I am thrilled to be hosting a spot on the CURSE OF THE SPECTER QUEEN by
Jenny Elder Moke Blog Tour
hosted by Rockstar Book Tours. Check out my post and make sure to enter the giveaway!
About the Book:
Author: Jenny Elder Moke
Pub. Date: June 1, 2021
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion
Formats: Hardcover, eBook, audiobook
Pages: 352
Find it: Goodreads, Amazon, Kindle, Audible, B&N, iBooks, Kobo,
TBD,
Bookshop.org
A female Indiana Jones meets Tomb Raider when Samantha Knox receives a mysterious field diary and finds herself thrust into a treacherous plot. After stealing a car and jumping on a train, chased by a group of dangerous pursuers, Sam finds out what’s so special about this book: it contains a cipher that leads to a cursed jade statue that could put an end to all mankind.
MAY THE HAZEL BRING YOU WISDOM AND THE ASPEN GUIDE AND PROTECT YOU...
Samantha Knox put away her childish fantasies of archaeological adventure
the day her father didn't return home from the Great War, retreating to the
safety of the antique bookshop where she works. But when a mysterious
package arrives with a damaged diary inside, Sam's peaceful life is
obliterated. Ruthless men intent on reclaiming the diary are after Sam,
setting her and her best friend, along with her childhood crush, on a
high-stakes adventure that lands them in the green hills outside Dublin,
Ireland. Here they discover an ancient order with a dark purpose - to
perform an occult ritual that will raise the Specter Queen, the Celtic
goddess of vengeance and death, to bring about a war unlike any the world
has ever seen. To stop them, Sam must solve a deviously complex cipher - one
that will lead her on a treasure hunt to discover the ancient relic at the
heart of the ritual: a bowl carved from the tree of life. Will she find the
bowl and stop the curse of the Specter Queen, or will the ancient order
bring about the end of the world?
Indiana Jones gets a refresh with this female-driven mystery adventure, set in the 1920s, full of ciphers, ancient relics, and heart-stopping action - the first in a brand-new series!
EXCERPT
Chapter One
Sam let the
first door chime go unanswered, occupied as she was with the stack of delicate
books cradled in her arms. The second chime earned a grunt of displeasure from
her as she scanned the shelves for the first edition of John Locke’s An
Essay Concerning Human Understanding she had repaired last week. She
spotted it, tucked safely between Kant and Machiavelli. The third chime rang so
insistently that she tipped the book forward too hard and it dropped to the
floor with an ominous crack.
“Oh dear,”
she said, crouching down to retrieve the book. “Mr. Locke, I apologize. And I
swear to you if it’s the butcher’s boys again, I will take the broad side of
his cleaver to their rear ends myself.”
The spine
appeared unmarred, which was more than Sam could say for her disposition as she
stacked the book on top of the others and jostled to a standing position. She
tottered to the front of the shop and set them down on the desk. In the window stood
the rounded figure of Clement’s postman, his face pressed to the glass and
obscuring the gold lettering across the door. She checked off each book on her
inventory list, letting him freeze in the early January snows of rural
Illinois, before crossing to the door and unlocking it. A blast of cold drove
it open like an unwanted guest.
“Yes,
Georgie, what is it you need?” she asked, shivering back from the chill.
“Got your
mail,” Georgie huffed, bustling past her to drop his sack on the desk. He trod
in drifts of snow across her pristine carpet and she swept the more offensive
piles back out the door as she swung it shut.
“That’s why
I had the package drop put in, Georgie,” Sam said.
“So you can
leave them in a protected box without them getting soaked by the melting snow
you’re tracking in.”
“It’s colder
than a brass toilet seat in the arctic out there,” Georgie replied, leaning
against his mailbag like he planned to stay. He peered into the stacks behind
Sam. “It’s toasty in here, though. Must be nice for you, being tucked up in
this place all day.”
“We keep the
temperature stable for the books,” Sam said, her patient tone fraying at the
edges. She had plenty to do before her long walk home in that same snow, and
she couldn’t do it as long as Georgie was here chewing the cud. “Extreme heat
and cold damage the leather. You said you had my mail?”
“Oh, sure.”
Georgie ducked his head into the thick canvas sack. “Couple of these are too
big, wouldn’t fit through the slot.”
