Blog Tour: Thicker Than Water by Brigid Kemmerer @BrigidKemmerer

Thicker Than Water

by Brigid Kemmerer
Release Date: December 29th 2015
Kensington Books

Summary from Goodreads:

On his own

Thomas Bellweather hasn’t been in town long. Just long enough for his newlywed mother to be murdered, and for his new stepdad’s cop colleagues to decide Thomas is the primary suspect.

Not that there’s any evidence. But before Thomas got to Garretts Mill there had just been one other murder in twenty years.

The only person who believes him is Charlotte Rooker, little sister to three cops and, with her soft hands and sweet curves, straight-up dangerous to Thomas. Her best friend was the other murder vic. And she’d like a couple answers.

Answers that could get them both killed, and reveal a truth Thomas would die to keep hidden…

Buy Links:

Amazon│Barnes and Noble│Google Play

Excerpt

“You all right?”

I glance at Stan. His eyes are on the road ahead, and his voice is quiet. I don’t know why he’s even asking. Of course I’m not all right. “Fine,” I say.

He doesn’t ask anything else.

Mom would pry. She’d dig the secrets out of me with the dexterity of an archaeologist, leaving my feelings intact while letting the truth rise to the surface. Like I said, she knew my buttons.

Then again, Stan is a detective, so he can probably do the same thing. Maybe he doesn’t want to pry.

The dead heat of summer gives me a big wet kiss when I climb out of the car, reminding me why I don’t wear suits. Reminding me that I probably should have gotten a haircut when she asked me. My neck already feels damp, and I’m glad I didn’t mess with the tie.

I’ve never been to this church, a long, squat brick building with a steeple at one end and an aluminum roof. Stained glass windows glitter with the Stations of the Cross. Nice. Colorful depictions of suffering and torture. Great place. I don’t know why we’re having the funeral in a church anyway. Mom dragged me to church all the time when I was a kid, but we haven’t gone in years. Maybe she and Stan went. I don’t know.

Cops are everywhere. Clustered in groups clinging to the shade along the side of the building, off by the parking lot grabbing a quick smoke, slapping Stan on the shoulder. They ignore me. Good. Sort of.

The atmosphere is wrong here. There’s no sense of loss, no anguish and grief. I feel like I’m trapped in a glass box with my own twisting emotions, watching everyone else at a social event.

It’s infuriating.

I don’t know anyone except Stan. I’m sure I met a few of these people at the wedding, but it was a small ceremony at the courthouse, and no one stands out. Mom’s two friends from back home called to tell me they couldn’t get time off again, couldn’t make the drive out for the second time in two weeks. I said fine, whatever. The only thing worse than being here alone would be mom’s friends treating me like a six-year-old who can’t get a straw into a juice box.

Everyone is standing in groups. Only one other guy is across the parking lot, standing under a tree. He’s not in uniform, but that doesn’t mean he’s not a cop. He’s built like one. He looks like he’s texting. Must really be feeling the loss.

He feels me watching him, because his eyes lift from his phone.

I look away before he can catch my gaze, then pull into the shade myself. It doesn’t help. Part of me wants to put a fist through this brick wall. Another part wants to run from here, to pretend none of this is happening.

Suspicious glances keep flicking my way, as if I’m the oddball here, instead of all the people who don’t even know the woman they’re supposed to be mourning.

Maybe it’s just me. Cops make me nervous. Always have. Maybe it’s a teenager thing, the way they always look at you like you’re on the cusp of doing something wrong. Maybe it’s the year Mom and I spent avoiding the law because Daddy was a very bad man, and we couldn’t risk any kind of trouble.

Maybe it’s the interrogation I had to sit through after finding Mom’s body.

About the Author

Brigid Kemmerer was born in Omaha, Nebraska, though her parents quickly moved her all over the United States, from the desert in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to the lakeside in Cleveland, Ohio, and several stops in between, eventually settling near Annapolis, Maryland. Brigid started writing in high school, and her first real “novel” was about four vampire brothers causing a ruckus in the suburbs. Those four brothers are the same boys living in the pages of The Elemental Series, so Brigid likes to say she’s had four teenage boys taking up space in her head for the last seventeen years. (Though sometimes that just makes her sound nuts.)

Brigid writes anywhere she can find a place to sit down (and she’s embarrassed to say a great many pages of The Elemental Series were written while sitting on the floor in the basement of a hotel while she was attending a writers’ conference). Most writers enjoy peace and quiet while writing, but Brigid prefers pandemonium. A good thing, considering she has three boys in the house, ranging in age from an infant to a teenager.

While writing STORM, it’s ironic to note that Brigid’s personal life was plagued by water problems: her basement flooded three times, her roof leaked, her kitchen faucet broke, causing the cabinet underneath to be destroyed by water, the wall in her son’s room had to be torn down because water had crept into the wall, and her bedroom wall recently developed a minor leak. Considering SPARK, book 2 in the series, is about the brother who controls fire, Brigid is currently making sure all the smoke detectors in her house have batteries.

Brigid loves hearing from people, and she probably won’t refer to herself in the third person like this if you actually correspond with her. She has a smartphone surgically attached to her person nearby at all times, and email is the best way to reach her. Her email address is brigidmary@gmail.com.

Author Links:

Website│Goodreads│Twitter│Facebook

a Rafflecopter giveaway