Read Drink and Be Bloggy

        Warning: HUGE spoilers for those who have not yet read Third Grave Dead Ahead      

     When we last saw Charley Davidson things were not looking so wonderful: Reyes (the Big Bad and oh so yummy son of Satan) had used her as bait to bring Earl Walker out of hiding leading to Charley being tied to a chair and tortured within an inch of her sanity, and, as if those two things weren’t bad enough, while she was laid out in a hospital bed healing from said torture her own father has her arrested for aiding and abetting a known escaped convict (can you guess who?), AND to top it all off we almost lost Garrett Swopes to the other side – yes, the other side. However, Charley did receive her official Guardian: the very ferocious and yet oddly lovey-dovey, Artemis (the Rottweiler pet of the also

This is my kind of guy

 drool worthy Donovan, leader of the biker gang The Bandits)… so I guess that’s my silver lining.

     That was the breath taking, and might I add most annoyingly cliff hangie, ending. So you can well imagine my frustration at having to wait MONTHS until Fourth Grave was due to come out. But, as the Goddess of literary fate would have it, Darynda asked me to do some beta reading for her *SQUEEEEEE*!! I couldn’t believe it! Not only was I going to get to read Fourth Grave before it even hit the email of her editor but I was going to be able to give my opinions on the book! It was going to be my job! W.O.W.    

      I’m gonna digress a moment: Darynda has become such an inspiration for me as a writer and just a wonderful light of guidance in my life; I cannot express enough what this opportunity meant to me. It has given me a new direction and goal in life, and I can tell you all my life was seriously in need of direction and light. I’m now attending college for an English degree with a concentration in writing. I’m going to do what I can to become a professional beta reader. I’m not at all certain I have what it takes to be an actual editor, but just to be able to read for a career and have my opinions matter would be like a dream come true. Okay… and now for what you’ve all been waiting for… 

     Fourth Grave Beneath My Feet picks up with our girl, Chuck, having developed a teeny tiny case of agoraphobia and a huge case of Shopaholic: ensconced in boxes and boxes of Home Shopping Network goodies (*Ahem* things Charley will never use… like cookware) and glued to her TV set watching infomercial after infomercial interrupted by a story on the mysterious bank robbers who have been dubbed “The Gentlemen Theives” She’s also packing heat (no, Reyes is not packed away in one 

of the boxes, ladies – jeez hold your horses) a gun, appropriately named Margaret. Cookie soon reveals to Charley that she has blown through all of their money, even the emergency mocha latte fund is

 dangerously depleted, the two of them run through all of their former clients who they still need to collect money from and come to one conclusion: Reyes Farrow. Oh! Charley and Co. have also vacated their former offices, seeing as how it sits above her traitorous father’s bar.  

     Charley meets Harper a girl who is tormented by a stalker and fears for her life, not having anywhere else to turn Charley brings Harper to a “safe house” and does a little bit of digging into her case. After finding a stuffed rabbit in a cabinet that has been made to look as though its neck has been broken, Charley realizes that Harper may actually be in quite a bit of danger and that this stalker may not just be a cry for attention like her step-mother believes. Charley decides to officially take on Harpers case and get to the bottom of the situation.    

     Headed out again to find Reyes and make him pay up the big bucks, Charley finds herself in a warehouse district, after emptying her wallet of mocha latte cash she looks into a room of men watching cage fighting… that’s right, Reyes Farrow is cage fighting! Moreover, when Charley confronts him about the money she finds out he’s living with Elaine Oaks! Elaine Oaks for goodness sakes! You remember her, she was the obsessed fan of Farrow who paid the guards at the prison to steal things from Reyes and basically had a shrine for him (I really hope she took that embarrassing stuff down before he moved in. AWKWARD!)     After a rather steamy argument Charley notices that Reyes’ next opponent looks a little… disturbed, he’s literally foaming at the mouth and coming right at her! Until Reyes stops him the demons shadow pops out of the man and claws hungrily towards Charley!

     That seems like an appropriate place to leave you all hanging at! But, I have been granted the most wonderful privilege of all: I get to choose a snippet from Fourth Grave to share with you! While I could have chosen a love scene, or I could have picked a heart warming scene between Charley and a boy she rescues, oooor I could have chosen to reveal where the hell Garret has been through this whole blog post (!) I chose to, instead, stay true to my inner Chuck and give you… a drunk scene. Enjoy! 
    

