Now he’s Took: a reluctant
monster afraid to bite anyone, broke, and about to be discharged from his elite
BITERs unit.
When an old colleague
suggests he consult on a BITERs case, Took has little to lose. The case is open
and shut… but nothing is ever that easy. As he digs deeper, he discovers a lot
more than one cold case is at stake, and if he wants to solve this one, he’ll
need the help of the BITERs team. Even if that brings his old commander, Madoc,
back into his life.
Cat gives this one 3
Meows with a 3 Purr heat index...
Luke was taken and
tortured and turned, becoming Took. He hasn't come to touch with his new life
and is on leave from the BITERS. He is working private consultations and takes
a case that gets him in deeper than he dreams of.
Madoc comes when he hears
that Took is in trouble. Madoc is an old vampire and very much wants Took, but
did he want him enough to be the one that had taken him in the first place? Can
he convince Luke he wasn't?
I felt the story had a
good premise and I snapped it up because I love TA Moore and loved the Digging
Up Bones series and I cannot get enough vampires, especially MM ones.
I felt like I was missing
a lot here. It was like I came in the middle of a series. There was a lot of
words, and stuff that I wish there had been an index at the front of the book
explaining. The world was built, and I never figured out some of the things.
It is a good story; it was
just hard for me to read since I had a lack of understanding of a lot.
Warning...there is a lot
of graphic violence and this is no sparkling vampire love story. now having said that I LOVED the relationship
between Took and Madoc. That was the best part of the story for me.
Excerpt…
The sons of God came in unto
the daughters of men, and they bore biters and reprobates they called
Anakim. And mankind turned against the Anakim and would not sustain them.
And they began to sin against birds, and beasts, and reptiles, and fish, and to
devour one another’s flesh, and drink the blood.The Enochian Bible, the Book of Watchers, Ch 1 V 25
Chapter One
“DO A bit of private work,” they said. “Easy money,” they said. It turned out “they” were a bunch of liars.
Took went down on one knee in the wet Georgia dirt next to the ranking detective on the case. Deputy Gatlin hadn’t been too pleased when the sheriff ordered him to walk a Charleston PI through his missing persons case, but now he cracked a dazed grin up at Took.
“Feel like I got kicked by a horse,” he said raggedly. Gatlin tried to take a deep breath and huffed out a shaky laugh when he couldn’t. “Can’t catch… my breath. Thank fuck for the vest.”
“Yeah,” Took said as he glanced down at what was left of Gatlin’s lower torso. The explosion set off by the trip wire had caught him from the side and blown the meat off him. From foot to knee his legs were untouched, but above that broken, white bone showed through pulped skin and the stiff patches of charred fabric where his uniform had melted against his skin. “Where’d you be without it?”
Gatlin laughed again. His smile wobbled at the corners, and Took could see the awareness in his glazed blue eyes that something more than a hard knock was wrong with him. His brain just didn’t think it was time to let him in on what had happened. Took had been there.
A flash of sharp, self-scathing humor twitched the corner of Took’s mouth. Admit it, it dared him, most days he was still there.
Took tucked his phone between his ear and his shoulder as he roughly stripped his shirt off and the expensive little buttons popped off into the long grass. The ringtone trilled in time with Gatlin’s blood loss as his life spilled out onto the grass. Took swore through his teeth as three rings seemed to take forever.
He’d told Gatlin this was a bad goddamned idea. It didn’t matter what Willie Daly had been willing to do back when he was meth-head peeper. He was a Goat now. The local district attorney couldn’t come up with a deal that would tempt him to snitch. As for whatever passed for a conscience, that wasn’t the first thing to go. It didn’t last long, though.
But Gatlin had been determined to show the big-shot detective from Charleston that he didn’t know everything. So he’d pulled the wire-and-nerves man off the streets and leaned on him until Willie spilled what he knew—or claimed he had. When Willie led them up here by a series of backwoods turns that scraped the suspension against the rutted concrete, Took expected to be led around by the nose until it got dark. Enough time to give Willie’s patron a chance to sneak out with the sunset, not for him to walk them into a well-set trap.
Took ripped the shirt in half and tied the strips of fabric as tightly as he could around Gatlin’s ruined thighs. It wasn’t good first aid, but their resources were limited and he couldn’t see that there was anything left below Gatlin’s hips to save. He couldn’t see that there’d be anything of Gatlin to save, but he had to do something, even if it was pointless.
The call finally connected.
“Appl—”
Took interrupted the irrepressibly cheerful chirp of the operator before she could finish her script. “This is VINE Agent Bennet,” he snapped. Not exactly true. His active agent status with the Violent Infections and Nullifications Enforcement department was on hold, but it was an old habit. It would take too long to correct himself, so he let it stand. Besides, it might make things easier. People might yell about breathing rights when VINE cracked down on Hunter activity, but those same people were always the first to call when they had a feral bloodsucker problem. Invoke VINE and people listened, and Gatlin needed them to listen to Took. Despite his makeshift bandages, blood still soaked the ground. “We have an officer down. I’m out at….”
Shit. He didn’t know.
TA Moore is a Northern Irish
writer of romantic suspense, urban fantasy, and contemporary romance novels. A
childhood in a rural, seaside town fostered in her a suspicious nature, a love
of mystery, and a streak of black humour a mile wide. As her grandmother always
said, ‘she’d laugh at a bad thing that one’, mind you, that was the pot calling
the kettle black. TA Moore studied History, Irish mythology, English at
University, mostly because she has always loved a good story. She has worked as
a journalist, a finance manager, and in the arts sectors before she finally
gave in to a lifelong desire to write.
Coffee, Doc Marten boots,
and good friends are the essential things in life. Spiders, mayo, and heels are
to be avoided.
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love the excerpt
ReplyDeleteThank you for the excerpt!
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