. .
All Grade Pulaski wanted was a quiet life, a few low-profile murders to clean up after, and his hometown in the rear view as he headed back to LA. Simple, attainable goals. All he had to do was keep his nose down and everyone else’s hands clean…as far as the law was concerned…and he’d been able to show Sweeny his heels sooner rather than later.
Problem was that Grade’s ‘thing’ with local mob boss Clay Traynor—currently somewhere between a one-night stand and a bad idea—was a lot of things, but it wasn’t quiet or simple.
For example, Judge Charity Parker was the last person in Sweeny who needed to know Grade’s name. Yet here he was in her basement after midnight, cleaning up a mess that could derail a couple of political careers in one fell swoop. All because Clay owed Judge Parker a favor… or three.
Grade should have known better than to go along with it. Amateurs always made a job messy, and politicians didn’t have a grateful bone in their bodies. Now the only chance he had of seeing LA again meant he had to break his professional code of conduct.
He needed to get his client caught.
Title: Dirty Job: Book 2 in the Dirty Deeds series
Publisher: Rogue Firebird Press
Release: July 5
Amazon
Hi everyone!
Thanks for letting me pop in to talk about my latest book, Dirty Job, which comes out on July 5. This is the second book in the Dirty Deeds trilogy, and I had a lot of fun with it! It’s available online – https://books2read.com/DirtyJob – and I hope you like it! There’s a third book in the works, after all!
If you want a ‘taste’ of the Dirty Deeds world, I thought I’d talk a little bit about where it came from. Which is, of course, me.
People have been surprised before when they meet me because I’m quite pleasant and a bit daft. ‘You seem,’ they say with surprise, ‘so nice.’ Because what I write isn’t always. The thing is, I grew up in Northern Ireland in the dog days of the Troubles, I worked in the charity and voluntary sector over here for years before I was published. What I write? Could be a lot worse.
And that isn’t to imply that I am, in any sense of the word, a hardcase or tough or even brave. I’m a coward. My only instinct in a difficult situation is flight or tea. However, I’ve met people who are hard and dangerous and who told me stuff about the things they’d done that made me moderately worried I was now somehow implicated.
There is nothing like sitting in an office talking to a man who’s just served his time for murder while he tries to jog your memory about why he went down. “Ah, g’wan, you’ll have heard of me.” But I digress.
I’m also a bit like Grade in that I know how easy it is to become desensitized to terrible things. I worked for a documentary company, and I remember going into the BBC archives and looking through old footage from the Troubles. At first, you’re horrified and uncomfortable in the way that watching someone else’s worst day can make you, but that doesn’t last. This is your job, so you have to keep looking, and eventually, disgust turns into ‘Wait! That segment there with the blood spray up the walls? I want that. That’s perfect’.
I also worked on a documentary series about a coroner, and it was fascinating how detached he was from the bodies. Everyone differs, of course, but I don’t see how you could be anything else and do that job. If you saw the corpse as a person, how could you peel their face off? Which they do. It’s quite noisy.
There’s a detachment that comes from any violent occupation—legal or not. Because the human body, the human mind, is built to adapt to its environment. The first time someone does something gross or awful, something that crosses that moral event horizon, the aversive reaction is going to hit hard. Because socially, we’ve been conditioned to ‘not do this,’ whatever it is. If you keep doing it, though? Your body gives up on that because it obviously isn’t working.
Most of the crooks that I crossed paths with? They weren’t particularly sorry. Some of them were proud of what they’d done, some joked about it, and others just thought it had been a day’s work. They had no plans to re-offend, but they’d not had the scales drop from their eyes to see what awful things they’d done. It had just been a day in the office for them.
Just like it is for Grade.
. .
TA Moore is a Northern Irish writer of romantic suspense, urban fantasy, and contemporary romance novels. A childhood in a rural, seaside town fostered in her a suspicious nature, a love of mystery, and a streak of black humor a mile wide. As her grandmother always said, ‘she’d laugh at a bad thing that one.’ Mind you, that was the pot calling the kettle black. TA Moore studied History, Irish mythology, and English at University, mostly because she has always loved a good story. She has worked as a journalist, a finance manager, and in the arts sectors before she finally gave in to a lifelong desire to write.
Coffee, Doc Marten boots, and good friends are the essential things in life. Spiders, mayo, and heels are to be avoided.
Start Page: https://tamoorewrites.start.page
Website: www.tamoorewrites.com
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Twitter: @tamoorewrites
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