KAREN’S KILLER BOOK BENCH: Welcome to Karen’s Killer Book Bench, where readers can discover talented new authors and take a peek inside their wonderful books. This is not an age-filtered site, so all book peeks are PG-13 or better. Come back and visit often. Happy reading!

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THE PRICE YOU PAY
A Peter Ash Novel Book 8
BY NICK PETRIE

Blurb

Peter Ash must follow his closest friend, Lewis, into the criminal underworld when secrets from the past threaten everything they hold dear in this propulsive new thriller from the bestselling and award-winning series.

Lewis has helped Peter Ash out of more trouble than Peter cares to remember.  So he doesn’t hesitate when Lewis asks a favor in return. Lewis has left his criminal past behind, but a former associate may be in trouble, and he and Peter must drive into the teeth of a blizzard to find him. When they discover blood in the snow and a smoldering cabin, both men know things are bad. Then they learn that someone has stolen notebooks full of incriminating secrets about Lewis’s long-ago crimes, and realize the situation is much worse than they’d thought.

To save Lewis’s wife, Dinah, and her two boys, Lewis and Peter must find the notebooks. With Peter’s longtime girlfriend, June Cassidy, they begin the search—facing ruthless and violent foes at each turn, including one powerful person who will stop at nothing for revenge. Will Peter and Lewis be able to keep that dark past buried? Or will they need to step into the darkness to save the people they love

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THE PRICE YOU PAY
A Peter Ash Novel Book 8
BY NICK PETRIE

Excerpt

Peter Ash opened his eyes in the dark, listening.

Some sound had pulled him from sleep. Not one of the normal noises of the old house. His subconscious mind was used to the wintery clank of the radiators, the wind’s rattle of the loose windowpane that he hadn’t gotten around to mending before the weather turned.

This was something different.

Peter often woke in the night, pillow wet with sweat, mind racing, the war returned in his dreams. He’d come to terms with it, mostly. Had learned not to fight it. It helped to look over and see June Cassidy snoring softly beside him, buried under a mound of quilts, to think of the life he was making with her every day. Sometimes that was enough.

Other times, his chest was so tight he could barely breathe. So he’d get up and pace the unlit house, heart pounding, skin flushed and damp. Fighting to pull air into his lungs, he’d feel the desert sun baking his skin. He’d see the faces from those gone-away days, good friends who had died or men he had killed. He’d smell the stench of unburied bodies. Breath after breath, he let it all come. The cost of war.

But Peter wasn’t sweating now. He felt cool and alert, his senses searching the night. He glanced at the clock on the nightstand. It was a quarter to four. Then came a soft clink, like metal on stone. Someone downstairs.

Slowly and carefully, not wanting to wake June Cassidy, he untwined himself from her naked body and eased himself out of bed. He knelt beside the nightstand and slipped a Browning Hi-Power pistol from the holster he’d mounted to the underside, then took a cylindrical suppressor from a leather sleeve beside it and threaded it onto the pistol’s barrel. No reason to wake the neighbors if this got ugly.

Gun in hand, he stepped into the pair of raggedy blue boxers that June had peeled off him the night before, then left the bedroom and walked barefoot across the sloping wood floor toward the stairs, the night air cold against his bare skin. As he crept down the steps, he stayed tight against the wall where the wide oak treads wouldn’t squeak. His scalp tingled and his heart thumped in his chest. The Browning’s safety was already off.

He heard the sound of running water from the back of the house. He ghosted down the long hall toward the dim electric glow of the kitchen stove. The faint rumble of a drawer, closing softly. He rounded the corner with the Browning up and his finger on the trigger.

A shadow stood staring into the open upper cabinets, hands on his hips. His starched white shirt glowed against his dark skin. Peter had thought he’d been utterly soundless, but Lewis spoke without looking at him. “Where’s your big thermos at?”

On the counter, the coffeemaker gurgled and began to drip. A loaf of brown bread stood on a cutting board beside a jar of peanut butter and a plastic bear filled with honey.

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Links to Nick’s websites, blogs, books, #ad etc.:

Amazon: https://amzn.to/49ltLT3

Audiobooks: https://amzn.to/49lpYVF

Hardcover: https://amzn.to/491WhcH

Thanks, Nick, for sharing your book with us!

Don’t miss the chance to read this book!