BooksChatter: ☀ Lyrical Underground Mystery & Horror: Robert E. Dunn, Mary SanGiovanni

Thank you for joining us for The Lyrical Underground Mystery & Horror Tour! Our featured titles today are:

A Living Grave (Katrina Williams, #1) by Robert E. Dunn
Chills by Mary SanGiovanni

Below you will find synopsis, excerpts, trailers and purchasing links for each novel, as well as author bios and stalking information.

Lyrical Underground will be awarding digital copies of both books on tour to a randomly drawn winner via Rafflecopter during the tour. Please do take part: comment on our post and follow the tour where you will be able to read other excerpts (☀), and reviews (✍).

Synopsis | The Books | About the Authors | Giveaway

Lyrical Underground Mystery & Horror Books

A Living Grave (Katrina Williams, #1) | Chills |

A Living Grave by Robert E. Dunn

The first in a gritty new series featuring sheriff’s detective Katrina Williams, as she investigates moonshine, murder, and the ghosts of her own past…

BODY OF PROOF
Katrina Williams left the Army ten years ago disillusioned and damaged. Now a sheriff’s detective at home in the Missouri Ozarks, Katrina is living her life one case at a time—between mandated therapy sessions—until she learns that she’s a suspect in a military investigation with ties to her painful past.

The disappearance of a local girl is far from the routine distraction, however. Brutally murdered, the girl’s corpse is found by a bottlegger whose information leads Katrina into a tangled web of teenagers, moonshiners, motorcycle clubs, and a fellow veteran battling illness and his own personal demons. Unraveling each thread will take time Katrina might not have as the Army investigator turns his searchlight on the devastating incident that ended her military career. Now Katrina will need to dig deep for the truth—before she’s found buried…

[13 September 2016, Lyrical Underground, 266 pages. This is the first book in the Katrina Williams series.] PREVIEW: Check out the book's synopsis and excerpt below.
Read the first chapter with Amazon Look Inside.

Excerpt

Chapter 1

     Therapy is not for the weak. It is spine-ripping, devastatingly hard work that shines a light on all the secret parts of your soul. We are all vampires at the center of ourselves, I think. Those bits of ourselves, the secrets that are protected by ego and self-delusion, burn like phosphorus flames when the light finally pins them down.
     I didn’t choose therapy. The sessions were a requirement of keeping my job with the Taney County Sheriff’s Department. I’m the only female detective in the department and the only one required to attend counseling.
     There had been an incident—
     There had been incidents—
     I guess the final straw that I had tossed onto the sheriff’s back was what I called a “justified adjustment of attitude.” It wasn’t that I minded so much the trouble setting the wife-beater straight got me into. What really got to me was that the wife, with her two raccoon eyes and broken nose, picked him up at the hospital and took him right back to the familial double-wide. Some things no amount of adjustment can fix.
     My therapist said that I was violent toward the man but exhibited more anger at the woman. Those were the kinds of things she said and I had to listen to. That was easy to blow off, but sometimes she said something that stuck like a bit of glass in my eye. That morning she had mentioned my clothes in the way only a woman in pencil skirts and strappy shoes can bring up another woman’s choice of jeans and boots. I work for a living and being pretty isn’t part of the job. Sometimes her questions and observations made me want to grab a fistful of perfect hair and adjust her attitude a little.
     I didn’t, though, because sometimes—just sometimes—she shines a light that I guess I really need to see. Maybe I need the burning away.
      [...]

A Living Grave
Available NOW!

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Chills by Mary SanGiovanni

“True Detective” meets H.P. Lovecraft in this chilling novel of murder, mystery, and slow-mounting dread from acclaimed author Mary SanGiovanni . . .

It begins with a freak snowstorm in May. Hit hardest is the rural town of Colby, Connecticut. Schools and businesses are closed, powerlines are down, and police detective Jack Glazier has found a body in the snow. It appears to be the victim of a bizarre ritual murder. It won’t be the last. As the snow piles up, so do the sacrifices. Cut off from the rest of the world, Glazier teams up with an occult crime specialist to uncover a secret society hiding in their midst.

