A warm welcome to author TA Moore joining us today for her mini tour on new release “Skin and Bones”.
Welcome TA 🙂
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 Five
“Did Mary-Anne mention sleep-walking to you?” Javi asked.
Cloister patted his leg to call Bourneville over. He scratched her cheek as she leaned against his leg, fur thick and her skin warm. She panted noisily, slobber dripped on the ground, and he made a mental note to get her a drink back at the car. It hadn’t been a long run but it had been a long night before they got here, and Bon had never learned that she could just walk up a hill.
“No,” he said. “It’s possible. My stepdad used to sleepwalk if he got drunk. He made pancakes once.”
Javi paused at that and raised his eyebrows. “Were they any good?”
Cloister laughed softly as he remembered the squall of the smoke alarm and the black discs in the cast iron pan. They’d had them for breakfast anyhow once Dad had woken up and gotten the syrup up, charcoal, stodge, and sugar.
“Not so much,” he admitted. “But he did stuff like that, his daily routine only on auto-pilot.”
“It’s possible,” Javi admitted. “Except why wouldn’t Mary-Anne tell us about that right from the start?”
Cloister shrugged. “Maybe she didn’t think we’d take her seriously?”
“The last thing she seems to want is for us to take this seriously,” Javi said slowly as he stared over the road at the lit up house. “She’s worried, but it’s like she doesn’t want us to.”
“It’s your job to work that out,” Cloister said. “I just handle the dog.”
That got him an exasperated look from Javi. “I apologised for that.”
“No,” Cloister drawled. He lifted Bourneville’s leash and wound it around his hand. “You actually didn’t.”
“It was implied,” Javi said coolly, as if that was actually a thing that people did. There were times that Cloister thought liking Javi was a sign of bad judgement on his part. “Come on. I’m going to talk to Franks and his lawyer. I want you to see if Bourneville can find any trace of the Judge around his house.”
“I’ll meet you there,” Cloister said as they started over the road. “I need to update Tancredi and let Frome know where I’m going.”
Javi nodded. “I’ll send you the address. Don’t take too long. I don’t want to waste any time. And for the record? I am.”
“What?”
“Sorry,” Javi said. He thumbed the fob of his car to unlock the doors as they reached it and pulled the door open. “Bourneville’s not just some average dog, I shouldn’t have implied she was.”
“Yeah, that’s why she’s going to pee in your shoes later,” Cloister said.
Javi looked amused as he folded himself down into the car. “Your pick up lines need polished, Detective.”
“So it didn’t work?” Cloister asked as leaned an elbow on the car door and looked in. The leather seats and polished dashboard looked nicer than his car ever had and it smelled like elbow grease and air-freshener. Some weekend, Cloister mused idly, he should take his to the car wash instead of just leaving it out in the rain. “
“I didn’t say that,” Javi said as he leaned back against the headrest. His face looked lean and elegant in the moonlight, all shadows and highlights and crooked smile as he looked up a Cloister. “But I’m a charitable man. I like to give back to the less…socially practiced.”
Cloister leaned down, close enough for a kiss or a threat. He watched Javi’s eyes darken in response and heat flushed a hungry distraction under Cloister’s skin. The urge to just lean in for the kiss, fuck who was watching, caught him by surprise. He resisted.
“People like me more than you,” he said.
“I don’t care if they like me,” Javi said with a curl of his lip. “I care if I can pick a one night stand up in a club.”
The flicker of jealousy Cloister was more used to. He didn’t have any right–no promises had been made by either of them, and Javi had been clear that none would be–but Cloister had always fallen hard. The Sheriff’s Department’s psychologist had his theories about that. Cloister didn’t think it was exactly a mystery why he was like this. His family didn’t want him, and that sort of thing left a hole in you.
That was his problem though, so Cloister didn’t ask if Javi had practiced his pick-up lines recently. He pushed himself upright and stepped back from the car.
“I’ll meet you at Franks,” he said. “Later on you can show me how it’s done.”
“Again,” Javi said with that flicker of a smile. “If we find the Judge soon. Otherwise I won’t have much free time for the foreseeable future.”
Simon ‘Si’ Franks liked nice things. His clothes. His apartment. The girl with a split lip he kept in his lap.
“This is harassment,” Franks’ lawyer mentioned conversationally as he stepped out of Bourneville’s way. “I will be lodging a complaint about this behavior.”
“That’s your prerogative,” Javi said calmly. “Until then, the deputy has work to do.”
“The warrant covers the main living areas, not the bedrooms or any electronics–”
“Leave them to it,” Si drawled. He didn’t look like a drug kingpin, maybe that was how he’d got away with it for so long. Pale brown hair was set a few inches back from where it should be, and his long, narrow face was so bland that his glasses and goatee looked like interruptions. He had mean eyes though. Cloister’s grandmother had a dog with the same flat nastiness to its eyes. It had given Cloister’s stepdad a scar on his calf that still made him limp when it got cold. “They aren’t going to find anything. Unless Millie here brought something.”
