#SeriesTour #BuyNow #FlocksdaleFiles
Have you started reading the Flocksdale Files Series by
Carissa Ann Lynch yet?! #1Click your
copies of both Have You Seen This Girl and House of the Lost Girls today! #Standalone #NewRelease
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This Girl (Flocksdale Files #1)
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House of The Lost Girls
(Flocksdale Files #2)
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#Giveaway
http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/display/81aa7894742/
Have You Seen This Girl (Flocksdale Files Book #1) #Blurb:
Wendi Wise is a troubled young woman who snorts her
breakfast through a straw and spends more time in rehab than in the real world…
Her life is seemingly out of control.
But now she has a plan.
That plan involves a sharp set of butcher knives.
She's going back to where all of her troubles began…
Flocksdale.
Wendi was lured away from a local skating rink, at the age of thirteen, and held captive in a place she calls 'The House of Horrors.' Dumped off blindfolded on the side of a dirt road, Wendi soon discovered that she was addicted to the drugs they fed her while she was captive.
Too scared to go home, and having a new habit to deal with, she hopped on a bus, vanishing from the family she loved.
Vanishing from Flocksdale…
The town of Flocksdale is littered with fliers with a grainy image of young Wendi, and the words 'Have You Seen This Girl?' written below.
Now, eight years later, she's on a mission—a mission to find the mysterious house from her youth and the monsters who dwell inside it.
Her life is seemingly out of control.
But now she has a plan.
That plan involves a sharp set of butcher knives.
She's going back to where all of her troubles began…
Flocksdale.
Wendi was lured away from a local skating rink, at the age of thirteen, and held captive in a place she calls 'The House of Horrors.' Dumped off blindfolded on the side of a dirt road, Wendi soon discovered that she was addicted to the drugs they fed her while she was captive.
Too scared to go home, and having a new habit to deal with, she hopped on a bus, vanishing from the family she loved.
Vanishing from Flocksdale…
The town of Flocksdale is littered with fliers with a grainy image of young Wendi, and the words 'Have You Seen This Girl?' written below.
Now, eight years later, she's on a mission—a mission to find the mysterious house from her youth and the monsters who dwell inside it.
TBR list:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26094482-have-you-seen-this-girl
House of the Lost Girls (Flocksdale Files #2) #Blurb:
Seventeen year old Marianna Bertagnoli is miserable…
Not only did her father abandon her five years ago, now she’s being uprooted and forced to move with her mother and new stepdad to a creepy Victorian house they inherited in the even creepier town of Flocksdale.
Flocksdale has an evil, ugly past—and history has a way of repeating itself…
Marianna notices some strange qualities about her new home, and soon realizes she’s living in none other than the infamous House of Horrors. That’s right, the very house where the demented Garrett family ran a drug ring, leading to the kidnappings and murders of forty young girls.
The dark energy of the town begins to rise again…
Within a week of moving in, Marianna’s mother disappears, one of her small group of new friends is found murdered, and she’s attacked by a man wearing a hideous clown mask. As she searches for answers, Marianna wonders if the malevolence still lingers, somehow alive…and how her stepdad came to own the House of Horrors.
Unsure who to trust, Marianna turns to Wendi Wise, a survivor of the Garretts’ crimes…
Caught up in twisted family ties and surrounded by deceit, Marianna is targeted by a new generation of evil. Doubly imprisoned—in her own body and in the real house of the lost girls—Marianna needs Wendi’s help to unravel the bizarre history of Flocksdale.
But will Marianna survive long enough to bring the evil to light…or will she be trapped in the house of the lost girls forever?
Not only did her father abandon her five years ago, now she’s being uprooted and forced to move with her mother and new stepdad to a creepy Victorian house they inherited in the even creepier town of Flocksdale.
Flocksdale has an evil, ugly past—and history has a way of repeating itself…
Marianna notices some strange qualities about her new home, and soon realizes she’s living in none other than the infamous House of Horrors. That’s right, the very house where the demented Garrett family ran a drug ring, leading to the kidnappings and murders of forty young girls.
The dark energy of the town begins to rise again…
Within a week of moving in, Marianna’s mother disappears, one of her small group of new friends is found murdered, and she’s attacked by a man wearing a hideous clown mask. As she searches for answers, Marianna wonders if the malevolence still lingers, somehow alive…and how her stepdad came to own the House of Horrors.