The gods they worship are unthinkable. The powers they summon are unstoppable. And the things they will do to the good people of Colby are utterly, horribly unspeakable…

[27 September 2016, Lyrical Underground, 190 pages.] PREVIEW: Check out the book's synopsis and excerpt below.
Read the first chapter with Amazon Look Inside.

Excerpt

Chapter One

     Jack Glazier had worked Colby Township Homicide for going on nine long New England winters, but he had never seen blood freeze quite like that.
     It certainly had been cold the last few nights; it was the kind of weather that cast phantom outlines of frost over everything. That hoary white made grass, tree branches, cars, even houses look fragile, like they might crack and shatter beneath the lightest touch. An icy wind that stabbed beneath the clothes and skin had been grating across the town of Colby for days now, and the place was raw.
     Jack hated the cold. He hated it even more when his profession brought him out on brittle early mornings like this one, where the feeble sunlight did little even to suggest the idea of heat.
     He had caught a murder case—a middle-aged John Doe found hanging upside down from the lowest branch of a massive oak tree at the northeastern edge of Edison Park. The body had been strung up off the ground by the right leg with some type of as-yet-unidentified rope. A crude hexagon had been dug roughly in the torn-up grass beneath the body.Scattered in those narrow trenches, he’d been told, the responding officers had found what they believed to be the contents of the man’s pockets, which had been bagged as a potential starting point for identification.
     Jack glanced up at the silver dome of sky with its gathering clouds of darker gray and listened for a moment to the low wail of the wind slicing at the men gathered near the body. They worked silently, their minimal conversation encased in tiny breath-puffs of white. The air carried a faint smell of freezer-burned meat that agitated Jack in a way the smell of dead bodies never really did. It made him think of lost things, things forgotten way in the back of dark, cold places and left to rot slowly. There was no closure and no dignity in it.
     Of course, he supposed that closure and whatever little dignity he could scrape together for the victims of murder was part of his job.
     [...]

Chills
Available NOW!

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About the Authors

Robert E. Dunn | Mary SanGiovanni |

I wasn't born in a log cabin but the station wagon did have wood on the side. It was broken down on the approach road into Ft. Rucker, Alabama in the kind of rain that would have made a Biblical author jealous. You never saw a tornado in the Old Testament did you? As omens of a coming life go, mine was full of portent if not exactly glad tidings.

From there things got interesting. Life on a series of Army bases encouraged my retreat into a fantasy world. Life in a series of public school environments provided ample nourishment to my developing love of violence. Often heard in my home was the singular phrase, "I blame the schools." We all blamed the schools.

Both my fantasy and my academic worlds left marks and the amalgam proved useful the three times in my life I had guns pointed in my face. Despite those loving encounters the only real scars left on my body were inflicted by a six foot, seven inch tall drag queen. She didn't like the way I was admiring the play of three a.m. Waffle House fluorescent light over the high spandex sheen of her stockings.

After a series of low paying jobs that took me places no one dreams of going. I learned one thing. Nothing vomits quite so brutally as jail food. That's not the one thing I learned; it's an important thing to know, though. The one thing I learned is a secret. My secret. A terrible and dark thing I nurture in my nightmares. You learn your own lessons.

Eventually I began writing stories. Mostly I was just spilling out the, basically, true narratives of the creatures that lounge about my brain, laughing and whispering sweet, sweet things to say to women. Women see through me but enjoy the monsters in my head. They say, sometimes, that the things I say and write are lies or, "damn, filthy lies, slander of the worst kind, and the demented, perverted, wishful stories of a wasted mind." To which I always answer, I tell only the truth. I just tell a livelier truth than most people.

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Mary SanGiovanni is the author of the THE HOLLOWER trilogy (the first of which was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award), THRALL, CHAOS, and the forthcoming CHILLS (aka THE BLUE PEOPLE), and the novellas FOR EMMY, POSSESSING AMY, and NO SONGS FOR THE STARS, as well as the collections UNDER COVER OF NIGHT and A DARKLING PLAIN. Her fiction has appeared in periodicals and anthologies for the last decade. She has a Masters degree in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University, Pittsburgh, where she studied under genre greats. She is currently a member of The Authors Guild, The International Thriller Writers, and Penn Writers, and was previously an Active member in the Horror Writers Association.

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