Sam was sure
his bell ringing had far more to do with the warm interior of the shop than
with any oversize packages, but it was too late for that. Here he was already,
invading her space and upending the careful equilibrium she maintained. He
didn’t care that there was the rest of the inventory list to get to, plus the
packages to prepare and send to Mr. Peltingham in London and Mr. Burnham in
Oslo, never mind the repairs to the copy of Medieval Remedies for
Cistercian Monks they had received at the shop last week. She didn’t have
time for Georgie Heath and the trail of muddy snow he dragged everywhere.
He pulled a
small collection of boxes from his sack—none of them, as Sam suspected, too
large for the mail slot—with an exotic array of stamps across the front. Sam’s
heart rate picked up when she spotted Mr. Studen’s scrawled handwriting. He
always had the best finds in Paris. She grabbed her letter opener and sliced through
the thick paper.
“Books,”
Georgie said, in the same tone his father used when talking about the neighbor’s
marauding hogs. “Always books, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Sam
said with a happy little sigh, extracting Mr. Studen’s letter along with his
latest find. “We are a bookshop, Georgie.”
Oh, clever
Mr. Studen. She smiled at the first few lines of introduction, a jumble of
letters and pictographic marks. He’d sent her another cryptogram, with a small
note dashed at the top that read I’m sure to stump you this time.
He wasn’t,
but she appreciated the challenge.
Georgie gave
a snort. “I don’t know what we need with a bookshop here in Clement, anyhow.
We’ve already got a library.”
“A
collection of old family bibles does not count as a library,” Sam said,
reaching for a pencil and paper. It looked to be a straightforward
monoalphabetic cipher despite the distraction of the pictographic marks, but
she didn’t want to underestimate Mr. Studen so quickly.
Georgie
shrugged. “I was happy enough to give that stuff up the second I walked out of
Mrs. Iris’s schoolroom for good.”
“Madame Iris,”
Sam corrected.
“Madame,”
Georgie said in a gross mockery of the French madame’s accent. “Pa says a book
is only good for propping open a door or knocking a fella out.”
“Well I
would expect no less from the man who led a town-wide protest when Mr. Steeling
hired a Frenchwoman to teach at the schoolhouse,” Sam murmured, making a list
of the most frequent letter appearances and the most common letter groupings in
the cipher. Georgie craned his neck around, squinting at Mr. Studen’s neat
handwriting.
“What is
that?” he asked. “Some kind of gibberish?”
“It’s a
cipher,” Sam said. “A code. It’s meant to keep a message hidden.”
The last
word she said pointedly, looking up at the intrusion of his person on her
space. If Georgie noticed her intention—which Sam was positive he did not—he
didn’t do anything to resolve it. Instead he scooted in closer, wrinkling up
his nose like his father’s prize hog.
“Well, how
do you know what it says?” Georgie asked.
“You need a
key,” Sam murmured, writing out a few attempts at the letters she thought she
might have deduced.
“Do you have
the key?”
“No.”
“Well then
how do you know what it says?”
Sam let out
a sigh. “I don’t, Georgie. Not yet. I have to decrypt it, which would be much
easier to do without so much distracting chatter.”
Georgie
rocked back. “I get it, this is like those things you and Jo and Bennett used
to do, out at the Manor, right? Those treasure hunts you’d make up.”
“We didn’t
make them up, Mr. Steeling did,” Sam said, setting down her pencil and folding
the letter closed along with her deciphering attempts, away from Georgie’s
prying eyes. “And I haven’t done those in years, not since we were children.”
Georgie
shrugged. “Maybe you and Joana can put one up now that she’s in Clement again.”
Sam drew
back. “Jo’s in town?”
“Yeah,
didn’t you know it? I figured she would have come to see you straightaway. You
were the only one she ever bothered with. Maybe she’s too good for you now,
too, after being at that fancy academy in Chicago.”
Joana
Steeling was back in Clement and she hadn’t come to see Sam. So, she was still
mad about the fight. Sam had tried so many times to explain why she couldn’t go
to the academy with Joana—first in person, and after Joana left, through
half-finished letters—but Joana couldn’t understand. It was so easy for her,
the heiress of the Steeling fortune, to spend late nights in shady speakeasies flirting
with the boys, getting into and out of trouble. But Sam could never live like
that. Most likely Joana had found her people at Marquart Academy. It didn’t
surprise her that Joana had moved on, but it did surprise her how much it hurt
hearing about it from Georgie Heath.
“If you see
Jo, tell her we’re out at the old barn most nights, me and Pete and the gang,”
Georgie said, oblivious to Sam’s discomfort. “They might have those swanky speakeasies
up in Chicago, but nobody’s calling the G-men on us. We do what we want, all night
if we want it.”