Unsure who to trust, Marianna turns to Wendi Wise, a survivor of the Garretts’ crimes…
Caught up in twisted family ties and surrounded by deceit, Marianna is targeted by a new generation of evil. Doubly imprisoned—in her own body and in the real house of the lost girls—Marianna needs Wendi’s help to unravel the bizarre history of Flocksdale.
But will Marianna survive long enough to bring the evil to light…or will she be trapped in the house of the lost girls forever?
TBR list:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27214121-house-of-the-lost-girls
#Excerpt from Have You Seen This Girl?:
- PROLOGUE -
Present Day: I lost my straw three hours ago, which sucks
because it was my favorite one. Getting up to look for it seems like a
painstaking, insurmountable task right now, but I pull myself up to a sitting
position and swing my legs over the side of the bed. The “bed” is nothing more
than a dingy, rust-colored mattress that lies on the floor of a two-room
basement apartment in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
The threadbare carpet that covers the floor provides no
support for my feet, and frankly, it stinks. I get down on my knees and lay my
face flat against the carpet, holding my breath and peering under an ancient,
stained armchair and the dresser that stands beside it. Now, where the fuck is
that straw?
All I can see are dust bunnies, mouse droppings, and the
carcass of a cockroach. No straw. I let out a frustrated groan. I give up
searching, stand back up, and pad across the hall to the tiny bathroom I share
with my current boyfriend, Michael, or “Mick” when he thinks he’s cool. I plop
down on the toilet, running my hands through my tangled mop of greasy black
hair.
I wait for the pee to come. Then wait some more. I can remember
one of my old AA mentors, telling me once why opiates interfere with bodily
functions like peeing, for instance. It was something about wires in the brain
getting crossed…I wish I had a stopwatch to time this affair, but then it
finally comes and I let out a sigh of relief.
Mick’s clothes from the night before are strewn across the
bathroom floor at my feet. Suddenly I have a thought, and begin rummaging
through the pockets of a brown pair of khaki shorts that I remember him wearing
last night. I find what I’m looking for: a tattered black wallet, worn out from
age and being sat on all day long. I open it up and peer inside. It only
contains two dollars, but that’s fine by me—all I need is one.
Pulling out the faded, crumpled bill, I smooth it flat
against the round edges of the wash basin. Once flattened, I begin slowly
rolling it into a perfectly cylindrical mini-version of my straw. It’s
basically perfect.
The dope is in my bedroom drawer, along with my razor. Using
the tiny blade, I lovingly chop the heroin until it is fine and powdery, and
then use the rolled up dollar bill to suck it straight up my nose. Its taste
hits the back of my throat instantly and drains down through my sinuses, a
sensation I used to loathe but have grown to love.
Wiping the residue from my nose noisily with the back of my
hand, I glance at Mick, who is still passed out on the bed. Getting high makes
him sleepy, but it fills me with an insatiable need to do something productive.
Our bedroom is dotted with tiny land mines of crumpled
t-shirts, inside-out jeans, and day-old panties. I make my way around the room,
picking them up and tossing them all into a wicker laundry basket in the
corner.
Besides the bedroom and bathroom, we have a small,
windowless sitting area, a narrow galley kitchen, and a small extra bedroom
that we use for trash and other random items. I move my cleaning to the living
room, gathering up snack wrappers and empty Solo cups, and then carry them into
the small silver garbage can under the kitchen sink. The sink is filled to the
brim with two-day-old dishes, so I start filling the sink with water and
shampoo.
I’ve been out of dish soap for weeks now, but the hair care
product seems to get the job done so I don’t complain. The water from the faucet
never gets hot because our gas got shut off months ago. If I want hot water, I
have to boil it. This all sounds ridiculous, I know. This is the twenty-first
century, but my addiction has me back in the Stone Age, because when you’re an
addict, you don’t spend money on things like food, water, clothes,
electricity…you spend it on drugs. At least the truly hardcore addicts like me
do.
Crusty teacups, sauce-covered plates, and sour-smelling
utensils permeate the water, rising steadily to the brim. I plunge my hands
into the frigid, cloudy water and begin mindlessly washing.
