GUEST POST and GIVEAWAY
Eyeshine:
Murder in Stoker Hills
Murder in Stoker Hills
by Cy Wyss
Eyeshine by Cy Wyss is currently on tour with Partners in Crime Virtual Book Tours. The tour stops here today for a guest post by the author, an excerpt, and a giveaway. Please be sure to visit the other tour stops as well.
Description
PJ Taylor is a reporter with a difference. Each night she turns into a black tabby cat from sundown to sunup. In this first adventure, follow PJ as she chases thieves, drug dealers, and even a murderer. Will PJ solve the mysterious drowning death of cantankerous old coot Chip Greene? Or will a local special needs boy end up taking the blame? Be prepared for twists and turns along the way as PJ applies all her feline senses to this diabolical situation.
Excerpt
- 1 -
Spring Festival
Spring Festival
People called Brooke Annabeth Taylor “PJ,” which stood not for pajamas but for Peeping Jane. She’d been a photographer and reporter for as long as the town could remember—at least since grade school—and her reportage was known for the most candid and impossible photos, like Peter Parker’s but from nearer the ground. Her job was made more difficult by her moniker because once people found out what it was, they shied away and wouldn’t tell her the secrets that are a reporter’s stock-in-trade. As she got older, it got harder and harder to convince anyone to give her a story. Now, at thirty, she was no longer “kitten cute” and able to wile her way easily into subjects’ confidence. Still, she managed to find a way.
With her penetrating amber eyes and easy smile, people found her disarming. She loved her relationship as a freelance reporter with the town’s paper, and all the vagaries that life entails, such as being a night owl and an absolute bulldog for the truth. If she could have chosen her own moniker, it would have likely combined these: Owl Dog. It was particularly inappropriate, however, because she turned not into a bird or canine every night, but into a cat.
She had been a black tabby from sundown to sunup since shortly after puberty. She often wondered why other people didn’t morph into alternate beings for the dark hours, but was admonished very early on by a loving mother to never, never, ever speak a word of it to anyone. PJ liked to think that was because her mother had a similar power and had suffered, but it could have been due solely to the woman’s intelligence and sense of practicality.
PJ’s father had died when she was ten. The man was a scientist, an absent-minded chemist, and PJ was of two minds about his awareness. On the one hand, his cleverness meant surely he wouldn’t have been fooled by a mere wife, no matter how adept at deception; on the other hand, his absentmindedness meant sometimes he forgot to wear shoes. So it wasn’t a stretch to think he might have no inkling about the bizarreness of his wife or daughter.
At sixteen, with PJ in limbo between childhood and womanhood, her mother suffered a tragic and debilitating stroke that took her life within months. PJ then moved in with her much older brother and his family. By then, she had become as adept as her mother at hiding her talent, in spite of the fact her brother was an FBI agent by that time, at twenty-nine, and extraordinarily difficult to deceive. It helped that after he witnessed firsthand the transformation from girl to cat, he immediately went into a long-lasting shock that consisted of utter denial. Instead of considering how her unique power could assist him in his life of crime fighting, he grounded her for a month and kept her largely confined to her room, especially after sundown.
PJ forgave Robert for locking her up, only because of her natural optimism and sense of personal grandeur. Honestly, grudges were beneath her, as were most things mere mono-modal humans did. She focused on her schoolwork and got all A’s that semester. Much later she discovered her brother had to take a polygraph test every year he was employed with the all-knowing government agency. PJ realized Robert had so thoroughly put the image of his sister becoming a black tabby cat out of his mind that he had convinced himself it wasn’t even a hallucination—it simply hadn’t existed at all. There’s no need to lie if you’re a true believer, and that was the most effective path for a forced deceiver. So PJ kept her secret, and Robert kept his job.
Fourteen years later, PJ was irrevocably known as Peeping Jane and Robert had traveled the country and come back in his forties to set up a one-man field office in Mayhap, Indiana. One day, PJ was out with her best friends Clara Goodwind and Vicky Donnerweise at the Mayhap Spring Festival when the sun dipped low on the horizon, threatening to bring the stars closer and the day to an end.
“PJ, why do you always leave just when things are getting interesting?” Clara said.
