Get a Glimpse of A Bone to Pick Through Chapter One!

By Jan S. Gephardt

“What is that dark thing in Bonita’s quinoa patch?” XK9 Shady Jacob-Belle dialed her vocalizer low, flattened her ears, and growled. Unease slithered in her gut. She drew back from the balcony’s railing.

Her mate Rex had been gazing toward the starry nighttime sky-windows with a dreamy look on his furry black face. Now he crouched beside her in the shadows, tense and focused. He stared toward the quinoa. “I am not sure.” Like her, he’d lowered his volume as far as it would go.

Together they peered through gaps in the trailing curtain of sweet potato vines that hung down from the rooftop garden on the level above them. The leafy vine tendrils provided a handy impromptu blind.

Through their brain link, Shady felt her partner Pam rouse from an exhausted sleep. Physically, Pam was at home, seven kilometers away in the Central Plaza District of Orangeboro. But their brain link gave her the ability to be aware of what Shady was doing. Shady? Pam’s mental voice came across drowsy and disoriented. You okay?

For now. Stand by, Shady answered. Whatever lurked a hundred meters away in their neighbor’s field, it was roughly human-sized. Shady’s hackles rose with a prickle of foreboding. All she could see in the darkness was a lumpy shadow among the meter-high quinoa spikes. Veils of mist drifted on thermals up the clifflike terraces from the river far below. Some were too thick to see through. Air currents carried scents from the quinoa patch away, not toward her.

She stifled an urge to bark. Better stay silent until they knew more. It might be nothing. But it also might be a Transmondian agent, here to spy on Rex’s Corona Tower home. Spy, or do something worse.

Want to read more?

The entire chapter, titled Midnight Crop Inspection, is yours to read for FREE through an easy-to-use download. Read how Shady and Rex follow up on a mysterious man who’s lurking in the neighbor’s field . . . and the problems that encounter uncovers!

Use this link to go to a BookFunnel landing page. From there you can download an electronic copy in any of several formats. It’s usually very easy, but if you have any problem downloading it, BookFunnel has excellent troubleshooters who can help you.

The landing page will ask you to leave your email and alert you that you’re signing up for my newsletter (which is itself quite a deal: free downloadable fiction and insider glimpses come in every issue). But if you don’t want the newsletter it’s easy to unsubscribe.

This is, of course, a shameless attempt to sell you a book! But if you’re intrigued and you enjoy the chapter, you’ll probably enjoy the whole book. It’s the second in the XK9 “Bones” Trilogy, about the Space Dogs: uplifted K9s who live on a space station and solve murder mysteries.

But although it’s written as part of a trilogy, it also gives a fairly complete story arc, just within this book.

If you Like these Features, you’ll love A Bone to Pick!

If you’ve read this far, I hope you’ll give the book a try! And of course I’d love it if you also are interested in my newsletter!

CREDITS:

The snippet presented here and the linked Chapter One of A Bone to Pick is © 2021 by Jan S. Gephardt, and published by Weird Sisters Publishing LLC. All rights reserved. The cover art for the novel is © 2020 by Jody A. Lee.