I’m
featuring a special excerpt for the romantic suspense novel, Desert Heat, by P.H. Turner today.
During
her virtual book tour, P.H. Turner will be awarding a $20 Amazon or Barnes and
Noble (winner’s choice) gift card to a lucky randomly drawn winner. To be
entered for a chance to win, use the
form below. To increase your chances of winning, feel free to visit her other tour stops and enter there, too!
A little bit about Desert Heat:
Social
worker Jordan Bia finds a child who escaped her captors and a life in the sex
trade, but four other girls from her small Mexican village were not so lucky.
Smugglers hide their human cargo in the hoodoos of a remote canyon on the
reservation—a place the Navajo shun, fearful of the witches who practice their
black rituals and feast on the dark energy of evil. Mysterious rites, omens of
death, and bodies litter the canyon.
When she meets Navajo police officer
Sam Tohee, sparks fly fueled by the danger of hunting men who buy and sell
little girls. Techno savvy Jordan plots to trap the smugglers and free the rest
of the children, but unless she and Sam can find the power to defeat the
witches she may not live long enough to save the girls.
Excerpt from Desert Heat:
I wriggled around, trying to ease the pain in my back and
butt, but no place on the cold rock was comfortable. I finally dozed off into a
troubled sleep, twitching with violent dreams that looped and twisted, finally
morphing into the vision of a mutilated body of a woman lying on the canyon
floor. Cold mist twined through the fins and hoodoos, swirling around her body,
creeping over my boots as I inched toward the woman's corpse. Fear had me
quivering, but I was drawn to her body like a moth to a flame. I saw no one,
heard nothing, smelled nothing, felt only the cold steal into my bones and the
unseen force pull me ever closer to her.
Dim moonlight shimmered over the dead woman, glinting
obscenely off her sightless eyes. One of her arms and part of one breast had
been gnawed; dark blood stained the sand beneath her, and an arm bone gleamed
white in a shaft of moonlight. I tried to scream, but no noise came out. A
single omen of death, the owl feather, had been laid across her neck, and gray
ash powder covered her nude body.
Clumsy with terror, I stumbled over an up-thrust rock and
crashed backward, knocking my head on a boulder. She arose and drifted to me,
hovering over me, reaching out to me with her mangled arm. Rotting flesh that
hung in tattered strips from her arm brushed my sweater.
I call
Austin, Texas home now after working on the East and West coasts, the Rocky
Mountains, and an island in the Gulf of Mexico. I've come full circle to live
and work close to the farm my family settled in the 1850's.
Truth is
stranger than fiction, and years in the news business provided lots of peculiar
characters and stories to write about. My books are set in my favorite places,
the desert canyons and high mountains of the American West.
Links:
11 comments:
Thanks for hosting!
What was your favorite childhood book?
Really scary excerpt.
Thank you for hosting Desert Heat!
Hi Mai,
My favorite childhood book was Little Women.
I really enjoyed the excerpt. Thank you for sharing!
Hi Betty! I hope you like Desert Heat.
Great post - I'm looking forward to reading this one :)
Thanks for the chance!
Thank everyone for their comments!
Thank you for the post and the giveaway!
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