“Sounds a
dream,” Sam said tiredly. “But I’ve got work to do, if there’s nothing else.”
“Oh, right,
got your newspaper here,” he said, ducking back into the bag and pulling out a
copy of the Chicago Daily News. Sam’s attention snagged on a small
headline tucked into the right corner of the front page: TUT OPERATIONS
RESUMED.
“The curse
of the mummy has been lifted,” she murmured, leaning closer to read the rest of
the article.
“Are they
still writing about that thing?” Georgie asked, glancing at the paper. “The
grave or whatever?”
“Yes,
they’re still writing about the tomb of Tutankhamen,” Sam said dryly. “It’s the
greatest archaeological discovery of our time.”
Georgie
waved her off. “I don’t see any point in all that old stuff, who cares? They’re
all dead anyway.”
Sam had no
intention of explaining the historical significance of Howard Carter’s recent
discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb. No one in Clement would understand, except her
boss, Mr. Steeling. He shared Sam’s fascination with all things ancient and
lost. He spent much of his time traveling overseas to exotic places like Greece
to join archaeological excavations. Places she would only ever read about in
the Daily News. She snapped the paper closed and placed it on the desk,
looking at Georgie expectantly.
“Well, I
suppose that’s all,” Georgie said, gazing forlornly out at the brutal white of
the main street of Clement.
“Yes, well,
enjoy your evening in the barn with the other boys,” Sam said, picking up his
sack and putting it on his shoulder, using the movement to push the rest of him
toward the front door. They both squinted against the cold wind that burst
through the opening.
“All right,
all right, I’m off,” Georgie said, the winter wind turning him chapped and
irritable again. “You tell Jo—”
“Will do,
thank you, Georgie,” Sam said, swinging the door shut and throwing the dead
bolt.
She took a
deep, cleansing breath of the temperature-controlled interior of the store, the
soft scent of the oiled leather covers restoring her sense of self, before
turning her attention to the stack of recent arrivals. Her eagerness to
discover new friends outweighed her obligation to the packaging list or the
pang in her gut about Joana returning home and not coming to see her.
She had just
begun to sort the packages when a smaller one slipped out from the press of the
others, the paper soiled and the corner torn away. It looked as if it had been
through a monsoon, the writing so faded it was a wonder Georgie had known where
to deliver it at all. And judging by the various interpretations of the address
scribbled across the front, she wasn’t sure the bookshop had been the package’s
first delivery attempt. How long had it been in the system, knocked from one
place to the other, before it got to her? There was no return address. She held
it up, a small puff of dry earth sifting onto the desk.
“What a
terrible journey you’ve been through,” she tutted. “Let’s get you fixed up.”
She carried
the package to the repair room in the back. The work lamp there glowing a
bluish white. A humidifier hummed beside it, giving the occasional ping in the
relative silence. She sat at the worktable and opened the package. A little
avalanche of dust and desiccated plant parts came sliding out along with the
enclosed item.
The book was
small, barely larger than her hand, the cover in such disrepair that Sam feared
it would disintegrate if she so much as gave it a stern look. She had seen
plenty of books in a variety of conditions since she started working at
Steeling’s Rare Antiquities, but this had to be the worst state of
deterioration she’d ever witnessed. It looked as if the book had been buried in
someone’s back field and dug up by a stray goat.
“Who would
do such a thing to you?” she wondered, her chest aching at the violence the
book had encountered on its journey. “Well, whatever ills have befallen you,
you’re safe here now.”
There was
nothing in the package to indicate where it had come from, no letter of
provenance or introduction from a buyer explaining what the book was or why
they had sent it. The mystery of it had her pulling out her tools, for the
moment abandoning the other new arrivals. She took her brush and went to work,
tilting it up to sweep softly along the outside edges, collecting a tidy pile
of earth and sediment.
Already she
knew it would need a rest in the humidifier to loosen up the pages and
hopefully restore the faded writing within. Once she had sufficiently cleaned
the outside, she began her preliminary inspection of the interior. The pages
were so waterlogged she could hardly pry them apart, but with the aid of a
scalpel and a level of patience bordering on stubbornness, she managed to loosen
one enough to pull it open.
The writing
was, as she suspected, faded and illegible in many places, but that wasn’t what
drew her attention to the book. It was the hasty sketch of a cat on the open
page, the graphite strokes thick and dark and tearing through the paper in some
places. She could even see smudges where the lead must have broken. Whoever drew
this cat must have had very strong feelings about it.
