Red Hatchet Falls by Susan Clayton-Goldner

ISBN: 9780463550588
ASIN: B084JDBBK8
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Blurb:

The idyllic town of Ashland is nestled in the foothills of Siskiyou Mountains. Locals often describe it as a little bit of England set down in Southern Oregon. Yet amidst the historic craftsman bungalows, the world-renown Shakespeare theaters, and the lush, manicured gardens in Lithia Park, something evil lurks.

While walking his pet raccoon, 72-year-old Homer Sullivan spots something shiny sparkling in the leaves near Ashland Creek. Thinking it might be something valuable, he hurries over to retrieve it, hoping he’ll become someone’s hero. He panics when he discovers it's a diamond ring and it's attached to a severed hand. He must find Detective Radhauser and fast.

Winston Radhauser has always searched for the truth. Set just eight months post 9-11, a young Islamic family is terrorized, and the severed hand is only the beginning. This time, Radhauser is tested to his limits, but will the truth devastate him?

Extract:

When his cell phone rang, Radhauser pulled it out of his back pocket and glanced at the caller ID. It was Captain Murphy. Radhauser stepped away from third base to the area behind the dugout to answer. This was Radhauser’s day off. He wanted nothing more than to ignore the call and return to Lizzie’s game. “What’s up?”

“I’m at the station. And you need to get over here.” His voice was gruff, the one he used to flaunt his authority.

The smell of popcorn and hotdogs grilling wafted over from the snack bar and he remembered his promise to his daughter. “Not possible. I’m in the middle of my daughter’s baseball game. And I’m coaching third base.”

“I don’t care if you’re up to bat with a tied score, two outs and the bases loaded. We need you here. Now.” Murphy had that indignant and slightly nervous tone. It told Radhauser either his boss was in a bad mood or something important had come up. While his captain rambled on about wishing he hadn’t stopped by the station on a Saturday morning, Radhauser looked around the park.

There were five Little League fields and today the manicured grounds held a sea of miniature ballplayers in multicolored caps. Kids shouted and cheered for their teammates. Coaches instructed their players. Keep your eye on the ball. Level swing. Wait for a good one. Anxious parents paced the sidelines. Others played catch with their kids, warming them up and waiting for the next game to begin.

“Give me twenty minutes, Murph. The game’s almost over. Lizzie will need a ride home.”

"Find her one, Wind. I've already wasted enough time with this old man who claims— and I quote, ‘has aided you in other police investigations.' Not to mention his pet. He and his damn raccoon found something he's certain you'll want to see."

Radhauser paced the grassy area behind the dugout. The sound of a loud voice distracted him. He looked around for the source.

To the left of the snack bar, in another grassy section, a tall, slender man with a red beard berated a player for striking out. He wore a green baseball cap and shirt that matched the ones the little boy wore. Both of the man's hands were planted on the boy's shoulders, shaking him. "Didn't I tell you to keep your eyes on the ball? Level swing. How many times have I told you not to swing at the low ones? You looked like you were playing golf out there." He let go of the boy and clenched his hands into fists.

Radhauser had a bad feeling this was the kid’s father. Talk about life not being fair.

The boy hung his head.

Radhauser watched for a moment, wanting to rescue the boy, but spoke into his phone instead. “It’s got to be Homer Sullivan.”

He’d met Sully while investigating a drowning that turned out to be a murder. It was over a year ago at Sunset Lake where Sully lived alone in a small cabin at the edge of the water. "Come on, Murph. This game is important to Lizzie. I don't get to spend enough time with my kids. And I promised we'd have lunch at the snack bar afterward. Don't call me on my day off to babysit Sully."

“He’s not claiming to be my deputy. Now get your ass in here. That’s an order.”

“I’ll be right there.” He hung up, then slammed the phone against his thigh. It was the first elimination round and Lizzie’s team, the Cardinals, had a good chance of winning.

When Cooper agreed to drive Lizzie home, Radhauser took a twenty-dollar bill from his wallet and handed it to him. “Buy Lizzie and yourself some lunch when the game is over.”

After thanking Cooper, Radhauser stepped into the dugout and whispered in his daughter’s ear. “I have to go, sweetie. Coach Cooper will get you that hotdog from the snack bar I promised and give you a ride home.”

Her dark eyes twinkled and her smile was big and bright as a birthday morning. Not a hint of disappointment. “That’s so great. Thanks, Daddy.” She gave him a quick wave, a flutter of small fingers in the still air, then turned her adoring gaze back on Cooper Drake.