     “I’m going to sleep with you,” Gemma said, as she eyed the concoction and rationed in a little more powder.
“You’re not really my type, but okay. How kinky are we talking?”
“Do you think it needs more?” she asked Cookie, studying the bowl.
“One can never have too much powdered sugar,” Cookie said. Then she pointed a whisk at me. “I think you should bottle Reyes and sell him on the black market. We’d be rich.”
I stepped closer. “Dude, what are you whisking?”
“Having recently been in the same room with hottest man on the planet, I'm probably whisking my virtue.” She chuckled. “Get it? Whisking my virtue?”
Gemma laughed as she measured in more powdered sugar. I took a gander at Cookie’s bowl and scooped out a dollop of white heaven. “So, icing?”
“Yes, we’re trying out your new cake pans.”
“I bought cake pans?” That was so unlike me.
She wriggled her brows. “And you bought a margarita mixer.”
Uh-oh.
 
     I soon found out Gemma had ulterior motives in hanging with me and drinking like a fish on dry land. I could read it in her body language, in the shifting light in her eyes, but mostly when she said,       “I have ulterior motives.”
She was determined to help me sleep if she had to get me plastered to do it. So she and Cookie were trying out a frozen margarita mixer I’d ordered during a low point in my downfall. For one week, all I could think about was drinking margaritas—well, that and running my tongue along Reyes’s teeth—but I didn’t have salt—or Reyes’s teeth. I’d also lacked the energy to leave my apartment to get some—or the desire to stoop low enough to beg Reyes to let me lick his teeth after what he did—so I could only wish for a margarita. And dream of Reyes’s teeth.
I’d secretly hoped a margarita would magically appear in my hand, but that would mean I would have to put down the remote and God knew that was not going to happen.
It was a vicious circle.
But Gemma rarely drank. Maybe a glass of wine with dinner. And I drank only on special occasions. Like Fridays and Saturdays. Cookie on the other hand . . .
“Wooooooohooooooo!” Cookie raised her arms in triumph. No idea why. “I haven’t had thith much fun thince . . . thince . . .” She seemed at a loss for coherent words, but she recovered quickly and pointed toward the door. “Thince Reyeth Farlow walked through that door!” She turned back to me, her expression full of awe. “And, my god, doeth that boy know how to walk.”
Cookie stood on the other side of the breakfast bar, trying to bake brownies in my new electric pressure cooker. While the apartment smelled really good, I didn’t have high hopes for a chocolate fix anytime soon. The cooker beeped and she turned to check it right before she disappeared. It was weird. She was there one minute and gone the next. And her disappearance was quickly followed by a solid thud, the sound echoing off the kitchen floor. I thought about hurrying to her rescue, but didn’t trust my own legs at that point. Gemma was draped over the arm of my sofa—which might or might not go by the name of Melvin—and Aunt Lillian, who swore those were the best margaritas she’d had since that beauty pageant she entered in Juarez, was face down on my floor. No idea why.
“You’re missing out, Mr. Wong. I don’t know what Cookie put in these, but they’re pretty amazing.” I saluted the boxes that surrounded him, downed the last sip of margarita—or Cookie-a-rita, as they’d been recently dubbed—and decided to get a jump on my letter writing Gemma insisted upon as a form of therapy. Usually therapists stuck to journaling, so letter writing was an interesting twist.
I figured I’d write a letter to Santa. Christmas had come and gone, but I’d missed it as I was not talking to anyone except for the sales people for the Buy from Home Channel at the time, and they didn’t seem to want to spend Christmas with me.
I’d had Christmas dinner with Cookie and Amber, of course, and Gemma and Uncle Bob had both come by bearing gifts and a special, sticky kind of depression, but I really didn’t remember much beyond that. Though there was an incredible chocolate cheesecake somewhere in there. The rest was a blur.
I took out pen and paper and jotted down my thoughts.
 Dear Santa,
What the fuck?
 That was about all I could manage, and it got me nowhere fast. I felt no better for the effort. Gemma’s therapy techniques sucked. I still couldn't get Reyes out of my head. The image of him letting Amber hug him was too precious. And not what I wanted. I wanted to be angry with him, to shake my fists and snarl, but he’d been fighting demons for me. To keep me safe. It was so freaking hard to stay angry with a guy who was secretly fighting a war in your honor. Damn it.
I herded Gemma to the bedroom and lay down beside her only to stare at the ceiling for two hours straight. Then the wall. The nightstand. The skull clad tissue dispenser. After hours of nothing but frustration, I eased Gemma’s arm off my face and slipped out of bed. I was really hoping that margarita would help me sleep like it had Gemma and Cookie, but it didn’t. When I was trying to stay awake for weeks at a time, all I could do was drink copious amounts of coffee just to fight it off. Now I wanted to sleep and couldn’t.
The sandman was an ass.    

      Fourth Grave Beneath my feet is, to date, my favorite of the Grave novels. Darynda Jones never ceases to surprise, scintillate, and enthrall me with her literary charm, whit, and kick ass chick, Charley Davidson.
  The rest, my friends… you’ll just have to wait for