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Release Date:
09/07/14
Blurb Description: When love leads to death, be careful who you trust…
Blurb Description: When love leads to death, be careful who you trust…
Eighteen-year-old Emily Heath would love to leave her dead-end town, known locally as "The Sham", with her boyfriend, Jack, but he's very, very sick; his body is failing and his brain is shutting down. He's also in hiding, under suspicion of murder. Six months' ago, strange signs were painted across town in a dialect no one has spoken for decades and one of Emily's classmates washed up in the local floods.
Emily has never trusted her instincts and now they're pulling her towards Jack, who the police think is a sham himself, someone else entirely. As the town wakes to discover new signs plastered across its walls, Emily must decide who and what she trusts, and fast: local vigilantes are hunting Jack; the floods, the police, and her parents are blocking her path; and the town doesn’t need another dead body.
WARNING: THIS BOOK IS UNSUITABLE FOR YOUNGER TEENAGE READERS. IT DEPICTS ADULT SITUATIONS, MURDER SCENES, CONVERSATIONS ABOUT SEX AND PROFANITY.
NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: The idea for this book came to me in a nightmare... It was so vivid that I imagined I was 17 again, at school, in the same group of 4 friends that I used to hang around with. We were involved in a murder and cover-up. I started writing partly as a way to get it out of my head and then the characters turned into real people... and Emily and Jack were born.
As some of the early reviewers have stated, it is quite extreme in chapter one, and necessarily so. This is the incident that sets up the whole book; something awful happens that sets off a train of events for the characters. This book is a mystery in two ways in that we're: 1) trying to find out who killed Emily's classmate; and 2) trying to work out who Jack is. I hope you enjoy it!
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About the Author
I’ve just finished writing my first
book, so I’ve been busy trying to work out how all the pieces fit together
– the planning, the plot, the rules, the imagination, the characters, the
grammar, the structure, the endgame… there’s too much stuff to remember and a
lot of the information that I’ve discovered online about how to write isn’t
that good or even well written (the irony in reading advice on writing that
isn’t well written…)
So I decided I needed to find somewhere to
store the good stuff. Then it occurred to me that other people might find it
useful too. So here it is. My online reference tool of all the useful (i.e.
good) advice for writers-to-be. I only post here when I have something really
useful to say about the craft (Twitter is
for daily musings, Goodreads to review and Amazon to
buy my work); it’s all about the quality here, folks, not the quantity… Enjoy!
**GIVEAWAY**
**EXTRACT**
Extract one:
“We’d all smoked the same little
something”
From
chapter: Have you seen
anything? Or
How dead bodies ‘melt out’ in spring
thaws
We all knew something was off. We
could feel it, in about a million
mammoth ways. The classroom was buzzing, as if we hadn’t been able to cope with
the endless weeks of gloom. Like everything had been packed inside, so tight,
for so long, that something had to snap.
I took my usual seat, lollygagging in
the middle of the classroom, wondering if the bottom of my jeans would ever get
dry. We were still inundated with water but now from below, rather than above.
The mammoth influxes of snow had started to melt leaving us to navigate the
puddles, pools and streams left on every manmade surface. Becky and Rebecca
were making a triumphant return to school, sitting on desks at the back but I
kept my distance, wanting to keep well away. I smiled at a joke one of the boys
made but I didn’t make eye contact. I remembered something Jack had said. Seem engaged in what’s going on, but don’t
get involved or singled out. It seemed like good advice; an invisible boy
knows how to stay hidden.
I found a soggy breakfast muffin full
of cold egg and tinned tomatoes seeping into my textbooks that Mum must have
sneaked into my bag before I left the house. She can never remember I hate
tomatoes, how many sugars I have in my tea or that I haven’t eaten a Jaffa Cake
since I was six. Her memory is perpetually locked into my childhood patterns,
pre-pills, before pre-breakfast cocktails were the norm. I took a bite because
I was too hungry to mind or to worry about smelling out the classroom but I had
a sense of unease. The days Mum acts like a Mum, they’re never the best.
Like the day Grace finally died. My
mother was sane, motherly. Offering advice. Telling me I might want to think
about not going to see Grace in the funeral home. It’s better to remember them living, she had said. Breathing, laughing. But I had to see
for myself, say goodbye. And now every hello I make to Grace, every memory I
bring back to life begins with the last one I have. Cold. Stony. Her hair in a
style she would have hated. A dress cherry-picked by her mother that made her
look about ten. Like something out of Anne of bloody Green Gables. Like I said.
The days when Mum makes sense, when I’m grateful for her efforts. Those never
turn out well.
Everyone was making so much noise. It
was like we had all smoked the same little something before breakfast, inhaling
the crazy. Kitty was quite literally, begging,
“have you seen Me?”
She’d suddenly appeared everywhere,
plastered all over school on posters the size of entire walls, her head eight
times its usual size. I couldn’t help thinking they were looking for the wrong
girl; she was barely recognisable from the picture they’d used; pre-make up,
pre-highlights, pre-pubescent. Maybe – if she’d been discarded outside, left to
rot like Cath – the hail and snow and wind and rain might have eroded all
adolescent traces, like a two-month outdoor facial for her face? Would they
draw the teenage mask back on like they did with Grace? A little mascara here,
a little hairspray there? As if it makes a difference.
I
shimmied down inside my coat, snuggling under my hood. I wasn’t sure if anyone
there knew that Jack even existed, never mind if they’d got wind of the
police’s suspicions but I felt tainted by association. It was as if Kitty was
speaking directly to me, pleading, Come
and find me. I’m still okay. Nothing
bad has happened. Yet. But we all knew different. Not the details. We had
20 minutes to wait for the hows, the where fors. 20 minutes for the puss to
ooze through our streets, beneath our school gates and classroom doors. Before
the hysterics really began.
