YvonneNext up in my marathon February of Blog Tours on behalf of Aria Fiction, is probably the one book of this eclectic selection which I am most excited about. I have read a couple of Carys Jones’s previous thrillers and she has been kind enough to visit several times to add her own flavour to my posts, by way of some lovely unique guest articles.
This time however, for personal reasons, which include the happy addition of a new member to the family, Carys has asked me instead, to share an excerpt from ‘Best Friends’ and promises to visit when the next book hits the press – Congratulations Carys 🙂
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Four friends, a terrible secret, and one week to stay alive…
Grace doesn’t have a family. That was taken away one dreadful day when she was just six, and her twin brother Peter was killed. Instead she has her best friends and flatmates – Jasper, Franklin and Aaron – and nothing can tear them apart.
Living in London, and trying desperately to make a living, the four friends are rapidly running out of money and hope. So, when they find a discarded suitcase in a skip, they can’t believe their eyes when its contents seem to answer all their prayers.
But then there is a knock on their door, and a very disgruntled thug with revenge on his mind, gives them one week to return his belongings, or they will pay with their lives. Soon the fractures in their friendships begin to show, and when one of them ends up fighting for his life, the stakes are raised even higher.
Will any of them get to the end of the week alive, or will the best of friends become the deadliest of enemies…
Clicking on the book title will link you directly with the relevant Goodreads page
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CARYS JONES
Carys hails from Shropshire, England, where she
Now plus one! – Congratulations Carys 🙂
John Green, Jodi Picoult and Virginia Andrews are among her favourite authors and when she is not writing, she likes to indulge her inner geek by watching science- fiction films or playing video games.
Although just maybe catching up on some sleep might figure more prominantly right now!
I love nothing more than to write and create stories which ignite the reader’s imagination. To me, there is no greater feeling then when you lose yourself in a great story and it is that feeling of ultimate escapism which I try to bring to my books, drawing inspiration from more or less anything and everything.
You can catch up with all the news at Carys’s website
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Chosen by Aria Fiction and Carys Jones, this short extract, which are also the opening lines of the book, is my shared feature for the Blog Tour.
Prologue
It rained the day Peter was buried. Not a gentle, soft rain but a fierce lashing which soaked the grass of the cemetery and coated ebony headstones in a glossy sheen.
Grace did not trust the water. Nor did she trust the stranger standing at her side who kept her leather gloved hand around the little girl’s upper arm in a vice like grip. They expected Grace to run. But where could she go? She longed to climb into the wooden box that contained her brother, to lie beside him and join him in his eternal slumber. Was he still cold to the touch as he had been when the police arrived, bursting through the door and prying the dead boy from his distraught mother’s arms?
Those cries. They still lingered in Grace’s memory along with the screams. An endless echo forever bouncing off the inner walls of her skull.
A crow landed in a nearby tree and then hopped along the lean branches as though trying to garner a better view of the grim scene below. Grace watched the bird, watched how the rain washed over its black feathers. Twice the crow vigorously shook itself and then it opened its dark beak to speak.
“Ashes to ashes,” lamented the priest. Mrs Darden from flat fifteen was holding a large umbrella over him, shielding them both from the icy penetration of the rain.
Christmas was close. In less than a week children would be waking up from a restless night spent waiting on magic, running down the stairs of their homes to see what delights waited beneath a glittering tree.
There were no stairs in Grace’s home. Not unless you counted the general staircase which ran up through the block of flats like a spine.
The call of the crow was shrill. Its rough squawk carried over the whisper of the rain and the words of the priest. Grace continued to look up at its black feathers, listening to the rasp of its cry.
“Come now, focus,” the owner of the gloved hand instructed tersely. “This is your last chance to say goodbye to your brother.”
Peter–forever small and pale with hair as jet black as the crow’s plumage, just like Grace’s. She always saw so much of herself in him. They had the same slight bone structure, the same hazel eyes and soft smiles.
“Adorable,” strangers would stop to stare at the twins in the supermarket, tilting their heads as they issued the obligatory ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs.’
Would anyone stop now that Grace was alone? The abandoned half of a pair.
“Focus,” the voice beside her demanded. Grace imagined that they were gritting their teeth and narrowing their eyes but she wouldn’t look up to confirm it. She kept staring fixedly at the crow, at its beady black eyes. It kept calling out, the haunting sound carrying over the crowd gathered at the grave side. Grace looked at the crow and she knew; it was death. And when she left the cemetery that rainy December day it would follow her, follow her home, follow her through life because she had seen death, looked it square in the eye and now it was never going to let her go….
Huge thanks to you awesome readers. Maybe this is the first book of mine you’ve read or perhaps you’ve been with me on my writing journey for some time, either way, thank you so much. For me there is no greater feeling than knowing that my books are being read and enjoyed. I hope that you’ll stay with me as I continue writing.
Now this book sounds much more to my taste than some you’ve featured recently! It gets off to a great start, but has me wondering what the past has to do with the present that’s described in the book’s general blurb. I hope you feature more from it in the future.
I’m pretty sure I’ve got another book from this author on my wish list and this one may have to join it.
I thought you might be more engaged with this particular Blog Tour, although you may not be quite so eager to participate in the next three posts! Thankfully I have managed to sort out recent misunderstandings with Aria Fiction and we should be back on track in time for the March Blog Tour circuit, although that is not to say that I don’t wish all the authors I feature, every success with writing in their chosen genres.
I have featured posts by Carys several times and I am reminded that I still owe her a couple of reviews for some of her previous books which I have promoted and read, so you might well have a couple on your own list too!
I shall definitely be looking forward to reading ‘Best Friends’. Is this terrible secret really all about the suitcase discovery, or does it go back much further and involve a conspiracy about the death of Grace’s brother Peter?
I’ll be sure to keep you updated when I begin reading 🙂
This does sound good, and I remember reading about this author on your blog before. How sad for Grace’s character, “The abandoned half of a pair”.
Yes! Losing any family member, especially a sibling, can be traumatic enough in itself. However to lose a twin must be completely devastating, almost like losing a part of yourself. The pairs of twins I know are all so close, as if two sides of the same coin and to think how one would cope without the other, doesn’t bear thinking about!
The only thing I am wondering with this story though, is despite the immediate danger which Grace and her flatmates find themselves in, does Grace also have a guilty secret about Peter’s death which is liable to be revealed, or perhaps the secret is so repressed that she doesn’t even remember it – not yet anyway!
I do enjoy Carys’s writing style and story line construction, so I can’t wait to get started on ‘Best Friends’ 🙂