About the Author:

Susan Clayton-Goldner was born in New Castle, Delaware and grew up with four brothers along the banks of the Delaware River. She is a graduate of the University of Arizona's Creative Writing Program and has been writing most of her life. Her novels have been finalists for The Hemingway Award, the Heeken Foundation Fellowship, the Writers Foundation and the Publishing On-line Contest. Susan won the National Writers' Association Novel Award twice for unpublished novels and her poetry was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including Animals as Teachers and Healers, published by Ballantine Books, Our Mothers/Ourselves, by the Greenwood Publishing Group, The Hawaii Pacific Review-Best of a Decade, and New Millennium Writings. A collection of her poems, A Question of Mortality was released in 2014 by Wellstone Press. Prior to writing full time, Susan worked as the Director of Corporate Relations for University Medical Center in Tucson, Arizona.

Susan shares a life in Grants Pass, Oregon with her husband, Andreas, her fictional characters, and more books than one person could count.

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Tirgearr Publishing

Soil and Ceremony by Julia Byrd

ASIN: B07RP1MG71
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Blurb:

A history of loss and a terrible stammer have led gravedigger Benjamin Hood to a life of isolation.

When a rash of untimely deaths sweeps through his small English village, he cannot stand by in silence. To uncover the truth about the lives lost, he takes up a long-neglected role of responsibility among the townspeople.

As Benjamin questions the victims' families, he finds that beautiful widow Juno Stephens has preceded him in each case. She makes no secret of her odd midnight ceremonies and dark powers of persuasion. The villagers are whispering about a woman bearing a lethal hex.

Is Juno the source of danger in the village, or a victim of it? Benjamin must resist her beguiling ways and decide if he can trust her...until another death sets his smoldering worries ablaze.

Extract:

Autumn 1840, near Stanmore, England

It was easy to dig the grave for the infant boy. It should have been difficult, the hardest task on earth to accomplish. Instead, I scarcely perspired as I shoveled dirt from a tiny rectangle. The job would soon be done, and I would be no different for it. I should have wept. I should have torn the calluses from my palms. I should have bled into the dirt.

But after it was done, I stabbed my spade into the rich autumn soil of Maida Green and straightened. I would do it again next week, or perhaps the one after. Babes die too often for a gravedigger to weep and rend and bleed each time. Apart from his mother, who carried him for months beneath her heart, nobody really knew the lad.

My apprentice worked on the other side of the path, hacking at a recalcitrant Cornus alba, a red-barked dogwood. He was watched over by the hulking manor house on a hill beyond the cemetery walls, called Maida House. One wing of the house was over two hundred years old, but Maida Green Cemetery was young, with fifty acres occupied by only a few hundred permanent residents. Its acreage had been portioned away from the traditional Maida House property like a severed limb. On quiet days, working in the cemetery was like working in a verdant park. We cut open the ground for more shrubs than graves, and pillars of smoke more frequently rose from burning leaves than burning incense. No smoke ever rose from the chimneys of Maida House.

“T-Toth,” I said, pulling my gaze from the house’s dark windows. His Christian name, Everett, was too much for my traitorous tongue. “L-l-leave some of th-those s-stems.”

My thoughts were clear, or as clear as any man’s, I suppose, but my words were not. As a result, I mostly kept my lips sealed. But Everett did not mind my stammer, and neither did the dead.

“I will,” he said. “They’ll look right cheery this winter.”

“M-more of them along th-th-th—”

“The south wall, I know. I’ll go over there next.”

I did not like being interrupted, but I liked it better than becoming stuck in a repeating loop, words swirling like a leaf in an eddy. I grunted an acknowledgment and turned for the groundskeeper’s cottage. I wanted to put the shovel away and check the log for burials planned for the next week.

“Ben?”

I stopped, turned, lifted my eyebrows.

Everett crouched over a patch of dirt, peering intently at something. “What used to grow here?”

The cemetery kept no secrets from me, but I never claimed to have memorized all the plantings. I walked back to him, then sank down on one knee in the grass. There was a little hole in the dirt, right beside the Cornus alba. “D-don’t know.”

“Something was dug out.”

I nodded.

He turned dark brown eyes on me. “Did you dig up anything?”

I shook my head.

Everett touched the crumbling edge of the excavation, then rubbed his fingers together, face tightening in concentration. He appeared much more interested in the hole than I was. When I had saved the money to buy my brother’s farm, Everett would become the head groundskeeper at Maida Green. It was a good thought, a consoling thought. He deserved it, and he cared as much about the place as I did. Maida Green had been conceived when the old London cemeteries reached their fill of occupants. In the city, the dead sifted up through the soil, gleaming skulls and unseemly scapulae sprouting in the grass. But in our village, a few hours’ ride northwest from the dome of St. Paul’s, we had plenty of space. The walls were high and the gate strong—to deter the body-snatchers and anatomists from coming to take our fresh corpses. Families paid well for eternal rest.

