I am thrilled to be
hosting a spot on the BETRAYAL BY THE BOOK by Michael D. Beil Blog Tour hosted
by Rockstar Book Tours.
Check out my post and make sure to enter the giveaway!
About the Book:
Author: Michael D. Beil
Pub. Date: April 18, 2023
Publisher: Pixel+Ink
Formats: Hardcover, eBook, Audiobook
Pages: 336
Find it: Goodreads, https://books2read.com/BETRAYAL-BY-THE-BOOK
A writer’s
conference brings twelve-year-old Lark’s favorite writer—and a suspicious
death—to Swallowtail Island, in the second book in this middle grade mystery
series by an Edgar Award-nominated author.
Swallowtail Island is hosting the Swallowtales Writer’s Conference. Lark's
ecstatic to be chosen as a “page” for her favorite author, Ann E. Keyhart.
But they say you should never meet your idols. When Keyhart arrives with her
personal assistant in tow, she is nothing but a terror. And within a few hours,
the assistant is dead! But the explanation isn't sitting well. Not when lots of
people had reasons to want to be rid of Keyhart, and especially not after it’s
revealed the assistant recently completed a hot new novel and the file's
vanished from her computer.
Then Lark finds out the assistant had a bird—the match to the one she found
hidden in her mom’s book—and she needs answers. It looks like Swallowtail
Island still has secrets to reveal, and Lark’s going to uncover them.
A gripping new chapter in the Swallowtail Legacy series, Mike D. Beil spins
another clever clue hunt that seamlessly slips in alongside the best classics
of middle grade mystery.
Get Book 1 WRECK AT
ADA’S REEF Now!
Excerpt:
Prologue
ann e. keyheart stands in the front hall of the
Captain’s Cottage, her mouth still hanging open from the blood-chilling scream
that brought me sprinting the seventy-eight yards back to her door. Not to
brag, but if the 78-yard dash was a thing, I would have totally broken
the world record. It’s even more impressive when you add these details:
it is after ten o’clock at night, the path is poorly lit, and I’m weighed down
by the five pounds of plaster cast that’s holding my broken right arm in place.
“Whathappenedareyouokay?” I say between breaths
while I push the door wide open and barge inside. Captain Edward
Cheevers’s dark, intense eyes stare down disapprovingly at Keyheart from his
portrait on the wall.
“Dead,” she says in a voice that lacks any emotion. “She’s
dead.”
You know, I’d better stop here, because I’m getting ahead of
myself. If you understand soccer, what I need to do is back pass to the
goalie and reset. So, let’s back up a few hours so I can explain
exactly why I was seventy-eight yards away from the Captain’s
Cottage, on the dark path between it and the Islander Hotel, at the very moment
that my favorite author discovered a dead body on her living room floor.
CHAPTER
1
there is nothing unusual about the way the day
starts. Pip, my ten-year-old sister, is the first one awake, galumphing
down the stairs and out to the barn to feed and say good morning to Tinker, her
horse. Our stepfather, Thomas, is next, making coffee and ransacking the
refrigerator for eggs and milk, when I make my appearance.
“G’morning, Lark. Perfect timing. Can you make up
pancake batter with one arm? Good. Great. Bacon or sausage?”
“Bacon,” I say, pouring the mix into a bowl and reading the
directions.
Fifteen minutes later, as I’m flipping the last batch of
pancakes, his three boys—my stepbrothers Blake, Nate, and Jack—stumble in, one
zombie after the other, drawn to the smell of frying bacon.
Pip, as usual, chatters almost nonstop through breakfast,
sharing stories of the previous day’s UNBELIEVABLE and FANTASTIC adventures
with Tinker, and outlining her (and Tinker’s) plans for the new day. The
rest of us nod or grunt occasionally so she doesn’t think we’re ignoring
her. In our crazy, mixed-up family of six, Pip is the only true “morning
person.” After I’ve had my orange juice (in my favorite vintage Judy
Jetson glass) and a stack of pancakes, though, I come to life.