He squeezed his arm around the girl’s stomach. She pressed her lips together, think under the coat of pink, and looked bleak. The girl and the lawyer wore very similar looks of disgust with Franks.
“Mela,” the girl corrected him.
“Whatever,” Si dismissed. “Let them do what they want. I’m an innocent.”
“Until tomorrow,” Javi said coldly. He gestured for Cloister to start the search. “Stay out of Deputy Witte’s way during the search.”
They wouldn’t find anything. Cloister couldn’t swear to that, but Bon was disinterested in the room. If she’d smelled something familiar, a scent she’d been set on before, she’d have been on alert. Not more interested in keeping a flat-eared eye on Franks.
“Such,” Cloister told her anyhow, a scrap of shirt collar under her nose to refresh the scent. She nosed his fingers, snorted cold and wet between then, and then cast around desulatorily. Her tail was down and disinterested. “Such, Bourneville!”
She huffed, shook her head, and leaned into the leash as she tracked around the wall.
“I like dogs,” Si said. “Maybe I should buy your dog some steaks, huh? Nice, juicy steaks…bet she wouldn’t be so interested in my business after she gulped them down.”
That was why Bon only took food from a few people. There was always someone who thought poisoning a dog would do them some good.
“Would you consider that a threat?” Javi asked the lawyer.
“Shut up, Franks,” the lawyer said through gritted teeth. “Remember you’re supposed to be smart.”
Franks shoved the girl off his lap and lunged to his feet. “Remember you were meant to get me off,” he spat as he stalked toward the toilet. “Can I piss? Or you want the dog to sniff the bowl first?”
He didn’t wait for an answer. The door slammed behind him and the sound of a noisy leak filtered through. Cloister rolled his eyes and led Bourneville over to the door of the bedroom. She sniffed the door and then gave him a reproachful look as if he’d set her up to fail.
“Do you want to leave?” Javi asked the girl.
She wiped her mouth on her hand. “No,” she said. “He’s on the tab for my lip.”
Cloister grimaced. What people did in their bedrooms were their business. Someone who needed to hurt other people enough that they would pay for it rubbed him the wrong way.
“Mela is free to leave whenever she wants,” the lawyer said. “My client is allowed to visit his friends and family for moral support before the sentencing.”
“And barring any friends and family, he hired a prostitute,” Javi said. “What else has your client been up to?”
“Nothing illegal.”
“You sure?”
“It’s my job to be, and to say it convincingly,” the lawyer said. “Why? What’s going on, Merlo?”
“Nothing.”
“That seems like a lie. If this is about my clients case, disclosure is mandated. Judge Buchanan is a stickler.”
He didn’t sound smug or guilty, just confident. Cloister let Bourneville give up–she lay down with a sigh and rested her chin on his boot–and shrugged the news across the room to Javi. No sign of the judge.
“You ever get tired of defending scumbags?” Cloister asked as he fussed over a dejected Bon.
“They pay better,” the lawyer said with a glance toward the bathroom.“And, of course, they’re innocent. Although I won’t be sorry to get this trial over with.”
“A conscience?” Javi mocked, voice sharp with disappointment. “That will cut into your billable hours.”
“Your concern is touching,” the lawyer said as he glanced at his watch. “I’d just rather be done with a case that has me up at this hour, babysitting a client to make sure they don’t sneak out do something stupid and play into your hands.”
Cloister paused, his fingers buried in Bon’s ruff. His Gran’s evil terrier always a babysitter too, whatever grandkid was unlucky enough to get tagged when they visited. Every time the terrier would slip its leash and to running into the woods to terrorise some racoons.
The grandkid who’d screwed up would lie, make excuses, pretend it had only been five minutes ago and they’d looked for an hour. They’d never got away with it. Granny had been sharp right to the end. The Wittes’ just got meaner as they got older.
Cloister caught Javi’s gaze over the room and tilted his head towards the door. There was a pause as Javi looked irritated, but he made his excuses and followed Cloister out into the hall.
“That bus route,” Cloister asked as they headed to the lift. “Is there anything along the route that would have been familiar to the Judge?”
Javi frowned. “It passes the Court,” he said. “Why.”
Cloister thumbed the plastic button to call the lift. “The Buchanans have a new housekeeper. They fired the gardener after Judge Buchanan forgot she told him to take out a tree. Mary-Anne was worried she’d wandered off at night and made a point of telling you that she was–”
“Going to be confused when we found her,” Javi said. “The list wasn’t surveillance. It was Ellie’s to-do list. Fuck.”
Title: Skin and Bone (Book 2 of the Digging up Bones series)
Publisher: Dreamspinner Press
Release: 26 February
Cover Artist: Bree Archer
Amazon:
Dreamspinner Link: https://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/books/skin-and-bone-by-ta-moore-10259-b
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?
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.
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Thank you for another chapter excerpt!