For the past six months, our daily life can be divided into
three segments: looking for money to buy heroin, finding the drug, and then
getting high. Oh, I almost forgot about the fourth segment: coming down from
the drug—my least favorite time of day. Our entire life revolves around heroin
and our bodies rely on it to function. It’s not about getting “high” anymore
because I never feel lifted or high-spirited, or overly anything these days. We
wake up feeling low and we need it to feel normal. Maybe they should change the
expression to “getting normal” or “avoiding feeling like shit,” instead of
“getting high.”
Today will be different though. Today I have a date with my
good friend rehab, and in six hours from now, my daily routine should change
dramatically. Mick isn’t going, but I’m fine with that. He’ll do his own thing
when he’s ready. I’ve been planning this for a month now, and finally the phone
call came: a bed opened up at the local in-patient clinic and today is the day
to report.
I’ve been to rehab before, and will mostly like go again
after this stint, but everything is about to change. This time around, major
plans have been made for when I get out of rehab.
Those plans involve me and a sharp set of butcher knives,
but I’ll explain that later.
Perhaps you’re wondering how I got this way. Or perhaps you
don’t give a damn. Either way, this is my story. It’s not a story about
addiction. This is a story about murder.
#Excerpt from House of the Lost Girls:
Chapter One
Fuck Flocksdale. Not my words—someone else’s. The flat black
spray paint obliterated the real words—Welcome to—on the shiny metal sign
greeting us on our way into Flocksdale. Our new town. Not my choice of
towns—someone else’s.
In the backseat of my parents’ SUV, I was slumped down in
the seat with yellow earbuds shoved as far into the openings of my ears as they
would go. The ornery words aroused me from my black mood, and I leaned forward,
pressing my face to the glass as we passed.
I tried not to smile. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who
hated this town.
“Wow. That’s just great,” my mother said, also noticing the
nasty words scrawled on the sign as we passed by. “Who would do something like
that?” she asked.
“Oh, honey. You know who. Rotten teenagers,” my stepdad
uttered disgustedly, staring back at me in the rearview mirror. I may as well
have written the words myself based on his nasty look. It was so obvious that
he hated me. Why couldn’t my mother see that? Or maybe she sees it and just
doesn’t care, I thought bitterly.
I narrowed my eyes at my stepdad darkly, sliding back down
in my seat. I turned up the volume on my iPod, switched the song to Boulevard
of Broken Dreams by Green Day. I mouthed words to the song, lonely lyrics about
walking alone, as we entered my new town of Flocksdale.
I hated him…not my stepdad, but my real dad. For leaving my
mom and I five years ago, and ultimately, bequeathing me to this asshole.
Everything between my mom and dad was fine, and then one day it wasn’t. He left
a note, saying he was going to live with his new girlfriend.
A note. If I ever got to see him again, I had a few notes of
my own to give him.
My mom and George got married only a year ago, but George
had been wrecking my life ever since.
Like right now, for instance.
He had accepted a job in Flocksdale, and even though my mom
had her own job in Ohio, and I had my school and friends, here we were—starting
over. Our lives didn’t matter to him. It was all about him, furthering his
career goals. He didn’t care that I had to leave my old school. The school I’d
attended my entire life…
Despite the explicit greeting on the way in, the part of
town we drove into seemed quiet and quaint. It was nearly ten o’clock at night,
but the main street was free of motorists and the sidewalks held no
pedestrians. Rows of brick buildings, apparently small businesses, lined the
street on both sides, “We’re Closed” signs firmly displayed in their windows.
“Well, this definitely looks like a peaceful town, Georgie,”
my mother said, using that stupid pet name I hated for ‘George.’ She patted my
stepdad’s arm, her attempt to let him know she was fine with moving here. That
she’d forgiven him. Her eyes fluttered back to meet mine, encouraging me to do
the same, but I closed them, refusing to cater to Georgie’s sensitivity. Well,
I haven’t…I mouthed sulkily.
I was never going to be okay with moving here. Technically,
I was almost eighteen and soon to be free to go anywhere I wanted. But even
after I finished my senior year of high school, at my new school, there was
supposed to be college and all that…
In other words, I was stuck with my mother and surrogate
daddy for at least a few more years. And now I was stuck serving out my time in
this lame-ass town called Flocksdale.
“Are you sure anyone really lives here?” I asked, yanking my
earbuds out. My mother shot me a death glare and my stepdad ignored my comment.