She was a buxom woman with big hazel eyes and bright red hair. Her wardrobe favored items with cats in evidence or implied by pithy sayings, such as “Meow Happens,” which her pink tube top currently sported. The woman was Taft County’s prime cat rescuer, with a warren of dedicated chicken-wire pens covering her backyard and a full-time feeding schedule. When she wasn’t volunteering at the county’s humane shelter, she was ensconced in a network of gossips centered at the Mayhap Memorial Library. Clara was an assistant librarian but party to all the good stories the town could provide. PJ found her an invaluable source. If it happened, or was going to happen, Clara knew about it and would talk.
Vicky stood with arms akimbo and watched PJ inhale an elephant ear. She was a striking woman with hair even blacker than PJ’s and blue eyes where PJ’s were yellow. Vicky was tall and muscular, like a man, but lither and hourglass-shaped inside the bulky kit she wore for law enforcement. She was one of Taft County’s deputies, second in their force only to Sheriff Curtis Denning, whom she happened to be married to.
“Land’s sake, PJ, how do you eat like that? You know I’m active all day, but I can’t eat three of those things without being ten pounds fatter tomorrow. Do you just stay up all night on the treadmill or what?”
A loud cry of enjoyment crescendoed from the fairway before PJ could answer, which was just as well since her mouth was filled with fried dough and she wouldn’t have gotten more than a grunt or two out. She didn’t have the heart to enlighten her friend. Every night, indeed, she ran the treadmill of being feline. She wandered miles in the summertime, searched every nook and cranny of the county, chased rodents and vermin, and napped only fitfully and with one eye open under the shifting moon.
She popped the last of the ear into her mouth and said, “It’s genetics. Some people are luckier than others.”
Vicky and Clara groaned.
Clara adjusted her pink-rimmed glasses and slurped her sno-cone. “At least I managed to keep myself to just one Devil Dog. And sno-cones have no calories after noon—everyone knows that.” Clara was constantly watching her figure, which didn’t seem to keep her from growing more buxom by the year. At the rate she was going, she would be a round octogenarian with a radiant smile in fifty years. PJ thought things could be worse.
“So you two coming two weeks from today or what?” Vicky said.
She was having a cookout, a common occurrence in the warmer months, and the Taylors and Goodwinds were regular fixtures. Everyone knew the cookouts were as much a bid to stuff the people of Taft County with reasons why the Denning clan should hold on to the sheriff-hood for the indefinite future, but everyone came anyway. Vicky’s ribs were legendary, and Curtis’s beer was as tasty and free flowing as anyone’s ever was. Today was Saturday, and two weeks from today was going to be the first big Donnerweise-Denning BBQ of the season.
“Yeah, I’ll be there,” PJ said. “At least until sunset.”
Vicky rolled her eyes. “Because you turn into a pumpkin at sunset, right? We’ll never get to see nighttime you. Isn’t Doc Fred helping you with that?”
Doctor Fred Norton was Mayhap’s most celebrated, and only, psychiatrist. Apparently he was a third cousin twice removed to the iconic Oprah Winfrey and had once listened to her problems with aplomb, inspiring her to go on and listen eternally to others. He was given a brief mention in a book of hers, which was now out-of-print. For Mayhap, that was all it took to secure one’s place in the annals of town history. He even had a special shelf in the library to display his pamphlets on the pluses of positive putation, despite the brochures containing more than their fair share of buzz non-words.
PJ’s cover story for disappearing every evening, no matter the weather or event, was a rare and debilitating overreaction to darkness. Everyone thought she ran home to sit in a bright room under full-spectrum lights so she could make it through the dark hours with her psyche intact, her odd and entrenched phobia notwithstanding. Doc Fred made a perfect corroborator. His acute sense of professional delicacy meant he could never confirm nor deny PJ’s hints that he was treating her without success for her illness. Perhaps he had spent the last decades sketching her case study, which would no doubt be picked up by the professional societies should it ever come to a positive conclusion.
“Sorry,” PJ said to Vicky, “I’m not going to talk about it.”
“Oh, right. Shrink’s privilege and all that.”
“Well, get going,” Clara said. “I don’t want to have to carry around any pumpkins your size after dark, if you turn into one.”
“Alrighty. Toodles, people.”
