A warm welcome to author TA Moore who is joining us today to talk about her new release “Sting in the Tail”.

TA talks to us about her book and brought a wonderful giveaway for our readers!

Welcome TA 🙂

Title: Sting in the Tail

Publisher: Rogue Firebird Press

Release: Oct 4

Buy Links:

Amazon

Blurb:

The Carnival of Mysteries just arrived in Sutton County. They say if you cross the fortune teller’s palm with silver she can read your future like a map. Right now all Ledger Conroy wants to know is if he has a future.

Back in Sutton after over a decade, Ledger’s plan had been to bury his father–recently deceased convicted serial killer and less-well known warlock, Bell Conroy–clear the property, and then finally wash his hands of being a Conroy. Instead there’s a cured human heart in the larder, a pissed off pretty boy who is definitely not human at the door, and a debt to the devil that Ledger’s just inherited.

Devil. Monster. Something like that. He’d not asked for its pedigree

Whatever it was, it’s given Ledger a week to fulfill the terms of his father’s contract. Or else he’s never going to leave Sutton again. With pretty-boy Wren at his heels, more to make sure Ledger doesn’t skip town than to provide assistance, Ledger tries to track his father’s sins across Sutton. The problem is there’s so many of them.

Ledger is faced with old grudges, a Sheriff that thinks Ledger knows more about his father’s crimes than he’s ever said (and isn’t wrong), and a dead man with a book shop. Not to mention the on-going distraction of Wren, who can’t decide whether to be a hindrance, a help, or just hot.

Luckily Ledger has a nose for this sort of work.

Sting in the Tail is part of the multi-author Carnival of Mysteries Series. Each book stands alone, but each one includes at least one visit to Errante Ame’s Carnival of Mysteries, a magical, multiverse traveling show full of unusual acts, games, and rides. The Carnival changes to suit the world it’s on, so each visit is unique and special. This book contains a dealer in dark collectibles, a man who’s NOT people, and a monster with a debt it expects to be paid.

In Sting in the Tail the book starts with Ledger Conroy back in his home town after a decade. The reason that he’s back is because his father has died. There is no fondness there, but Ledger wants to make sure there is nothing in his father’s estate that could harm him. Everything in the story is kicked off by that one event, Bell Conroy’s death.

Death generates so much narrative potential by, somewhat counterintuitively, ending it.

I have had a lot of death in my family over the years (I mean, obviously everyone does but we have a lot of untimely ones). Get me giddy at a bar (I don’t drink, but I absorb the atmosphere, and I will tell you about the Moore Year of Death. Which was a sad and terrible time, but also full of what can only be described as slapstick humor.

Course, I am Irish. Like my gran always said, ‘If you can’t laugh at a bad thing, what are you going to do? Cry?’.

So maybe that’s why I find death, in all its various forms, such a fertile place to plant a story. For obvious reasons in a romantic suspense, but it works for contemporary and paranormal fantasy too. Death generates emotion, lots of them. That kindling is frequently a good spark to get your main character going. Or to raise questions that they can’t answer.

I know in my family there are so many secrets that only came out after someone died, usually during the wake. So you find out these…blunt instruments nuggets of history, but you can never contextualize them. The person who was most intimately familiar with the details is gone, and then went knowing that this would be what you got.

A few years ago, I found out that a: I looked a lot like my biological sister, b: my hairdresser at the time was my cousin, and c: she was dead (my biological sister, who was the youngest). I don’t talk to my Dad’s side of the family much. I just don’t know them, except apparently for small talk over hair trims. So I’m never going to find out what she died off, except that according to my mum it wasn’t genetic.

Which is a relief because my genes are already a bit of a slime pit!

Sometimes I still wonder. I didn’t know the woman, and she’d never wanted to know me, but in her death she left me this question I can’t answer.

….ok, I could answer it if I went back to my old hairdresser and asked. It just doesn’t feel right though?

In Sting in the Tail death is a get out of jail free card, literally, for Bell Conroy. His death, however, left his son to deal with all the debts and questions and free-floating feelings he’ never wanted to actual tangle with. Bell’s debts are, in fact, the driving force of the book. Most obviously his literal, contractual debt to the monster that comes to call it in, but Bell’s selfishness and wickedness had left other, less concrete, debts to grapple with.

None of them are Ledger’s, and yet all of them are. He might not have inherited his father’s sins, but he can’t ignore them either. That was the inheritance that he left behind, not the old house and the very hard to spin positively in a real estate listing torture basement.

He also has to, after years of ignoring them, examine the few fond memories he has of his childhood. Only to find that the worm of his father’s evil has gotten to them as well. That there was never a ‘before’ when he had a loving dad and a normal family. It was always tainted.

And OK, sure. Sometimes I kill off a parent (or a set) just because it is more organizationally efficient. Bad decisions are easier to make without your mom taking to the bad decision with a umbrella! Romantic dilemmas brew more fizzily without your Dad there to call you a drama queen and tell you to just do what feels right.

Still. Death is a fascinating narrative tool. And seriously, ask about the Year of Death sometimes. It’s a WILD ride.

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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Win an ebook from TA Moore’s backlist! Just comment on the post and I’ll select a winner next week!