Discover the world of author John Burley and make sure to enter the giveaway at the end of the post for a chance to win the following prize fromt he author: John will be awarding a digital copy of The Quiet Child to three randomly drawn winners via rafflecopter during the tour. The tour is sponsored by Goddess Fish Promotions.
GENRE: Thriller
BLURB:
From the award-winning
author of The Absence of Mercy, comes a gripping and darkly psychological novel
about family, suspicion, and the price we are willing to pay to protect those
we love the most.
It’s the summer of
1954, and the residents of Cottonwood, California, are dying. At the center of
it all is six-year-old Danny McCray, a strange and silent child the townspeople
regard with fear and superstition, and who appears to bring illness and ruin to
those around him. Even his own mother is plagued by a disease that is slowly
consuming her.
Sheriff Jim Kent,
increasingly aware of the whispers and rumors surrounding the boy, has watched
the people of his town suffer—and he worries someone might take drastic action
to protect their loved ones. Then a stranger arrives, and Danny and his
ten-year-old brother, Sean, go missing. In the search that follows, everyone is
a suspect, and the consequences of finding the two brothers may be worse than
not finding them at all.
Excerpt teaser:
Michael McCray squinted into the low-hanging sun as he swung
the liberty blue Mercury four-door into the Century Grocery parking lot off Gas
Point Road. At 7:45 p.m., the last of the August daylight still lingered, not
yet willing to surrender the town of Cottonwood, California, to the custody of
the night. Throughout the surrounding neighborhood, shadows spilled out from
the bases of homes and businesses, dim expanding pools that merged to cover the
quiet streets, the suburban yards strewn with forgotten playthings. On the
radio, Kitty Kallen’s honey-flecked
voice finished singing “Little Things Mean a Lot,” and Michael
leaned forward and turned the knob to the left, clicking it off. He could feel
warm air drifting through the open windows, the oppressive heat of the day
finally slipping away with the reluctance of a child heading in for an evening
bath.
The churn of the Mercury’s whitewall tires across the gravel
lot—now all but empty except for the hunkered yellow presence of the
proprietor’s 1952 Chevy Bel Air—ground
to a halt as Michael nosed his car into a spot in the second
row. He placed the vehicle in Park and turned off the engine. In the backseat,
his two boys sat silently, gazing through the open windows at the parking lot
beyond. It was Monday—a school night for ten-year-old Sean and six-year-old
Danny—but Kate had been feeling unusually well this evening, her dark brown
eyes engaged with her family instead of trapped beneath the
hazy effect of her medication. “We should celebrate,” Michael had suggested.
“How do you and the boys feel about ice cream from the market?”
Kate had nodded, smiling up at him from the living room
La-Z-
Boy, her expression both foreign and familiar, reminding him
of how she’d looked at him twelve years before as he’d leaned in for their
first kiss—awkward and wonderful—at the
top of that Ferris wheel in Redding. It was the summer after
he finished his master’s degree in chemistry at UC Davis, the road trip north
made on a whim, Michael thinking he’d spend some time in the mountains, maybe
cross into Oregon and hit Portland before turning back. He’d made it as far as
the small community of Cottonwood before encountering Kate at the late-night
check-in desk at the Travelers Motel on the north end of town. It was her
summer job between college semesters. By the end of that first conversation,
Michael had asked her to the carnival the following night. By the end of
August, they were married.
“I’ll take Danny with me,” he’d told her this evening before
heading out.
“I wanna come too,” Sean had protested, jumping up from the
couch.
“Stay with your mother.”
“Please, Dad. Please,” Sean persisted, wrapping his hands
around his father’s forearm.
“It’s okay. Let him go,” Kate had said, the latest issue of
Cosmopolitan magazine resting in her lap. “I’ll be fine here by myself for a
few minutes.”
Michael paused, uncertain, his palm on the doorknob.
“I’ll be fine,” Kate assured him once again. Then, glancing
at Sean, “He wants to go.”
Buy Links:
AUTHOR Bio and Links:
John Burley is
the award-winning author of The Absence of Mercy, honored with the National
Black Ribbon Award, and The Forgetting Place. He attended medical school in
Chicago and completed his emergency medicine residency at University of
Maryland Medical Center and Shock Trauma in Baltimore. He continues to serve as
an emergency medicine physician in Northern California.
Website: http://john-burley.com/index.php
Amazon Author
Page: https://www.amazon.com/John-Burley/e/B00E5V4BSM
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/John.Burley/
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