching, Darcy shifted her weight from one leg to the other, giving her a better vantage point.

Santiago released the nylon buckle, shrugged off the rucksack, and rested it gently on the ground.

“Unpack it.”

Santiago complied. “Cameras. Lenses. Water.”

“The palace grounds are closed to all traffic, including pedestrians. The officers posted at the Marina barricade will point you to the detour route.”

Santiago shook his head. “Great. Another delay.”

“Good day, sir, and thank you for your cooperation.” Osborn radioed a fellow officer. “Kenton, Osborn. A white Volkswagen van is headed your way. Direct him to the detour. After he leaves, radio me.”

Seconds after Santiago’s van dipped from view, Osborn’s two-way radio squawked. “He’s gone? Good. Thanks, Kenton.” Osborn walked across the lawn and disappeared from view.

Rocking forward, Darcy prepared to stand, but she felt a slight tug followed by a tearing sound. Something had snagged her jacket. She bent down to free her Windbreaker and noticed the license plates on the sports car parked beside her: eql ryts. Sean’s car. He must be somewhere in the Presidio. She placed a hand on the hood to raise herself. The metal was cool to the touch. The car had been here a while.

She swept the area and immediately spotted Detective Walter Ortiz, a cop she knew well from a previous case. He and several other officers lingered at the fringe of the parking lot. The party broke up, and Officer Fillmore, a rookie from the Central Station, began his patrol of the area. She had an idea. Not original, but few were. She pulled out her PI license and advanced on Fillmore, calling out as she approached, “Have you seen Detective Ortiz?”

As she hoped, her assertiveness threw Fillmore, who had been on the force for a month. “Oh, hi, Detective McClain. He’s in the rotunda. Why?”

“He’s expecting me.”

“Really?” Fillmore hesitated. “I’ll show—”

“Thanks, I know the way.”

“Wait.”

Darcy pretended not to hear. She crossed the greenbelt at a fast walk. Out of sight of Fillmore, she veered onto a walkway, dived into the shrubs bordering the lagoon, and ducked under the yellow crime scene tape, one end of which was anchored to a tree trunk, the other tied around a colonnade.

She stole to the nearest wall and kept low for cover. A team of three stationed at the archway milled about. One carried a logbook, his job to sign in and out anyone who entered or exited the monument.

A gentle breeze stirred the scent of freshly mown grass, and muffled voices filtered from the rotunda, the words inaudible. She leaned sideways for a better view, her shoulder against the pillar for leverage. Detective Geary, a bald man pushing fifty, threw out his chest and sucked in his gut as he joined five of his officers and two plainclothes cops huddled at the palace entrance. Barazza and Martinez lingered nearby, talking in low voices. Barazza noticed Geary and headed toward the officer. A short conversation ensued. Geary spewed expletives, slapped Barazza on the back, and rejoined his men for another gab session.

Suddenly, the group exploded in loud argument, and two uniformed officers broke from the tight-knit assembly. The men seemed agitated, pacing and puffing nervously on cigarettes, apparently contemplating something important. Then the loop tightened and the heated debate continued. Curiosity ate at Darcy.

As time passed, gathering clouds blocked the sun, and shadows dulled the silhouettes inside the monument, making it difficult to discern one figure from another, especially from her angle and when most wore blue.

“Hey, get those lights in here.” Geary bellowed his directive.

Officers scurried into the theater. They unpacked tripods equipped with high-wattage spotlights and arranged them in a semicircle. Bright floodlights doused the honey-colored walls in blinding white.

“Okay, everyone out.” Geary’s gruff voice resonated through the dome.

People scattered. Darcy’s pulse quickened. On the ground sprawled a man, his back to her, one arm tucked under his body and his head partially hidden. He wore brown Dockers, loafers, and a white shirt. She craned her neck to catch a closer look, but the angle wouldn’t allow for a clear view. A policewoman stepped forward and covered the body with a blanket. Darcy eased off the concrete ledge to the ground and paused, thinking through the best approach to access the rotunda.

A hand closed on her shoulder. “Seen enough?”

