Congratulations to the winners of the last contest. W.W. from Oakland, CA won Bookclubbed to Death. Carli S. from New York City, NY will receive Death in the Margins. The books are going out in the mail today.
This week, I’m giving away crime novels set in the South. In J.G. Hetherton’s What Lies Beneath, Laura Chambers finds herself caught in a deadly web of small town secrets. Hillsborough, North Carolina is a town with a dark history that is bubbling to the surface. Twenty years ago, Laura’s friend’s family was slaughtered in their beds, and the sole survivor, Laura’s eight-year-old friend, was whisked away to distant relatives. That was the last time Laura ever saw her best friend. Twenty years later, a woman runs onto the interstate, directly into the path of a truck, and the gruesome accident leaves behind a mangled corpse. Her very last phone call was to Laura, just before she was killed, but her face is disfigured beyond recognition. Identification seems impossible, and the victim was barefoot and in a state of undress. The only thing in her possession is an old photograph depicting Laura, Laura’s father—and standing next to them, her lost friend from childhood.
In Scott Blackburn’s It Dies with You, twenty-nine-year-old Hudson Miller has made his living in the boxing ring, but a post-fight brawl threatens to derail his career. Desperate for money, Hudson takes a gig as a bouncer at a dive bar. That’s when life delivers him another hook to the jaw: his estranged father, Leland, has been murdered in what appears to be a robbery-gone-bad at his salvage yard, Miller’s Pull-a-Part. Soon after his father’s funeral, Hudson learns he’s inherited the salvage yard, and he returns to his Bible-belt hometown of Flint Creek, North Carolina, to run the business. But the business is far more than junk cars and scrap metal. It was the site of an illegal gun-running ring. And the secrets don’t end there; a grisly discovery is made at the yard that thrusts Hudson into the fight of his life. Reeling for answers, Hudson joins forces with his father’s former employee, 71-year-old, beer-guzzling Vietnam vet Charlie Shoaf, and a feisty teenage girl, Lucy Reyes, who’s fiercely seeking justice for her own family tragedy. With a murderer on the loose and no answers from the local cops, the trio of outcasts launch an investigation. The shocking truth they uncover will shake Flint Creek to its very core.
Which book would you like to win? You can enter to win both, but I need separate entries. Email me at Lesa.Holstine@gmail.com. Your subject line should read either “Win What Lies Beneath” or “Win It Dies wtih You.” Please include your name and mailing address. Entries from the U.S. only, please. The giveaway will end Thursday, Jan. 19 at 5 PM CT.