T.A. Moore returns with a blog tour and giveaway for upcoming release, Prodigal (Lost and Found #1)! Check out what the romantic suspense is all about, see the exclusive chapter from the Lost and Found prequel, Feet of Clay, and enter in the giveaway for a $10 Dreamspinner Press gift card!
Publisher: Dreamspinner Press
Release: Feb 13
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Prodigal-Lost-Found-Book-1-ebook/dp/B082FJ32PG
Dreamspinner Link: https://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/books/prodigal-by-ta-moore-11519-b
Blurb: Fifteen years ago Sammy Calloway disappeared on his way home from school. Now he’s back… or is he?
Boyd Maccabbee has spent his life second-guessing his actions on that fateful day. What if he’d done something differently? Maybe Sammy would have made it home safe and never become Cutters Gap’s most tragic famous son. Or would it have been Boyd who was never seen again? When the police find new evidence on the disappearance, Boyd hopes to finally get some answers.
The last thing Morgan Graves needs is to be dragged into some old case about a missing kid. He doesn’t know why police hit on his DNA, but he’s not Sammy Calloway. He thinks he’d remember being kidnapped.
He knows he’d remember firefighter Boyd.
Drawn into the complex web of suspicion, grief, and anger that has knit Cutters Gap together in the years since Sammy’s disappearance, Morgan struggles to hang on to himself when everyone already assumes they know him.
And somewhere, the truth about Sammy Calloway is waiting.
First of all, thank you so much for having me! I’m thrilled to be here with my new release Prodigal, the first in the Lost and Found trilogy. Prodigal is set years after the disappearance of a child in Cutter’s Gap left the town, and the people left behind, shattered. In ‘Feet of Clay’ I revisit Cutter’s Gap in the years between Sammy Calloway’s disappearance and the start of Prodigal.
I hope you enjoy it.
Two
“We have a 10-42 out at the old Jenkins’ place,” Nat said over the radio, his voice sharp with annoyance. “Again. We need a car to go and break it up. MacKenzie?”
Mac hastily swallowed a mouthful of burger and pineapple. He wiped BBQ sauce off his fingers onto a napkin and thumbed the switch on the radio.
“MacKenzie,” he said. “I’ve got it.”
He wrapped the grease-stained paper around the half a burger he had left and stuffed it back into the take out bag. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d eaten his food cold, or not at all. His trash at home was a graveyard of take-out that started out so hopefully.
The quickest route out of town swung Mac past the school. He would have liked to blame the flicker of distraction as he glanced at the building on Masterton, but it was always the same. It was habit to play out one of the scenarios they’d had about what happened, to try and work out if there was something he’d missed.
If it had been Hill who’d taken Sammy from outside the school before his brother could get there, what would he have done next? The guy had no car, rode a bike to work -- had Sammy been somewhere in the school, been that close, when they started the search?
Or if Shay had collected his little brother…
Mac reached the end of the street and turned left. He left the speculation behind with the school, same as every time. It was the only way he could do his job. There were a dozen landmarks of the case, scattered through the town, that he couldn’t let go off. Someone, somewhere, had to have missed something and if he just...gnawed...at the facts long enough… But if they had, he would have too, and he couldn’t let it be all he thought of.
The Jenkins place had, briefly, been an alpaca farm.
It turned out that--like a lot of people--alpacas didn’t thrive in Cutter’s Gap. After a couple of lean years the Jenkins had tried to sell, gotten no buyers, and eventually just left the old farm to rot while they moved back up north.
These days it was a popular place for drug dealers and drunk kids. Sometimes they were the same people. Cutter’s Gap could be a hard place to get a foothold in.
Mac pulled up at the gate up to the farm. It had been chained shut by the department last time he’d been here, but it hung open now. The metal bars were bent and twisted, scraped with paint, and the chains had snapped.
Someone either didn’t care too much about their truck, or it wasn’t their truck.
Mac drove along the rutted old road to the house. A trashed pick-up pissed oil and gas onto the gravel, and a handful of other cars and a couple of motorbikes were parked around it. Mac could ID half the kids there by the cars. Small towns, long shifts.
He opened the car door. The almost physical thump of music made him wince as it hit him, all bass and cheap speaker distorted vocals. He hit the siren and left it wail as he grabbed the handheld speaker from the back and stalked up the rickety steps to the house.
“LAST CALL,” he said into the handset. About twenty kids--a handful of teenagers, a couple of college students--flinched at the sound and turned to see what he was doing. “TURN THAT OFF AND GET OUTSIDE. YOU’RE ALL TRESPASSING.”
The music cut out. A boy in a jeans and dreadlocks, voice cracked between baritone and tenor like he was three years younger than he was, yelled, “It’s the 12!”
Panic scattered the teens. They rolled off couches--and boyfriends--tossed down joints and raced for the door. Mac staggered as they hit him, a wall of weed and cheap whiskey sour youth, and turned to the side to them push past him. He walked over to stub out the joints on the carpet under his foot, a dozen new char marks on grey fibres, and registered the bag of pills spilled out on a coffee table.
Prescription bottles and blister packs, the loot from a raid on a dozen parental medicine cabinets. Ground up pills and broken open capsules littered the floor. Mac swore under his breath as he hooked the loudspeaker over his arm and pulled a pair of gloves out of his belt.
He carried the bag outside and held it up in the air.
“Anyone know anything about this?” he asked. A couple of kids shrugged. Most of them were trying to push his car out of the drive where it blocked their escape. Mac lifted the speaker to his mouth and barked, “HEY! WHO BROUGHT THESE TO PARTY?”
One lanky teenager slipped on the gravel and went down. A couple of the others turned around and looked shifty. Ben Anders there, Mac noted, was nearly twenty eight and definitely too old to be hanging out with high teenagers.
“Shay brought ‘em,” someone said. Everyone nodded. Two of them pointed as they added their agreement.
“Shay had them.”
“Shay brought the party favors.”
Aw, hell. Mac followed the fingers to where Shay Calloway was sprawled on the ground, shoulders braced against the flat tires of the wrecked pick-up. Twenty years old, nearly, and already such a screw up that everyone knew to blame him.
“You’re going to get your ass thrown in jail yet, Shay,” Mac said.
Shay shrugged and pushed his matted hair back from his face with the back of his hand. His t-shirt hung from a torn collar and his jeans were unbuttoned and barely hung up around his lean hips.
“Then at least you’ll have accomplished something with your career,” he said bitterly. Shay stuck both hands out in front of him, clumsily crossed at the wrist. “C’mon, Mackie. You’ve been dying to slap those cuffs on me for years. Take me away, for crimes against whatever…”
Shay tried to stand up and his jeans started to slide down. He grabbed at them to hitch then back up and measured the length of himself on the gravel. Grazes mottled his forearms red and shredded white as he folded them over the back of his head.
“Ow.”
Mac liked being a cop, most of the time. He was good at it, despite what everyone in town thought. Sometimes, though, he missed being able to call an idiot a fucking idiot.
He crunched over the drive and bent down to grab Shay’s arm and haul him back to his feet. Or up off his face, at least. Shay got half way there, on his knees with his hand cupped under his drizzling nose to catch the blood, when one of the handful of girls suddenly screamed.
“Lottie!” she screamed, voice shrill and nervous. Her heavy ponytail swung counterbalance as she tottered back and forth on wedge heeled sandals. “Where’s Lottie? I can’t find her!? Oh my god, Lottie! Where did she go?”
Author Bio:
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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