BooksChatter: ☀☄ The Shattered Seam: Seam Stalkers [1]

Thank you for joining us on the Virtual Book Tour for The Shattered Seam, a Young Adult Paranormal Horror Novel by Kathleen Groger (13 September 2016, Leaf & Thorn Press, LLC, 226 pages).

This is the first book in the Seam Stalkers series.

Don't miss our interview with author Kathleen Groger.

PREVIEW: Check out the book's synopsis and excerpt below. Read the first xxx chapters with Amazon Look Inside.

Author Kathleen Groger will be awarding a Kindle Fire 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 (☀), interviews (ℚ), reviews (✍) and guest blog posts (✉).

Synopsis | Trailer | Teaser | The Series | Author Q&A | About the Author | Giveaway & Tour Stops

Synopsis

Spending spring break on an isolated island rumored to be haunted is not sixteen-year-old Sam’s idea of fun. Spending spring break with her uncle and his ghost-hunting film crew on an isolated island is even worse.

Way worse.

Her family’s secrets—and a genetic ability she can no longer deny—surface, along with the ghost of a rich serial killer who left behind a trail of trapped souls. And he’s not through yet.

With only one chance for escape, Sam must embrace her family’s curse and close the Seam between the living and the dead. Or be lost, forever.

Teaser: Excerpt

Chapter 1

Everyone at school wanted to be someone special. The popular cheerleader. The super student. The girl with the highest number of followers on this or that social media site.Everyone fought to be different, to be noticed. Everyone except me.Every day I struggled to just be normal.
But normal hung outside my grasp, mocking me with its unattainability, its routineness, its boring existence.
And this weeklong trip to a “haunted” castle in the Thousand Islands of New York had zero chance of helping me achieve normalcy.
It seemed like I’d been waiting for hours on the docks while the guys tried to rent a boat to take us to the island. The cold from the metal bench seeped through my jeans and chilled my already numb ass, making me wish I was at Nana’s house in Florida. We’d spent every spring break together shopping, staying up late, sharing secrets.I swallowed the ache working its way up my throat. Our annual ritual wasn’t happening this year. Or next year. Or ever again.
I twisted the silver bangle bracelet she’d left me and took two deep breaths of the arctic-like air. I needed to stop feeling sorry for myself.
My fingers ached to draw. With Nana gone, it was the only thing I had I could count on. I pulled out my sketchbook and penciled the scenery, shaded the jagged branches of the skeletal trees, rubbed my almost frozen finger over the harsh shoreline, smudging the charcoal to blur the edge.
“What are you doing?”
My heart jumped at the high-pitched voice. I turned. A girl about seven or eight, with frizzy blonde curls and wearing a long black wool coat, sat less than a foot away.
“You scared me.” I picked at my chipped hot-pink nail polish, pretending I hadn’t freaked out because a little girl asked me a question.
She set a doll down between us and stared at her scuffed Mary Jane shoes.
My heartbeat returned to normal. “I’m drawing.” I added a few more pencil strokes. “Do you like to draw?”
The empty docks took shape on my page. Ghosts of the summer crowds hid in the stacked row boats and closed souvenir shops.
The girl peeked at my sketch from under her bangs. “Your picture’s pretty.”
“Thanks.” I blew into my frigid hands. “I’m Sam. What’s your name?”
“Amelia.” She picked up her doll and smoothed its straight brown hair. “You two have the same hair.”
I tucked a strand behind my ear. “Pretty close.”
“What happened to make you so sad?” She tilted her head, and for the briefest of moments, her grayish eyes glistened.
I glanced around for her parents, but we were alone. “Where’s your mom?”
Amelia ran her hands over the doll’s hair again. “She’s dead.”
The shock I felt had to be plastered across my face. I was an idiot. “I’m sorry. I lost my Nana recently. It hurts a lot to lose someone you love.”
“Do you ever feel her with you?”
“I’m—I’m not sure.”
“So that’s why you’re sad? I—” A bell rang, cutting off her words. Amelia looked to her right. “I have to go. He’s calling.”
She scrambled to her feet, clutching the doll to her chest.
“Amelia, wait.”
She turned.
I ripped my drawing out of the sketchbook. “Here. I want you to have this.”
She took the page and touched my hand for a second before pulling away. Her fingers were colder than mine.
“You’re very nice, Miss Sam.” She skipped away, singing in a voice that should have belonged to someone older. The words floated back

“Sitting by the water

Waiting for my father

Tick tock

Time goes by.”

She went down the dock, then jumped onto the rocky ground.
I watched until she disappeared around a boat wrapped in blue plastic sitting on a trailer. I turned back to my sketchbook, and with her image fresh in my mind, quickly drew the girl. My hand shook when I shaded in the dark circles under her eyes.
Someone tapped my shoulder, and I spun around so fast, I almost dropped the sketchbook into the St. Lawrence River. “Jeez, don’t sneak up on me.”
“Sorry. Save that kind of reaction for when we get to Shadow Island and document the ghosts.” Uncle Eric ran his silver-ringed fingers through his spiked dark hair, making it stick up even more.“People will love you.”
I tucked the sketchbook under my arm, stood, and gave him a you’re-full-of-crap face.
“This episode’s gonna rock. Not everyone gets to spend their spring break with me and my crew on a deserted, haunted island. You have to be stoked.”
I glanced at the two guys filming the area and moving up the dock toward us. What if I started imagining things in front of the TV cameras? What if I started acting nutty with the whole world watching? What if they took me back to the shrink for another evaluation? A noose tightened around my chest and inched its way up toward my throat.
“I’m so lucky.” My deeper than normal voice sounded bitchy even to me. I’d be on the island seven days. One hundred sixty-eight hours.Ten thousand eighty minutes.

A lifetime, exposed and alone.
[...]

The Shattered Seam
Available NOW!

The Series: Seam Stalkers

Click on the book cover to Look Inside the book on Amazon and read an excerpt.

Silencing The Seam [2]

Sixteen-year-old Sam Drake thought she’d left the horrors of spring break and Defiance Castle behind her. But back home, the spirits swirling around her are more demanding, more aggressive.

Fear of being institutionalized by her skeptical mother drives Sam to follow her dad to New Orleans. There she hopes to take back control of her life. But the French Quarter and the cities of the dead have other plans. Hour by hour they drain her, making it next to impossible to fight off a ghost who is determined to use her for its own revenge.

Ensnared in an ancient power struggle where Voodoo rituals, betrayal, and murder rule, Sam must determine who to trust. One step in the wrong direction will lock her inside the Seam to walk among the dead for eternity.

[Published 18 October 2016, 209 pages]

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About the Author

Kathleen wrote her first story in elementary school about a pegasus named Sir Lancelot. It had no plot or conflict, but it sparked a dream.

After serving a fifteen-year sentence in retail management, the bulk in big box bookstores, she turned her love of reading into a full-time career writing dark and haunting characters and stories.

She lives by the mantra that a day is not complete without tea. Lots of tea.

Kathleen lives in Ohio with her husband, two boys, and two attention-demanding dogs.

When not writing or editing or revising, you can find her reading, cooking, spending time with her family, or photographing abandoned buildings.

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