“Hmm. No scat or claw marks. Not a mole, then, nor a badger.” Everett smoothed dirt into the hole. “Probably nothing. I do wish that Horvath boy hadn’t died. Making me twitchy and mistrustful, and I’m not the only one.”

I rose and started back towards my cottage. The main gravel path had an offshoot, a narrow track that curved behind a group of young trees and led to the groundskeeper’s cottage. It was snug and dry, with a pump in the yard that delivered cold, sweet water. Sometimes, after the gates were locked at night, I imagined I slept in a manor house with my own manicured parkland spreading around me like a green quilt.

As I returned the shovel to its hook under the sloping lean-to on the side of the house, something made me pause. The cemetery’s huge shears, steel-bladed with leather-wrapped grips, hung in the wrong place. Everett could have put them away incorrectly. I could have done it myself. But neither of us had tied a black silk ribbon around the pivot or threaded onto the ribbon a tiny slip of paper. For a moment I just stared.

The ribbon came loose with a tug, and I unfolded the scrap of paper. On it was written two words in a flowing, feminine script.
Thank you.

I jerked my head up and looked around. Was she still nearby? Surely one of us would have noticed a woman wandering the premises. Women frequently entered the cemetery, visiting graves and leaving flowers. But they didn’t borrow my shears.

The silk ribbon snagged on my rough fingertips, and on some impulse, I lifted it to my nose. It smelled of…nothing. It was just a strip of fabric. Had I expected to catch a lingering whiff of rosewater? Lavender? I snorted at my own fancy and jammed the note and ribbon into a pocket.

About the Author:

Julia Byrd lives and writes in Brooklyn, New York, with her handsome dog, and scruffy husband, although a large piece of her heart remains in her native Illinois. She tells people she enjoys books, wine, dogs, trees, and architecture as plausible cover for her secret double life.

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The Illusions in Between by J.M. Robison

Welcome to Tirgearr Tuesday! This week, we're announcing the publication of J.M. Robison's latest release. The Illusions in Between.

ASIN: B07Q75BMMR
Kindle US, Kindle UK
Kindle CA, Kindle AU

Blurb:

Still hunted by the church, Zadicayn has remained in hiding with his small family for seven years. But rumors of his location finally reach the Illuminati, a secret underground society of Black Magicians.

Wanting his magic for themselves, the Illuminati lure Zadicayn to Rome where the last wizard is forced to fight, not only for his life, but for his family, his magic, and for the world. Because his next death with be his last.

 

Extract:

Rome, Italy
1 February 1848
Pope Pius IX

The soul is a cavern, much larger than the body containing it. This cavern fills with memories, thoughts, feelings, decisions, and dreams until you are so full of it that surely it bleeds out of your pores and everyone who lays eyes on you while you stand upon the balcony above Saint Peter’s Square can see it. I’m so full of it all that it covers my robes in a blinding white.

The throng below denies seeing it because the head of God’s holy church does not bow to threats and is not easily swept into coercion. Both of those fill my cavern wall-to-wall, so I can’t even feel the love I express to the people below me with my smile and wave of my hand.

I pass through the curtains and enter the warmth of my chambers. Silly how the door to my incarceration is made of heavy red silk. If I had magic, I’d sprout wings and fly out of here like Icarus, even knowing what fate befell him.

But magic is why I’m a prisoner to the Vatican.

I sit at my table, hand shaking as I reach for my hot tea. I cup it in both hands, hoping the heat will soften the shake, though it’s not from the February chill. My recent plight has called to question many things which a devout, sober, Catholic mind would never have questioned. But my mind is not sober. It’s drunk on fear and desperation, the weight of which has deepened the cavern of my soul to reach new depths, new questions. Like, the Catholic religion should be held as the only religion of the State, that future popes ought never to come to terms with progress, liberalism, and modern civilization…damning thoughts for a pope of the Catholic Church.

Me. Damning me.

I flinch when the door opens. I spill hot tea over white knuckles. Carlo Vizzardelli enters.

I made him cardinal in January. Hard to turn the position down to a man who was awarded the apostolic protonotary and became the consultant to the Sacred Congregation for Bishops. Three days after I gave him the red beret, he wasted no time outlining his position in the Illuminati and flexing the control over his demon.

