Today's spotlight features Chasm by fellow Clean Reads author, L.K. Kuhl,
an Adult Suspense novel.
an Adult Suspense novel.
Warning: Kuhl gives Chasm a PG-13 rating for some fighting and gore.
What happens when you’re in love with your children’s abductor?
Blurb:
Taylor
Vine thinks she can fight off the demons of her past when she moves back home
to Estill Springs, Tennessee, but it doesn’t take long to see that things
aren’t quite that easy. The bumps she hears in the night soon escalate, keeping
her up at nights, and it isn’t long before her most precious possessions, her
children, get abducted. She finds herself in a race against time to try to find
them before it’s too late. One wrong move and the outcome could be disastrous.
Excerpt:
Her
heart picked up its pace, and she reached for the phone. She hesitated, unsure
whether to even answer it. But she plucked it from its receiver. “Hello?” Her
voice slid out rickety and unsure.
The
male voice on the other end was dark and deeply plagued with distress. It
broke, and she struggled to make out what he was saying.
What
she heard next was unimaginable; it didn’t sound human. The grief penetrated
through the voice—through the phone—flanking it with wretched wails and sobs.
“I’ve killed the children. Heaven…help me…I’ve killed the children.” The phone
went silent.
Taylor’s
knees buckled. “What?” The hyper pitch in her voice strained out. “Goodness
gracious, who is this? What happened? Whose children?” Her knees about took her
down again. She caught the edge of the counter, catching herself before she
fell. “Answer me, for crying out loud! Don’t hang up on me!”
She
listened desperately, plastering the phone to her ear. But the phone was
silent. “Hello, hello? Answer me!” Frantically clicking the telephone cradle
button, she tried to bring him back, but there was only a dial tone.
She
pounded the phone on the counter so forcefully that the plastic mouthpiece
broke into a million tiny pieces. She let it fall, left it dangling by its
cord. Swiftly making her way to the hall closet, she rummaged through the
plastic totes for a flashlight. “There has to be one in here somewhere,” she
mumbled to herself. Extension cords and old Christmas lights spilled over onto
the floor.
Finally
finding a flashlight, she clicked it on. It was dim, but it would do. She ran
back to the hall, to the children’s rooms, feeling no pain in her swollen
ankle.
Flinging
Cody’s door wide, she flashed the light toward the wall where his bed sat. In
slow motion, the lonely, empty, disheveled bed yanked a horrifying scream from
her gut, reverberating through the house. The earth quit spinning, and she was
lost to oblivion. “NO! Not my children! Please, God…not my children.” She
needed life support, couldn’t breathe; the air was being sucked from her body
in rapid swells. She dropped to the floor, her world going black—closing
in—smothering.
Not
knowing how long she’d been out, Taylor struggled to her feet, she was sure it
wasn’t long; it was still black outside, flashes of lightning still cracking in
through the window. She raced to check on Nora. Her room was the same:
deserted, hollow, puncturing a bleeding, oozing hole in Taylor’s chest the size
of a large, bottomless chasm.
“For
crying out loud, no…please, no.” The tears coursed down her face. She staggered
numbly to Nora’s empty bed, collapsing on it, her hand reaching, groping—trying
to find the warmth of her baby girl. But the only thing the tangled blankets
and sheets offered her was a bleak and disgusting coldness. It shocked her
through her hand. How long had they been gone? Time couldn’t wait, she needed
to find them.
 |
| L. K. Kuhl |
Author
Bio:
L.K. Kuhl
lives in Nebraska with her husband of twenty-nine years, young son, Nathan, and
Greg and Will, their furry dog kids. She has two older daughters, Morgan and
Brittani and son-in-law, Trevor. L.K. has been writing for over twenty years.
She first began writing children’s books and poetry, moved on to writing music,
and is now writing Young Adult and Adult novels. Her first book, Everlasting, a
Young Adult Paranormal Romance, was published in February, 2016. She loves
spending time with her family, vacationing, writing, reading, and taking long
walks. It’s the characters who write their own stories in her novels, and she
is just their messenger, sharing it with the world.
I got the
idea to write Chasm because my husband used to be an engineer for the railroad.
Although my husband never worked with this gentleman directly, one of the
engineers on the railroad hit and killed his wife and children with the train
he was driving. It was no fault of the engineer. The wife did it deliberately
to get back at her husband, the engineer. The engineer said the last thing he
saw was his children looking up at him from the windows of the car.
Although
this is a work of fiction, and this is just a story between two, make believe
people, I felt compelled to tell his story about how utterly and completely devastating
this would be. The engineer was never able to return to work after this.
Author
Links:
Website: https://kuhlreads.com/
Author
Facebook Page:
https://www.facebook.com/kuhlreads
Twitter: https://twitter.com/lynettehoff1
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/lynettehofferbe/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/l.k.kuhl/
Blogger: http://kuhlreads.blogspot.com/
Amazon
Author Page: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B01BXDJGIY
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