Ready for the second in the Digging up Bones series to come out? T.A. Moore is here with just the thing to tide you over til the 26th release of Skin and Bone. See what the guys have been up to, watch a video and enter in the giveaway for a $20 Dreamspinner Press gift card too!
Title: Skin and Bone (Book 2 of the Digging up Bones series)
Publisher: Dreamspinner Press
Release: 26 February
Cover Artist: Bree Archer
Tour:
20 - My Fiction Nook
21 - Two Chicks Obsessed
24 - Boy Meets Boy
25 - Love Bytes
26 - Joyfully Jay
Blurb:
Cloister Witte and his K-9 partner, Bourneville, find the lost and bring them home.
But the job doesn’t always end there.
Janet Morrow, a young trans woman, lies in a coma after wandering away from her car during a storm. But just because Cloister found the young tourist doesn’t mean she’s home. What brought her to Plenty, California… and who didn’t want her to leave?
With the help of Special Agent Javi Merlo, who continues to deny his growing feelings for the rough-edged deputy, Cloister unearths a ten-year-old conspiracy of silence that taps into Plenty’s history of corruption.
Janet Morrow’s old secrets aren’t the only ones coming to light. Javi has tried to put his past behind him, but some people seem determined to pull his skeletons out of the closet. His dark history with a senior agent in Phoenix complicates not just the investigation but his relationship with Cloister.
And since when has he cared about that?
Post Content:
First of all, thank you so much for having me! I’m thrilled to be here with Skin and Bone, the second book in the Digging up Bones series. Authors should probably be like parents in that they never admit any book is their favourite, but I love this series. It was great fun for me to revisit them in Skin and Bone and I hope you guys enjoy seeing them again too!
For this blog tour I have written a short story called ‘Sticks and Stones’ where you can see what Javi and Cloister were up to between books!
Sticks and Stones - Chapter Four
Some days Javi wished that Cloister was as simple as he liked people to think. It would make sticking to Javi’s usual ‘one stand only rules’ a lot easier. Javi knew his flaws. He was arrogant, impatient, and he could be cruel...with some people it was so easy that ‘could be’ changed to ‘was’.
Cloister made it easy--he was a redneck with a Montana drawl, who lived in a trailer and liked hot dogs, dogs, and bands with dog in the name--but he gave as good as he got. And he was good with people.
Not like Javi. He had a knack for fault lines, the weak points in someone where just a little bit of pressure could make you do what you want. Cloister was an manipulative as a hammer. He could read people though, understand why that weak point was there.
He was right about Mary-Anne. She did have something to hide.
“It looks like someone had Judge Buchanan under surveillance,” Javi said. He enlarged the photo of the note on his phone and passed it over the table. “They tracked everything she did. Right down to her lunch order it looks like.”
Mary-Anne touched her fingers to the screen and folded her lower lip between her teeth. She made a choked sound that could have been a laugh or a strangled back sob.
“Ham on rye,” she said. “Her lucky sandwich. That’s what she had for lunch the day she won her first big case, and what she had for lunch every day after that. Nothing like the taste of rye and victory, that’s what she said.”
She rolled her wet eyes and dabbed at her lashes.
“Mary-Anne, this isn’t a list that someone could construct from a distance. There’s too many details, too much time covered,” Javi said. “This had to be put together by someone with access to Ellie’s life. Can you think of anyone that she might have mentioned made her uncomfortable, maybe showed her more attention than usual?”
Mary-Annie shook her head.
“It’s probably just an intern,” she said as she pushed the phone back toward him. Her smile was watery as she shrugged. “They always try and impress her, work out how to get her what she wants before she wants it. The good ones realise soon enough that all she wants is that they do a good job.”
“Do you know any of their names?” Javi asked. He lifted his phone and tucked it into his pocket. “I could check.”
Mary-Anne shook her head and sat back in the chair. Her hands picked nervously at themselves in her lap.
“She doesn’t talk about work,” she said. “When she decided to retire we made a deal that we were going to live in the future, talk about places we were going to go and things we were going to do. So she wouldn’t change her mind. I don’t know who— I don’t think this is important, SA Merlo. Please, just find my wife and prove that I’m ridiculous?”
Definitely hiding something. Javi paused for a second as he watched Mary-Anne fret opposite him. She was nervous, too eager to brush what would normally be alarming evidence away as unimportant, and yet she seemed genuinely worried.
“You said you didn’t realise when Ellie got up during the night?”
“It’s what she did. To work. To read. To walk the dog, before we had to—“ Mary-Anne stopped and pressed the heel of her hand against her eye socket. “Ellie never sleeps much. Probably because she drinks so much coffee. I’m used to her not being there when I roll over.”
