Welcome to my stop on the blog tour for Her Husband’s Grave by P.L. Kane. My thanks to the author for inviting me and for providing me with the extract I’m about to share with you all. But first, her is what Her Husband’s Grave is all about!
Author : P.L. Kane
Title : Her Husband’s Grave
Pages : 305
Publisher : HQ Digital
Publication date : June 26, 2020 (ebook)
| ABOUT THE BOOK |
Criminal psychologist Robyn Adams is at breaking point after a previous case resulted in an attempt on her own life. But as she sits in the car about to head home, her phone rings. It’s Robyn’s cousin, Vicky Carter, who she hasn’t seen or heard from in years.
Vicky’s voice cracks down the phone. Her husband, Simon, has been found buried on Golden Sands beach. Desperate to help and determined not to let her last case get the better of her, Robyn returns to the coastal village where she spent summers with Vicky as a child.
Robyn knows that she has let Vicky down in the past and is set on making up for lost time. Throwing herself into the case, she combs through evidence, intent on discovering a lead that will help the local police.
But there is clearly someone who wants Robyn gone. She is convinced someone is watching her and when she begins to receive threatening notes, Robyn knows that she could be risking her life…
But Robyn won’t leave again – she owes it to Vicky to stay.
| EXTRACT |
The closer to the sands she drew, the more Robyn saw – the angle so acute, and the cordon so far back up there that none of this had been visible from above. Not that the body itself was on display, because the police had erected a white tent around it – but those journalists would have had a field day taking snapshots of the general buzz around the area just beneath the pier. The tide was out at the moment, but the sand was still wet when she reached the bottom – which meant it hadn’t been for that long. ‘This way,’ O’Brien practically grunted, pointing, as if Robyn hadn’t already seen where they were heading. ‘A fisherman, one of the really early morning brigade that like to sit on the pier up there, discovered it. Thought he’d got a tug, caught something big.’ O’Brien gave a small gravelly laugh. ‘He was right, just not in the way he would have liked. When he looked over the side, flashed his light into the water, he saw he’d hooked the leg of someone’s jeans. That’s when he called it in.’
‘Any CCTV coverage around here?’ Robyn asked, looking about her.
‘Not so’s you’d notice,’ came the predictable reply. ‘Not this far down the pier. Definitely not on the beach itself.’
O’Brien strode into the tent first, making no attempt whatsoever to hold the flap open for Robyn. When she pulled this back, she saw men and women in white suits – though they were pretty much indistinguishable – and she saw Watts, eyes cast downwards at what was in front of him. Photographers of the more official kind were skirting around the discovery, snapping off shot after shot with huge cameras. One of the suited figures was crouching off to the side and examining something; they looked like one of those Crown Green bowlers following the trajectory of a roll. Robyn’s eyes followed their own trajectory, down to the body half-covered in that wet sand. The jeans leg was sticking up and out, pulled free by the fisherman’s hook presumably, and the foot was covered in a sock – though there was no sign of any footwear.
Parts of the corpse were buried and others exposed: the flash of a bare arm; what looked like material from a T-Shirt; an ear and jaw. You couldn’t see the face yet, however, and for that small mercy Robyn was grateful. It wasn’t that she hadn’t been to crime scenes before, seen dead bodies in a much worse state than this, it was just if she couldn’t see the face yet then it wasn’t really a person. It was a puzzle to be worked out, and she knew a lot of forensics people felt the same way.
What made it a person, of course – someone who’d lived and breathed, had a life until it had been snatched away from them – wasn’t just seeing a face. It was a name, it was connecting that name to loved ones and seeing their reactions, too.
Loved ones like Vicky and Mia.
But they’d already lost the one person in the world they cared about the most, they couldn’t lose him again. No matter the similarities between this death and Simon’s, it wasn’t him. It couldn’t possibly be him.
A horrible thought struck her then. What if this had been done to get at her? There you go, that ego again! But she had helped to put a lot of people away; people with friends, family. What if all this was some kind of revenge thing? Was she responsible for Simon’s death somehow, had the killer done it just because Vicky was related to her? That worked if you thought about the first murder in those terms, but not this one. She didn’t even know this person… did she? Was it some kind of message, someone messing with her? Maybe the killer was around, watching her even now?
It was only now that Watts looked up and saw Robyn; that he noticed she was even in the tent. He skirted around the body and joined her. ‘Robyn? Robyn, you okay? You look a little…’
‘Hmm? Oh, yes. Just thinking.’
Her Husband’s Grave is available to buy in ebook format. The paperback will be published in September.
Amazon US | Amazon UK | Hive UK | Kobo | Waterstones
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR |
Paul Kane is the award-winning, bestselling author and editor of over a hundred books – including the Arrowhead trilogy (gathered together in the sellout Hooded Man omnibus, revolving around a post-apocalyptic version of Robin Hood), The Butterfly Man and Other Stories, Hellbound Hearts, The Mammoth Book of Body Horror and Pain Cages (an Amazon #1 bestseller).
His non-fiction books include The Hellraiser Films and Their Legacy and Voices in the Dark, and his genre journalism has appeared in the likes of SFX, Rue Morgue and DeathRay. He has been a Guest at Alt.Fiction five times, was a Guest at the first SFX Weekender, at Thought Bubble in 2011, Derbyshire Literary Festival and Off the Shelf in 2012, Monster Mash and Event Horizon in 2013, Edge-Lit in 2014 and 2018, HorrorCon, HorrorFest and Grimm Up North in 2015, The Dublin Ghost Story Festival and Sledge-Lit in 2016, IMATS Olympia and Celluloid Screams in 2017, plus Black Library Live and the UK Ghost Story Festival in 2019, as well as being a panellist at FantasyCon and the World Fantasy Convention, and a fiction judge at the Sci-Fi London festival. A former British Fantasy Society Special Publications Editor, he is currently serving as co-chair for the UK chapter of The Horror Writers Association. His work has been optioned and adapted for the big and small screen, including for US network primetime television, and his novelette ‘Men of the Cloth’ has just been turned into a feature by Loose Canon/Hydra Films, starring Barbara Crampton (Re-Animator, You’re Next).
His audio work includes the full cast drama adaptation of The Hellbound Heart for Bafflegab, starring Tom Meeten (The Ghoul), Neve McIntosh (Doctor Who) and Alice Lowe (Prevenge), and the Robin of Sherwood adventure The Red Lord for Spiteful Puppet/ITV narrated by Ian Ogilvy (Return of the Saint). Paul’s latest novels are Lunar (set to be turned into a feature film), the Y.A. story The Rainbow Man (as P.B. Kane), the sequels to RED – Blood RED & Deep RED – the award-winning hit Sherlock Holmes & the Servants of Hell, Before (an Amazon Top 5 dark fantasy bestseller) and Arcana. He also writes thrillers for HQ Digital/HarperCollins as PL Kane, the first of which, Her Last Secret, came out in January 2020 (www.plkane.com).
Paul lives in Derbyshire, UK, with his wife Marie O’Regan and his family.
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