It’s a big day—another in a series, it seems—for
me. It’s the opening day of Swallowtales, Swallowtail Island’s annual book
festival, which promises to pack every hotel and B&B on the island with
wannabe writers of every age. Two hundred aspiring writers are coming to
take classes and to “workshop” their books, stories, and poems with other
writers. It’s also an opportunity to meet and discuss their work with
publishers, agents, editors, and a handful of bestselling authors.
What does all this have to do with Meadowlark Elizabeth
Heron-Finch, you ask? That’s easy: Nadine Pritchard, the famous writer who
was my mom’s best friend when they were kids, just happens to be on the board
of directors of Swallowtales. Right after we arrived on the island in
June, she hired me to be her assistant, and together we solved the
seventy-five-year-old mystery of her grandfather’s murder. Along the way,
we also stirred up a hornet’s nest involving the wealthy and important (on
Swallowtail Island, at least) Cheever family and a few hundred acres of
extremely valuable real estate.
When Nadine first asked if I wanted to be a page, which is
sort of an assistant to one of the bigshot authors or other VIPs, I was less
than enthusiastic, until I saw the list of authors.
“Can I be her page?” I asked, pointing
at the name “Ann E. Keyheart.”
“Ann Keyheart? Really? Why?” Nadine seemed
surprised.
“She’s, like, my favorite author. I’ve read The
Somewhere Girls a million times. I know, it’s not like me at
all. All that teen drama. And you know, the really big secret that
they all promise never to reveal. So cheesy. I usually hate that
stuff, but I can’t help it. It’s so…good. Have you read it?”
Nadine shook her head. “No, but I know of it. I
visited a girls’ school in New York last year to talk about my books,
and I’m pretty sure every girl there was reading it. Tough competition for
a nonfiction book about the civil war in Somalia.”
“Have you ever met her? Ann Keyheart, I mean.”
“No. I understand that she used to be a Swallowtales
regular, but stopped coming a few years back when her career really took
off. We hadn’t even asked her this year, figuring it would be a no, but
then her people reached out to us a few weeks ago. Said
she wanted to do it, and didn’t even care about the money. She’d do it for
free. Kinda hard to say no to that. You really want to be
her page?”
“Uh-huh. Yeah. I mean, she’s not crazy or anything,
right?”
“Well, speaking as a writer, I think all writers are at least
a little crazy. But if you want the job, you’ve got it.”
It is the
boys’ turn to clean up after breakfast, and I have a half hour to kill before
heading to the Islander Hotel for my first duties as an official Swallowtales
page, so I return some texts. It wasn’t until the second week of August
that we made the family decision to stay on Swallowtail Island, and ever since
I told all my old friends back in Connecticut, they have been freaking
out. They can’t believe that I am choosing to live on a
tiny island in Lake Erie—with a year-round population of about two thousand,
with no cars, and in Ohio, for goodness’ sake. I might
as well be moving to the moon as far as they’re concerned. And now, with
less than two weeks of summer vacation left, they’re bombarding me with texts
about how horrible my life is going to be. I have to give them credit for
doing their research, at least. Thanks to them, I know that the average
size of the graduating class at Swallowtail Island High School is forty-five,
and that the soccer team hasn’t won a game in more than two years. And
that sometimes grocery stores run out of food because the lake is frozen and
the ferry can’t get to Port Clinton.
“Hey, listen to this,” says Thomas, pointing to something in
the Swallowtail Citizen that had arrived the day
before. “It’s a letter to the editor.”
I roll my eyes at him. “So?”
I know, I know. What can I say? I’m twelve, I’m an
orphan, and I live on an island. In Ohio. And sometimes the voice in
my head (my mom’s) telling me to be nice is too late for me to stop
myself. At this point, though, Thomas knows me well enough not to take it
personally.
“Trust me, you’ll be interested,” he says. “Some woman
who read about you in last week’s paper. Roseann Flaherty.”
It’s true. After Nadine and I solved her grandfather’s
murder and found Captain Edward Cheever’s missing will—a will that, among other
things, might make Pip and me the owners of about three
hundred acres of valuable land on Swallowtail Island—the Citizen ran
a big story about me. Now, before you start thinking I’m famous or
something, you need to know that the Swallowtail Citizen is
not exactly the New York Times.
“Does she want to buy some land, or is she offering to sell
it for me?” It’s a legitimate question. When word got out about the
will and the land, we had to stop answering the phone because we were getting
so many calls from real estate agents.
