First of all, thank you so much for having me! I’m thrilled to be here with my new urban fantasy Dead Man Stalking. This is the first book in the Blood and Bone series and I am thrilled to put it out there into the world. I was meant to be writing an entirely different book, but then Took and Madoc took up residence in my head and I had to give in and let them have their say.

I had a blast creating this world and these characters, and I hope you enjoy them too. I’ve included a chapter of a prequel short story that you can follow through the blog tour.

Dead Man Stalking:

Agent Luke Bennett proved that humans could rise just as high in the ranks as their vampire colleagues—until a kidnapper held him captive for a year and turned him without his consent.

Now he’s Took: a reluctant monster afraid to bite anyone, broke, and about to be discharged from his elite BITERs unit.

When an old colleague suggests he consult on a BITERs case, Took has little to lose. The case is open and shut… but nothing is ever that easy. As he digs deeper, he discovers a lot more than one cold case is at stake, and if he wants to solve this one, he’ll need the help of the BITERs team. Even if that brings his old commander, Madoc, back into his life.

 

 

Release: 10 September

Cover Artist: Kanaxa

Amazon – http://amzn.to/2ZkYwmw

Dreamspinner Link: http://bit.ly/2ZceYua

 

Tour:

 

 

Chapter Six

One of the local detectives, Martlet, had given up his desk for Luke. The drawers were still full of his clutter—old notebooks and chewed pencils, a dust-dulled rosary, and old candy wrappers—and a thin woman with a disapproving mouth kept an eye on Luke from the frame at the corner of the desk.

As Luke cross-referenced the police reports with anything that the victims had in common—bars they all went to, connections at the university, coffee shops tagged in on their social media posts—he couldn’t help but feel the disappointment that canted the lady Martlet’s mouth was aimed at him. There were a dozen potential, casual, connections between the various corpses. Once Quick came back after his trawl through the victims financials there would be more.

It had looked like a good start, but once Luke pinned them down the connections were too tenuous to be relevant. That didn’t mean the killer hadn’t picked his victims, out of everyone in the fifteen mile radius Luke had assigned him, because they all drank the same coffee shop. Back in LA sure, that would mean something, but this was a college town. Everything, and everyone, butted up against everything else.

Frustration crawled under his skin, sharp as thorns over the clenched muscles of his neck and shoulders. Luke clenched his fist around his pen and resisted the urge to throw it across the room. This was the job. Hours of nothing that mattered, until he found the pattern that the killer moved in. It was just Madoc’s permission to hunt this down that had turned up the stakes on it.

Apparently if he wasn’t going to fuck the man–and he wasn’t, Luke reminded himself dryly–he was going to get his approval.

Probably not by beaning one of the local cops–either relieved to be off the hook or resentful that VINE had dropped in to take glory–in the back of the head with a pen.

Luke leaned back in the office chair–it creaked under his weight as he stretched out–and half-closed his eyes. He made himself relax joint by joint, until he was all loose bones and slack muscle. Then he turned his brain down to a low static hum.

The therapist that VINE insisted they all see once a month–to make sure they didn’t snap from the worst things they saw, either because it was too horrible or too tempting–called it ‘weaponized meditation’. He said it wasn’t healthy, that the benefits of meditation came from the work it took to get to that state. But then he worked in an office and saw people who’d never been honest with him once every few weeks.

Luke didn’t have the time to put the work in when he’d already worked out the shortcuts.

“Sleeping on the job?” Kit asked, his voice abrasive with the usual irritation as he tossed something heavy onto the desk.

Luke opened an eye to peer up at him. Office gossip–or what passed it for it around the BITERS–had it that Kit had gotten on fine with Luke’s predecessor. Henry Cade had been seconded from the Scholomance, an old man who’d been stuck in a young body for nearly seventy years. When he’d retired last year Kit had signed the card — a starkly weird little bit of normality. Maybe he didn’t like Luke because he’d replaced Henry.

Not really fair. On the other hand Luke knew exactly why he didn’t like Kit, and that was nothing to do with Kit.

“At least I haven’t died on it,” Luke shot back as he straightened up.

“Not yet.” Kit stood next to the desk, his thumbs hooked into his belt. He pointed at the stack of stapled papers set on top of Luke’s files with his chin. “I need you to talk to the room-mate.”

“I thought you could sniff the bad guys out all on your own?” Luke said absently as he flicked through the sheets. He highlighted things he wanted people to look at, Kit scrawled a line under them in black biro. It made Luke squint as he followed the pattern of deposits from a N. Kares from monthly to weekly. “Jamie’s?”

“Kares is Anakim,” Kit said. He pulled his phone–the back battered and scarred–and thumbed across the screen until he found what he needed. A picture, it turned out as he turned the phone to show Luke, of a small, beige woman with black clothes and a sullen look around her mouth as she glared at the camera.

“Someone’s daughter?” Luke asked.

Kit gave him that look, the one that wanted Luke to prove he knew what he was doing. “Why do you say that.”

“She’s plain and I’ve never heard of her,” Luke said bluntly. “Without beauty or brilliance, that leaves family.”

“That leaves money,” Kit corrected him, his voice smug that Luke had missed something. “She’s of Russian descent, one of the Tsar’s favourite lines. When she got sick her father had enough money to send her here for treatment, and for the Kiss when she didn’t respond. Two hundred years ago.”

“So someone’s daughter,” Luke said. He smirked as Kit glared at him. “What’s your angle?”

“Does it matter?” Kit asked. “I want the truth, not your angle on it.”

“Angles get you the truth,” Luke said. “Everyone goes into a conversation wanting something, the trick is to recognise when you won’t get it.”

Kit grunted and held up his hand. “Enough. I have work to do, and I don’t care how you justify your worth. Blackmail. And he got greedy.”

It was a theory.

“I thought you’d decided Hunters were our culprit.”

“That’s what the evidence says,” Kit said. “But just because Kares is a vampire, doesn’t mean she’s the killer. Maybe Jamie was meant to collect the cash, and ended up spending it himself. If Hunters are involved, they don’t like traitors.”

True. Anakim were predators to be exterminated, human traitors were an embarrassment. Most Hunter cells were also usually short of money for weapons and equipment, their funding cycle was tied to the erratic atrocities of rogue vampires.

Luke grinned at him, all humor and edge. “The roomie won’t know,” he said. “They got on, but the room-mate’s a law student on a football scholarship. He doesn’t have enough time on his hands to know what Jamie was up to behind the scenes. You’ll need to go straight to the source.”

“Kares?” Kit asked with mock-surprise. “Well, I guess that simple option never occurred to me.”

“Which you knew,” Luke said as he held the files out. “What do you want?”

“She’s rich, Russian, and reputedly randy,” Kit said. “And older than me.”

“So if you turn her down–”

“It’s an insult to her, and to the Russian who still sponsors her family,” Kit finished for him. “He’d rather have let her die than sire her himself, but the opportunity to protest an insult by VINE will stir up those old protective instincts. You–”

“Am human,” Luke said. “So I don’t count.”

“You don’t,” Kit agreed. “You also only like men. In the old days that didn’t matter so much, but these days it’s…gauche…to force someone against their orientation.”

And god forbid, Luke thought with a flicker of old, home-grown contempt, that an Anakim look anything but woke in their atrocities.

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Tomorrow’s installment on the Dreamspinner Blog! All the blog tour posts will also be linked here: http://tamoorewrites.com/deadmanstalking.

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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.

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