“So what was different tonight?”
“We’d argued,” Mary-Anne said. “About...something and nothing. I was just on edge.”
Javi nodded. “Thank you, Mary-Anne,” he said. “I’ll get back to the search.”
He stood up and Mary-Anne mirrored him. She fumbled a bottle of pills out of her pocket and held them out to him.
“There’s something else,” she said. “I think she took some of my sleeping pills last night. They’re not that strong, but it might have made her confused. I don’t know.”
Javi made a note of the name, promised to call if he found anything, and went outside. His car was parked at the bottom of the drive, behind the deputy’s squad cars, and the white shell gravel slid under his feet as he walked down. The alarm beeped quietly as he unlocked it.
Down the road he saw Cloister lug a massive, potted fern from the back of the gardener’s truck. Bourneville sat on the narrow strip of pavement with her head cocked to one side in confusion. At least, Javi thought dryly, had some idea of proper behavior.
He locked his car again, gave the long, dark road a cursory glance, and jogged across.
“Good use of police time, Deputy,” he said.
Cloister put the heavy planter down on a cart and brushed his hands together. He gestured to the nervous man with ‘Ballentine’s Landscaping Services’ sewn onto his shirt.
“Mr Dao does the landscaping at my trailer park,” Cloister said. Javi tried not to wince. Or judge Mr Dao. The yellowed patches of grass around Cloister’s trailer weren’t exactly an impressive testament to Ballentine’s work. “He’s been here half the night, getting the house ready for a birthday party.”
The explanation didn’t make Mr Dao look any less nervous. He bobbed his head awkwardly at Javi and shifted his weight from one cracked boot to the other.
“I need to get back to work,” he said in a quiet, hoarse voice as he grabbed the cart. “Everything has to be ready for breakfast. Thank you for the help, Mr Witte. Deputy.”
“Wait,” Cloister said as he put a hand on one of the planters. “Tell Javi here what you were telling me.”
Mr Dao rubbed a rough-worked hand down his face. “I don’t want to get involved.”
“It could be important,” Cloister said.
“No one is trouble, Mr Dao,” Javi said. “It’s a missing person case. We just need to find Mrs Buchanan.”
“Ellie?” Dao asked. He scratched his head and nodded, more to himself than them. “She was always very nice to me. Very kind. I did some work for them.”
“Was?” Javi asked, as non-accusatory as he could make the question.
Somewhat to his surprise Dao just looked confused, not alarmed.
“A few months ago they let me go,” he said. “Ellie, Judge Buchanan, had asked me to take down this tree in the background. Then, I guess she changed her mind? Or maybe her wife did and Ellie didn’t want the trouble. She said she’d never asked me to do anything, accused me of lying, and then Mary-Anne told me not to come back.”
Cloister cleared his throat. “You saw Mary-Anne earlier didn’t you?”
There was a pause as Dao wrestled with whether to say something or not. He finally nodded. “Up and down the road, for a couple of hours,” he said. “She said that Ellie sleepwalked and that she’d gotten out. I helped for a while, but I had to get back to work.”
Again. Javi glanced sidelong at Cloister, who didn’t even have the grace to look smug.
“When was this?” Javi asked.
Dao pursed his lips and rubbed his wrist absently, even though his wrist was bare of a watch.
“It was around 11?” he said after a moment of internal calculation. “I came back from the nursery with some plants and she was already out. After midnight the lady, the housekeeper, came out and they talked for a while, then went back in.”
The housekeeper had called at two am to report Ellie missing. That was a long time to wait if you were that alarmed.
“Can I…” Dao jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the drive. “I’ve got stuff to do.”
Javi nodded. “Of course,” he said. “Thanks for your help.”
Author Bio:
TA Moore -
TA Moore is a Northern Irish writer of romantic suspense, urban fantasy, and contemporary romance novels. A childhood in a rural, seaside town fostered in her a suspicious nature, a love of mystery, and a streak of black humour a mile wide. As her grandmother always said, ‘she’d laugh at a bad thing that one’, mind you, that was the pot calling the kettle black. TA Moore studied History, Irish mythology, English at University, mostly because she has always loved a good story. She has worked as a journalist, a finance manager, and in the arts sectors before she finally gave in to a lifelong desire to write.
Coffee, Doc Marten boots, and good friends are the essential things in life. Spiders, mayo, and heels are to be avoided.
Website: www.tamoorewrites.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TAMoorewrites/
Twitter: @tamoorewrites
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Thank you for the excerpt!
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