Today, I’m hosting the next stop on the Find Me blog tour which is published by Head of Zeus. The novel Find Me is written by J.S Monroe. For the blog tour, I am pleased to be able to share an extract of the novel to give you a little taste of this book.
The blurb:
Five years ago, Rosa walked to Cromer pier in the dead of night. She looked into the dark swirling water below, and she jumped. She was a brilliant young Cambridge student who had just lost her father. Her death was tragic, but not unexpected.
Was that what really happened?
The coroner says it was. But Rosa’s boyfriend Jar can’t let go. He hallucinates, seeing Rosa everywhere – a face on the train, a distant figure on the hillside. He is obsessed with proving that she is still alive. And then he gets an email.
Find me, Jar. Find me, before they do…
Find Me Extract:
Jar had considered group-emailing the office from Paddington, to explain his own lateness, but he wasn’t sure how it would have gone down: ‘Just seen my girlfriend from uni who took her own life five years ago. Everyone tells me I’m imagining things, that I must move on, but I know she’s alive, somehow, somewhere, and I’m never going to stop looking until I find her. She wasn’t ready to die.’
He has told Carl everything, but not the others. He knows what they think. What’s a prize-winning young Irish writer, debut collection of short stories a critical if not commercial success, doing in the seventh circle of office hell in Angel, chasing web-traffic figures by writing click-bait on Miley Cyrus? It was unfortunate that the first piece he was asked to le was on writer’s block: ten authors who had lost their mojo. Sometimes he wonders if he ever had it.
In recent months, he has seen Rosa increasingly often: at the wheel of passing cars, in the pub, on top of the Number 24 bus (front seats, where they always sat when they were in London, riding up to Camden). The appearances have their own name, according to the family GP back in Galway: ‘post-bereavement hallucinations’.
His father has other ideas, talking excitedly of the spéirbhean, the heavenly woman who used to appear in Irish visionary poems. ‘How can you be so insensitive now,’ his mother chided, but Jar doesn’t mind. He is close to his da.
He spent a lot of time at his home in Galway City in the immediate aftermath of Rosa’s death, trying to make sense of what had happened. His father owns a bar in the Latin Quarter. They would sit up late, talk through the sightings, particularly one, on the Connemara coast. (He did all the talking, Da listened.) Some he knows are false alarms, but others, the ones he can’t challenge…
‘You look like death, bro,’ Carl says, slumping down in his chair, which lets out a hiss of air. ‘Just seen a ghost?’
About the Author:
Jon Stock, now writing as J.S. Monroe, read English at Cambridge University, worked as a freelance journalist in London and was a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4. He was also a foreign correspondent in Delhi for the Daily Telegraph and was on its staff in London as Weekend editor. He left Telegraph in 2010 to finish writing his acclaimed Daniel Marchant spy trilogy and returned in 2013 to oversee the paper’s digital books channel. He became a fulltime author in 2015, writing as J.S. Monroe.
His first novel, ‘The Riot Act’ was shortlisted by the Crime Writers’ Association for its best first novel award. The film rights for ‘Dead Spy Running’, his third novel, were bought by Warner Bros, who hired Oscar-winner Stephen Gaghan (Traffic, Syriana) to write the screenplay. It is currently in development. He is the author of five novels and lives in Wiltshire, England, with his wife, a photographer, and their three children.
To find out more about J.S Monroe follow him on Twitter at @JSThrillers .
Find Me can be purchased via Amazon here.
As always don’t forget to check out all the other stops on this blog tour.
Chillers Killers and Thrillers 