I am joining the blog tour for Retribution by Christina O’Reilly today. Many thanks to Christina for allowing me to share an extract from her book, and to Rachel at Rachel’s Random Resources for inviting me to be a part of the tour.
BLURB:
A young woman has been murdered on Ripton Beach.
DSS ‘Archie’ Baldrick and DC Ben Travers eventually identify the body as that of Lucy Martin, who has been renting a bach in the area. Her husband, Oliver, seems to know very little about his wife or her background.
What was Lucy hiding? Why has she no family or friends?
As the number of suspects mounts up, Archie begins to conclude that the real answer lies in Lucy’s dark and mysterious past, and that the murderer may be just a little too close for comfort …
PURCHASE LINKS:
EXTRACT:
In this extract, the young woman’s cause of death has just been established as murder by drowning. Now the detectives are looking for any evidence from the crime scene at Ripton Beach.
‘There goes your rampant social life for the next few weeks – if not months,’ Archie remarked.
‘Not much loss there, boss.’ Travers squinted along the beach to where police officers swarmed like clusters of ants, each holding a plastic bag. ‘What exactly are we expecting them to find?’
Archie shrugged. ‘Anything that might belong to the dead woman, or her killer. Where are her shoes, for instance? Her bag? Her phone? Did she just wander down here without them?’ He looked back up towards the haphazard row of baches behind the dunes, noting at the same time that the placement of the body was such that none of the dwellings overlooked it. ‘And where did she walk here from?’
‘Someone could have brought her here by car,’ Travers suggested. ‘Killed her, dumped the body here and then left. There were no vehicles in the carpark early this morning.’
Archie loosened his collar and ran a hand around his sweaty neck. It was going to be another warm, muggy day. ‘Get PC Devlin to organise an incident room for us to use – his station is the size of a phone box. And we’ll need some local accommodation, at least for the next few days.’
‘Onto it, boss.’ Travers loped away across the sand to where Devlin was standing barefoot in the shallows with his uniform trousers tucked up around his knees. He bent down as Travers approached and then suddenly stood up again, waving a streaming object triumphantly in the air.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Christina is a writer and professional proofreader living in the Waikato region of New Zealand. Four of her short stories have been published, one in a magazine and the others in anthologies produced by Page and Blackmore, Rangitawa Publishing and most recently in Fresh Ink: Voices from Aotearoa, produced by Cloud Ink Press.
As well as being a finalist in the 2020 Ngaio Marsh Awards, Christina’s first crime novel Into the Void was longlisted for the 2019 Michael Gifkins Memorial Prize for an unpublished novel.
SOCIAL MEDIA:
Make sure you visit the other blogs on the tour for more on Christina’s latest book.
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