She spun. “Osborn. Hi.”

Osborn leaned sideways, his gaze toward the rotunda. “Hey, Hilton. Come here.”

A short, dark-haired man in his mid-thirties strutted in their direction. Hilton, too, was new to the force, not a rookie but a transfer from LA. He saw Darcy and shook his head. “McClain, how in the hell did you get past the command post? Shit, Geary’s going to blow his top. Sir!” Hilton shouted to his boss. “I need you for a minute.”

“I’m coming,” said Geary. Darcy had tangled with him on many investigations, the outcome never good. He put an unlit cigar between his lips and scratched his silver-and-brown mustache with his thumb. The minute he laid eyes on her, his slow gait increased to a fast shuffle. “You working this job, McClain? No, so scat.” To Hilton, Geary shouted, “Goddamn it. Who’s sleeping on the job? I want names. Do you hear me, Hilton? Names.”

“Yes, sir.”

Geary turned back to Darcy. “Well, what are you doing here, McClain?”

“Out for a jog.”

Geary snickered. “Right.”

“Detective. Sir,” an officer called to Geary.

“Yeah, Beckwith? What is it?”

“Press wants to interview you. They want to know if you can ID the guy.”

“Tell the assholes I’m trying to conduct a murder investigation plus deal with other crap.” He cocked his thumb at Darcy. “Now back to work and find the damn murder weapon.”

“Yes, sir. Sir, what is the murder weapon?” asked Beckwith.

“The hell if I know. Just keep searching.”

A tall, distinguished-looking black man in a tan suit sauntered over to Geary. Darcy liked Detective Ortiz, a man with a conscience, for God knows Geary had none.

“Darcy, hi.” A smile brightened Ortiz’s stern face, and his hand shot out.

She shook it. “Good to see you again.”

Geary muttered something, followed by, “Okay, you two, cut the sweet stuff. We’re here on business.”

Ortiz glanced at his cell phone. “MacDonald says he found something interesting.”

“Oh?” Geary’s dour expression brightened. “Let’s talk over there. Where it’s private.”

After a few moments, Ortiz motioned to Darcy to come over.

Geary cursed. “No reason to involve her whatsoever. None.” Darcy didn’t hear Ortiz’s reply, only Geary’s loud bark. “Okay, okay. So let her identify the victim. Then she leaves.”

Ortiz made eye contact. His sad expression carried a warning: “This won’t be easy.” And his demeanor said she knew the victim. He walked her to where the body lay. A cool breeze rustled the bushes, tousling Darcy’s damp hair. A shiver skidded along her spine, and sweat beaded on her upper lip. It seemed like an eternity until he pulled back the blanket.

“I’m so sorry.” Ortiz touched her shoulder.

Numb, Darcy knelt, one hand on the ground to steady herself, her knees weak and her brain denying what her eyes clearly saw. “How did he die?”

“Don’t answer.” Geary stepped in front of Darcy. “Now stand, McClain.”

“It does no harm to give her a minute.” Ortiz grabbed Geary’s arm and led him away from the body. Begrudgingly, Geary went along.

Darcy stared at her friend, lying lifeless on the cold ground. Disbelief and sadness tore at her heart, and tears stung her eyes. Through blurred vision, she whispered her goodbye. “I’ll miss you, Sean.”

***

Excerpt from Genocide by Pat Krapf. Copyright © 2017 by Pat Krapf. Reproduced with permission from Pat Krapf. All rights reserved.

 

Author Bio:

Patricia Krapf

Patricia “Pat” Krapf is a full-time writer and author of the acclaimed Darcy McClain and Bullet Thriller Series.

She and her husband live in Texas with their giant schnauzer Bullet, who at a hundred pounds has found his way into the plot of his master’s books.

Pat was an active member of the Dallas-Ft. Worth Writers’ Workshop for ten years and is now a member of several professional writing organizations, including Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime. She frequents Bouchercon and the DFW Writers Conference. Her second book, Gadgets, won the Betty L. Henrichs Award for Best Publishable Mystery.

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