He’d grown up here in this dump, and I knew insulting his alma mater would get
under his skin.
But getting under his skin was turning out to be one of my
favorite pastimes.
I twisted my hair in a tight bun and started packing up my
book and iPod into my messenger bag. It was all I’d brought, besides my duffel
bag containing a few outfits. Everything else was coming by U-Haul. I didn’t
care about my stuff. It was my friends and school I worried about leaving
behind.
I was relieved to see lights up ahead, illuminating a
McDonald’s and CVS as we entered the heart of town. So, there is civilization
here, I thought wearily.
More businesses—a grocery store, diner, coffee shop, and a
badass-looking used book store. Then the stores faded away and we entered a
cluster of residential houses and neighborhoods. The houses were small and
close together, mostly shotguns, but then they got larger and grander as we got
further from town.
“We’re getting close. It’s on the river,” George said, his
voice taking on an excited, boyish tone. I knew we were getting close to the
water because the houses were taking on a strange quality. Some of them were
sitting up high on stilts. I’d never seen anything like it.
“I guess they’re worried about floods here,” I remarked
softly. I had to admit, the houses looked pretty cool, sitting up high on
solid, wooden beams. Like they were too cool to hang out on the ground with the
rest of the houses.
“Yeah, sometimes the river gets high around here. But there
hasn’t been a major flood in forty years,” my mom said, answering for George.
But then he said, “Nearly thirty houses and businesses were
torn down and rebuilt. They built smarter the second time around, preparing for
floods. But we won’t have to worry about that…”
Rolling down the window, I leaned my head out, sucking in
deep breaths of damp July air. Why did they tear them down? And who were
“they”? I wanted to ask, but then I could almost hear…water.
There it was—rolling, murky water with steaming pipes from a
nuclear plant on the other side of the river. A huge sea of nothing but water,
and more nothingness beyond it. An old, metal walking bridge glittered in the
distance. “It’s down here,” George nearly whispered, taking a turn onto
Clemmons Street.
There were nearly six houses on both sides of the street,
all built on stilts . But at the end was a gigantic Victorian home, its own flood
wall behind it, sitting right on the river. It towered in the black night sky,
moonlight dancing crazily on the rough waters in the background.
It was beautiful in an eerie sort of way and as we pulled up
in front of it, I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand upright. Could it
be…? The House of Horrors…?
That’s right. I did my research on this place. The town of
Flocksdale had a history. A nasty, evil sort of history.
Nearly twenty years ago, a deranged family ran some sort of
trafficking/drug ring. The bodies of nearly forty young girls were found buried
in the crawlspaces, basements, and backyards of the townspeople involved in the
operation. The townspeople of Flocksdale.
All of the perpetrators were either apprehended or dead, but
it still gave me the creeps. I’d read everything I could find on the internet
about the murders. In some of the write-ups, I’d read about the description of
the main house used in the kidnappings and subsequent killings—an old, creepy
Victorian. A description that seemed to fit this one. Surely, there were other
Victorian homes in this town? Right…?
I’d tried to tell my mom, and even George, about it. But
George ignored me, and my mom said, “Every town has history and crime is
everywhere, Marianna. George grew up there, so it must be all right.” Yeah…that
made me feel a whole hell of a lot better.
George parked the SUV in a concrete driveway out front of
the house. I made no attempt to get out. I stared up at this beautiful monster
of a house, wondering what was in store for me in this creepy little town with
its even creepier history. I shivered involuntarily. Two words came to mind:
Fuck Flocksdale.
#MeetTheAuthor
Besides my family, my greatest love in life is books.
Reading them, writing them, holding them, smelling them…well, you get the idea.
I've always loved to read and never considered myself a "writer"
until a few years ago when I couldn't find a book to read and decided to try
writing my own story. I'm the author of Have You Seen This Girl? (Flocksdale
Files Book #1), Grayson's Ridge, and This Is Not About Love. I reside in Floyds
Knobs, Indiana with my husband, children, and massive collection of books.
#FollowTheAuthor
Amazon Author Page: http://www.amazon.com/Carissa-Lynch/e/B00REPXXW6/
Goodreads: http://bit.ly/1J8uk2Y
Limitless Publishing: http://www.limitlesspublishing.net/authors/carissa-lynch/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/carissaannlynch
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