It took ten minutes for me to go from Pope Pius IX of the Roman Catholic Church to Slave of the Illuminati. I’d always heard rumors about them, but never that they called themselves Black Magicians and commanded demons from hell to perform wizardry for them. Or threaten me into doing what they want. Which was to rule Rome from behind me.

The same day as my prayer to the Holy Father for rescue, I received my monthly report from Valemorren, England, concerning the status of the wizard they’ve been unable to capture again. I can’t decide if God wanted to double my worries or laugh at my troubles.

“Ready?” Carlo barks.

I nod and sip my tea. He must see the tremor in my hands.

He sits opposite me, laying a fresh sheet of paper and inkwell on the scatter of documents on the table. The other cardinals must see Carlo as terribly ambitious to meet with me one-on-one so frequently. But that oddity is pushed aside when compared to Carlo’s many other ambitions prior to his arrival to me. I see his own cavernous soul through his eyes. Now that I know him, I see the many tunnels and depths he’s bored to fit all his greed, lust, and hate. I don’t know why I was blind to it until after I knew him.

He’s talking while he writes, but I don’t listen. I set my tea cup aside and nod when he looks up for my approval. It doesn’t matter what he writes. I’m going to sign it, whether or not I agree. If I don’t sign, he’ll drag me out to the Belvedere Courtyard where he’ll summon his demon and threaten to rip out my tongue, tear out my eyes, something to cause permanent damage to me while still leaving me alive. His threats are good enough; they keep me doing what he wants. Lord give me strength to resist and not care about any mortal maladies he may cause to fall upon me.

I look at the table, at the documents scattered below the one Carlo writes on. A chunk of Valemorren’s report glares up from the bottom…Ashdowns continue to deny having any contact with their daughter, though we have our suspicions they get into the mountain at least monthly th…Zadicayn must have a secondary way out, as we constantly watch the only entrance we know of, and we have it on good report he appears in Bristol every month…

“Carlo?”

“Eh.”

“Have you heard of a Fae Wizard?”

Carlo sets his quill down and leans back in his seat, his short, pointed beard aligned with the center of his body. “I have. What prompts the question?”

I can’t say what prompts the question, only that a damning idea blossoms in my chest because I too, have dug tunnels and depths in my soul searching for the gem which will free me from this man, and I found…this. “There’s a Fae Wizard in Valemorren, England.”

His eyes light up. Every pontiff has heard at least the title of Fae Wizard. But because the pope before me actually had to deal with one six years ago–who was never caught–the task fell on me. I’m familiar with Fae Wizards, and because of Carlo, I’m familiar with the envy Black Magicians have had of the wizards since antiquity.

The light in his eyes darken. He sees my intent to get him out of Rome. He leans forward. The malice he invites into the room prickles heat beneath my zucchetto. “Prove it.”

I’m anxious to divert his gaze off me. I tip my tea off the table without care as I dig through the papers until I unearth the one which has, finally, diverted his gaze.

He snatches it out of my hand. His eyes bump side to side as he scans the entire page. Though when he puts it down, he’s grinning, and I know he’s read every word.

“You tempt, Pius. That’s not a Godly trait you should have.”

I shrug. My heart beats in my throat. If I open my mouth, he’s going to hear a rapid thud.

He looks at the paper again. Black Magicians borrow a demon from Satan, and that demon performs requests for the magician. Since the demons are invisible to everyone but the magician, everyone thinks these performances are magic. Fae Wizards follow a different set of rules. I don’t quite understand the depth myself, but I know they use real magic and it comes from a different entity. And Black Magicians want the same thing.

He folds the report and tucks it into his robes. He stands. He’s lost most of his hostility, replaced by a greedy aura. “I know you’re doing this to get me out of here, Pius, but don’t think you won’t be watched in my absence. I will know if you do something to betray me, and you will suffer the consequences.”

I clasp my hands on the table and nod. Carlo sweeps out of my chambers like he’s already missed the train, leaving his unfinished document on the table.

I slam my eyes immediately in prayer. Dominus vobiscum, Fae Wizard. Defeat Carlo and free me from the Illuminati.

About the Author:

Born in small town Bennington, Idaho, J.M. wanted to be just like her big, story writer sister. Big sister paints now, but that initial role model was all the springboard J.M. needed to fearlessly leap into writing the novels of her heart. Getting around the world as a soldier has helped broaden J.M.'s views on cultures and personalities, and settling down as a Deputy Sheriff in Nevada for a time has helped her maintain all the fine intricacies humans are capable of which has helped define her characters into something realistic and believable. Without any prior claims to fame, J.M. is proud to showcase that hard work, even from rock bottom, DOES pay off.

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