Except that,
the longer she stared at the image, the less it actually looked like a cat. At
least, not like any ordinary house cat. The proportions were all wrong—the ears
too sharp and pointed, almost like horns; the jaw too long and narrow, more
fitted to a dog. And then there were the eyes. They were nothing more than blank
page, but the longer she stared, the more they seemed to burn, two desolate
holes radiating a promise of danger. Awareness prickled down her legs and
across her arms, as if a wayward slip of icy January wind had found its way
into the shop. But it wasn’t the wind. It was the way the cat kept staring,
even when she slid the book aside. Those sightless eyes were on her, always on
her, and in a fit of fear she slammed the cover shut.
“Don’t be
such a fool,” Sam muttered, though she made no attempt to open it again. “It’s
only an old book. What’s the harm?”
Georgie was
putting her on. He must be. This was exactly the kind of prank he and Pete and
the other boys would pull back in Madame Iris’s schoolroom. Leaving notes with
rude poems, knowing she would mistake them for clues to a new treasure hunt at Steeling
Manor, the hunts Mr. Steeling created for his children and Sam. They must be
bored to tears after the last snowstorm, getting pickled out there in his
father’s barn every night. They were probably watching through the front window,
waiting to see her come tearing out of there screaming.
But there
was nothing at the door save the whistle of the winter wind and the last rays
of a dying sun. The darkness looming outside made the malevolence emanating
from the book so much worse, and Sam was acutely aware of how alone she was
just then. She hovered in the doorway of the workroom, not wanting to come any
closer to the odd little book.
“What are
you?” she whispered.
But whatever
secrets the book had, it held them as tightly as the dust wedged into its
pages. Sam chewed at one corner of her lip, weighing her options. She could try
to chase down Georgie, force the book back on him, and make him deliver it out
to Steeling Manor. But the shop was the last stop on his route; he was probably
halfway back to the barn by now, and halfway into a flask of his awful bathtub
gin. The boy could be surprisingly agile when getting away from work. She could
leave it until the next time Mr. Steeling came by to check on the new arrivals,
but that could be weeks from now and Sam didn’t want it hanging around.
No, there
was nothing for it. She would have to deliver it to Steeling Manor herself.
Which meant facing her fears, and potentially her former best friend.
“Oh, Sammy
girl, what have you gotten yourself into?” she sighed, tucking the book into
her satchel and pulling the strap across her chest like a battle shield.
About Jenny Elder Moke:
Jenny Elder Moke writes young adult fiction in an attempt to recapture
the shining infinity of youth. She worked for several years at an
independent publisher in Austin, TX before realizing she would rather write
the manuscripts than read them. She is a member of the Texas Writer’s League
and has studied children’s writing with Liz Garton Scanlon. She was a
finalist in the Austin Film Festival Fiction Podcast Competition in 2017 for
her podcast script, Target. When she is not writing, she’s gathering story
ideas from her daily adventures with her two irredeemable rapscallions and
honing her ninja skills as a black belt in Tae Kwon Do. Jenny lives in
Denver, CO with her husband and two children.
Giveaway Details:
3 winners will receive a finished copy of CURSE OF THE SPECTER QUEEN, US Only.
Tour Schedule:
Week One:
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6/1/2021 |
Excerpt |
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6/2/2021 |
Review |
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6/3/2021 |
Excerpt |
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6/4/2021 |
Excerpt |
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6/5/2021 |
Review |
Week Two:
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6/6/2021 |
Review |
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6/7/2021 |
Excerpt |
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6/8/2021 |
Review |
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6/9/2021 |
Review |
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6/10/2021 |
Review |
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6/11/2021 |
Review |
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6/12/2021 |
Review |
Week Three:
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6/13/2021 |
Review |
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6/14/2021 |
Review |
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6/15/2021 |
Review |
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6/16/2021 |
Review |
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6/17/2021 |
Review |
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6/18/2021 |
Review |
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6/19/2021 |
Review |
Week Four:
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6/20/2021 |
Review |
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6/21/2021 |
Review |
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6/22/2021 |
Review |
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6/23/2021 |
Review |
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6/24/2021 |
Review |
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6/25/2021 |
Review |
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6/26/2021 |
Review |
Week Five:
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6/27/2021 |
Review |
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6/28/2021 |
Review |
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6/29/2021 |
Review |
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6/30/2021 |
Review |
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