“It sounds to me like she’s writing about the book you’re
looking for—the one from the English bookstore.”
I sit up straight in my chair. Now Thomas has my
undivided attention. Right after we arrived at the Roost, our house on
Swallowtail Island, I found a tree swallow (Iridoprocne bicolor, to be
precise) made of silver, along with a copy of The Pickwick Papers by
Charles Dickens that had belonged to my mom. Strangely, the pages were cut
out in the center of the book to make a secret nesting place for the
bird. Inside the front cover was a stamp from Crackenthorp Books in
London, so I wrote to them to see if they knew anything about the bird. A
few weeks later, I got a response from Mr. Archibald Crackenthorp, who
wrote that he didn’t know anything about the bird, but that a second Dickens
book, Little Dorrit, had also been sent by his father to the same
address around 1940.
When the guy was interviewing me for the story in the Citizen,
he was kidding around at the end of his visit, calling me Nancy Drew and asking
me about my next case. All I’d said was that I was looking for a book with
a cutout for a little carved bird—that I’d heard there was a book like that
somewhere on the island, and I was going to try to find it. I didn’t say
why, or how I’d heard about it, or anything about already having one like it.
“I told you you’d be interested,” Thomas says as I read over his
shoulder.
“What does she say?”
Thomas continues: “Apparently your story triggered a memory
of seeing a book with a bird hidden inside, like what you said you were looking
for. She thinks that the bird was tan or brown all over, like a wren or a
sparrow. It would have been around nineteen seventy-six, when she was in
the fourth grade. A classmate brought it in for show-and-tell.”
“Does she say anything about the book? The
title?” I ask. “Or the name of the girl who brought it in?”
“Uh, let me see. She doesn’t remember the girl’s
name…the family moved off the island sometime afterward, but she remembers that
the girl lived in a big house on Buckeye Street.
A yellow house.”
“There’re no yellow houses there,” I say. I cut across
Buckeye on my bike on my way into town all the time and I would have noticed a
yellow house.
“It’s been forty plus years. Houses change
colors. Change in all things is sweet, according to
Aristotle.” He looks closely at me, waiting for the inevitable eye roll,
but I deny him the chance to be right. “Anyway, it’s a clue, which is more
than you had ten minutes ago.”
“Maybe it’s a clue. Maybe not.”
“But you’re going to look into it.”
“Well, in the words of Larkus Maximus, duhhh.”
The job of a
Swallowtales page is not complicated. In our training sessions, the
organizers stressed a few key things. Number one, chauffeur the VIP from
the ferry dock and help out with the check-in process. Deliver the
information packet containing class rosters, schedules, invitations, and
tickets. Then a quick tour of the Islander Hotel, where most of them are
staying, and where all the classes and workshops will be held. We all
received training on the photocopy machine and how to get VIPs connected
to the Wi-Fi and a printer if they want. After that we’re basically “on
call,” a text message away from whatever they want, whether it’s a cup of
coffee, a ride into town on one of the hotel’s golf carts, or twenty copies of
a handout for their class. “Be there if they need you, and stay the heck
out of the way if they don’t” we were told.
I’m supposed to meet Keyheart at the ferry dock, where she’s
due to arrive on the Niagara at eleven o’clock. Dressed
in the official page uniform of khaki shorts and a peach-colored polo with the
Swallowtales logo embroidered on the front, I take the keys to one of the
hotel’s electric golf carts and drive to the lighthouse at the point. As I
skid to a stop a few steps from the water’s edge, the Niagara has
just passed the outer channel markers and is heading for the red buoy that’s no
more than fifty yards from where I sit. From there, it has a straight shot
to the dock, but I have plenty of time to get there. Once it reaches
shore, there are lines to be made fast, ramps to be lowered, and gates to be
opened before anyone can disembark.