Praise for the Book
"This was a good book. I enjoyed it. I did like the main character - woman who turns into cat at night." ~ Stephanie
"It kept my interest and I would recommend it to my family and friends." ~ Mary
"A fun read! I recommend it. I loved the character of P.J. [...] It was great to see the relationship between P.J. and her brother develop throughout the book. I was surprised by the solution to the mystery; it kept me guessing until the very end." ~ Bonnie E. Craig
"This is the kind of book that you can read leisurely and have fun with. An easy and fun read." ~ Joanie
Guest Post by the Author
Cats
I’ve basically always been a cat person. This is not to say I don’t like dogs, because I do. We took care of my brother’s dog, Jake, when I was growing up and he was an awesome guy. Still, I’ve mostly had cats. I think it started with Hamburger, a grey and white cat that seemed to be a stray. My mother made me take him to school in the hopes of finding his home but I snuck him back over our fence and lo and behold he was still in our yard when I got back from school. So we ended up keeping him. I swear he was deaf; he never did react when the can opener ran.
Then there was Oni, a grey tabby. We got her from a neighbor and she liked to go outside until one day I found her lying in our front yard, injured from the street I thought. I brought her inside on a tray since her hips seemed to be crooked. The hips seemed to heal but her mind didn’t, since after that she wouldn’t go outside, even if the door was left open. She was my special little girl.
Around that time we got Sandra, another grey tabby. She was a neighborhood stray and I used to open up my bedroom window and feed her on the eave. She would climb the tree out front of our house and beg at my window, no wonder. She lived to be 23! She was the first cat we had to have put down. The others had all wandered off into the prairie and were swallowed by the vast expanse of nature outside our doors.
More recently, in Indiana, we got two cats from our veterinarian of the time. An orange and white cat and a grey tabby appeared in a large box at the vet’s and we asked their backstory. Apparently they were owned by an older gentleman who unfortunately had cancer. When the time came for him to go into the hospital he held on to his bed and wouldn’t go with the paramedics until someone had come to get his cats. They called our vet and she took the cats and promised him she’d find them a good home. We came to the rescue. We brought them home and at first kept them in the guest bedroom so they and our other cat, Navvy, could get used to the idea of each other. Navvy never was able to get along with them. She was really a one-cat household kind of cat. Anyway, the orange and white cat (who we named Orange) and the grey tabby (who we named Scaredy) stayed in the guest room even when we opened up the door. They were used to a tiny apartment and couldn’t believe they had the run of our whole big house, including a large screened-in porch.
Not too much later, we got Gobbo, a black and white tuxedo cat whose pelvis had been crushed by a car accident. Unfortunately, we didn’t have Gobbo that long; he succumbed to his injuries just a few months after we got him. My husband lamented to our friends that he wanted a nice lazy tuxedo cat and it turned out those friends were trying to find a home for Eddie, a chubby cuddly tuxedo cat. We had Eddie for many years, he passed away in 2014. Scaredy had passed away years before, as had Orange.
After Eddie passed away my daughter and I searched for cats. We went to our veterinarian, as they have kittens from the humane society that they show off. She picked a black kitten we named Yellow. Not only does Yellow have big beautiful yellow eyes, he was also one of triplets, and to tell them apart they had color-coded collars: red, blue, and yellow. I found a friend for him from the humane society, an older cat named Brucee. They hit it off like brothers and love to romp and play. I heard my daughter say the other day that she loves cats and can’t imagine life without them. So I’ve helped create a fellow cat person, which I think is great.
About the Author
I live and write in the Indianapolis area. After earning a PhD in Computer Science in 2002 and teaching and researching for seven years, I’ve returned to the childhood dream of becoming an author. I better do it now because I won’t get a third life.
Behind me, I have a ton of academic experience and have written about twenty extremely boring papers on query languages and such, for example this one in the ACM Transactions on Databases. (That’s a mouthful.)
Now, I write in the mystery/thriller/suspense genres and sometimes science fiction. I know for some people databases would be the more beloved of the options, but for me, I finally realized that my heart wasn’t in it. So I took up a second life, as a self-published fiction author.
Online, I do the Writer Cy cartoon series about the (mis)adventures of researching, writing, and self-publishing in today’s shifting climate. I also love to design and create my own covers using GIMP.
Giveaway
Enter the tour-wide giveaway for a chance to win a $10 Amazon gift card.
Links