The starboard railing is lined with passengers pointing at
the lighthouse and, of course, capturing the moment of their arrival on
Swallowtail Island on their phones. As the Niagara slips
past me, a lone woman is standing in the shadows at the stern, leaning
nonchalantly against the railing as if she’s made the trip a million
times. I think to myself, Must be an islander—definitely not a
tourist. Then, while I’m reaching down to turn the key in the golf
cart, she glances over her shoulder and casually tosses something overboard. I
can’t see what it is, but my brain registers a flash of black and white
stripes, exactly like the ones on a can of CoffLEI, a coffee-flavored soda made
on Put-in-Bay. (Its short for Coffee of the Lake Erie Islands, in
case you’re wondering.) Whatever it was, it really ticks me
off, because, geez, there are trash cans and recycling bins all over the stupid
ferry. Before I’m able to get a decent look at this Neanderthal, though,
she disappears into the crowd along the rail. Annoyed, I step on the
accelerator and kick up some gravel as I spin the cart around and head for the
road to the ferry dock.
By the time the Niagara is tied up and
passengers have begun to disembark, I have parked the golf cart in the lot and
I’m standing outside the terminal holding up a sign that reads:
A. KEYHEART. I know what she looks like, although I’ve been warned by
more than one person that the author photo in all her books is several years
old and “definitely Photoshopped.” Passengers file past me, some
making the expected jokes (“If I say I’m A. Keyheart, will you take me to
my hotel?”) but still no Keyheart. Finally, as I’m about to give up, a
young woman clambers down the ramp, spots me, and waves. She’s lugging
three large suitcases and has a full pack strapped to her back.
“Hello! Thank you! I was worried you’d already
gone,” she says. She points to the sign. “That’s me.”
I’m not so sure; she looks like a college kid. I know
they can do wonderful things with cosmetic surgery these days, but this is
ridiculous. I look at the sign, then back at her. “Uh…are you
sure…I’m waiting for the author, um, Ann Keyheart.”
“Yeah, I know. I’m her P.A.”
“P…A?”
“Personal assistant. Didi.”
“Oh. Right.” This is the first I’ve heard about an
assistant, personal or otherwise. “I’m Lark, your, er, Ms. Keyheart’s
page for the week. I’m so sorry. I wasn’t expecting…” I take one of
the suitcases from her and stack it on the back of the cart.
“No problem,” she says, pushing her sunglasses up and turning
to take in the view of town from the dock. Her free hand goes to her
mouth, but not before a quiet “oh” slips out, and her lovely green eyes turn
watery.
“Are you…okay?” I ask.
She shakes her head quickly, as if to break out of a trance,
and covers her eyes with her
sunglasses. “Yeah. Good. Okay. I just…oh, there she
is. Finally.”
A woman in a lime-green linen pantsuit appears at the top of
the ramp, stopping to pose as if she’s waiting for the press to greet her on
the red carpet at the Oscars. Her big moment is ruined, though, when a
gust of wind takes her hat, and after a brief, swirling flight, deposits it in
the harbor.
“Oh! My hat! No! That’s from
Harrods! Didi! Hurry!”
I run toward the ferry, thinking that I might be able to
rescue the hat if I can find a boat hook, but it is not to be: the wake from a
passing boat washes over it and it sinks before my eyes.
“Annnddd there it goes,” says Didi. “Right
to the bottom. Like the Titanic. I hope that’s not an
omen for the week.”
“After I drop you off at the hotel, maybe I can come
back and look for it,” I say.
Didi shakes her head. “Don’t worry about it. In
fifteen minutes, she won’t even remember that she had a hat. Harrods
my butt. Marshalls, more likely.”
Keyheart, barely five feet tall in her matching green
espadrilles, slowly makes her way down the ramp, all the while staring sadly at
the spot where the hat disappeared. I get my first good look at her, and
mentally compare the woman before me with the younger, thinner, redder-haired,
and somehow, but most definitely, taller person in the
photograph that I was so familiar with.
“Hi, Ms. Keyheart, I’m Lark,” I say, holding out my
(cast-free) left hand, which she leaves hanging for a long second
before giving it a quick shake. “Your page for the week. I just want
to say how happy I am to be able to—”
“You’re my…oh, that’s just perfect. A
one-armed page. Are you even old enough to drive that thing?” she
asks, pointing at the hotel golf cart.
“Yes, ma’am. Don’t worry about my arm. And you only
have to be twelve to drive golf carts on the island.”
“Good grief. I’m being chauffeured by a child. A
child with a pituitary problem, apparently,” she adds, backing up a step so she
can take in all sixty-eight and a half inches of me. “Are your parents in
the circus?”
Didi buries her face in her hands. “Actually, they’re
dead,” I say, smiling sweetly. “But they were both tall.”
O-kayyy. On that note…Maybe we should get going,” Didi
says, guiding Keyheart into the seat next to me while she climbs into the back
seat.
I press down on the accelerator and off we go, with Keyheart
holding on for dear life and wondering aloud about the lack of seat belts.
When I pull up outside the hotel lobby, I say, “We need to
stop here to get you checked in, and then I’ll take you to your cottage.”
In addition to the main building, which has forty-eight
rooms, the Islander Hotel has half a dozen “private cottages” for very special
guests. Although she offered her services for free for the week, Keyheart
had requested the Captain’s Cottage, the newest and most luxurious of the
bunch, with a deck that extends well out over the lake. It is named for
Captain Edward Cheever, the famous sea captain—yes, the same one whose
long-lost will I found, and whose land Pip and I might now
own. His name and face are pretty much everywhere on
Swallowtail Island.
“I’ll take care of it,” Didi says to Keyheart. “Can I
have my phone back?”
Keyheart makes a face, sucking in a deep
breath. “Oh. Riiight. Your phone.”
“What?” says Didi. “Where is…no! You didn’t.”
Keyheart nods. “I’m afraid I did. I’m really,
really sorry. I made my call, and then, I don’t know what
happened. One second I was holding it, and the next…”
“Did you leave it on the boat?” Didi asks. She
starts to climb back aboard the cart. “Maybe we can get back before it
leaves. Come on!”
I’m ready to make the drive back to the dock, but Keyheart is
shaking her head. “It’s not on the boat. I…it went over. The
side. Ker-plunk.”
“No. No, no, no!” Didi repeats. “How
did you…that phone is my life. What am I supposed to…how can I
even do my job?”
“Let’s not be melodramatic, dear,” Keyheart says, and I
cringe, knowing how I would respond to somebody telling me not
to be melodramatic. ...
About Michael D. Beil:
In a time not long after the fifth extinction event, Edgar Award-nominated author Michael D. Beil came of age on the shores of Pymatuning Lake, where the ducks walk on the fish. (Look it up. Seriously.) He is the author of the Red Blazer Girls series, Summer at Forsaken Lake, Lantern Sam and the Blue Streak Bandits, and Agents of the Glass: A New Recruit. For reasons that can't be disclosed until September 28, 2041, he now lives somewhere in Portugal with his wife and their two white cats, Bruno and Maisie. He still gets carsick if he has to ride in the back seat for long and feels a little guilty that he doesn't keep a journal. For more on the author and his books, visit him online at www.michaeldbeil.com.
Website
| Facebook | Instagram | Goodreads
| Amazon
Giveaway
Details:
1 winner will receive a finished copy of BETRAYAL
BY THE BOOK, US Only.
Ends May 16th, midnight EST.
a Rafflecopter giveawayTour Schedule:
Week One:
|
5/1/2023 |
Excerpt/IG Post |
|
|
5/1/2023 |
Excerpt/IG Post |
|
|
5/2/2023 |
Excerpt/IG Post |
|
|
5/2/2023 |
Excerpt |
|
|
5/3/2023 |
Excerpt/IG Post (when available) |
|
|
5/3/2023 |
Excerpt |
|
|
5/4/2023 |
IG Review |
|
|
5/4/2023 |
Excerpt |
|
|
5/5/2023 |
Excerpt/IG Post |
|
|
5/5/2023 |
IG Feature |
Week Two:
|
5/8/2023 |
IG Review |
|
|
5/8/2023 |
IG Review |
|
|
5/9/2023 |
Review |
|
|
5/9/2023 |
IG Review |
|
|
5/10/2023 |
Review |
|
|
5/10/2023 |
Review/IG Post |
|
|
5/11/2023 |
IG Review |
|
|
5/11/2023 |
TikTok Spotlight |
|
|
5/12/2023 |
Review/IG Post |
|
|
5/12/2023 |
Review/IG Post |
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.