WELCOME TO THE BLOG TOUR FOR

The Bones of Amoret

by Arthur Herbert

Welcome to my stop on the book tour !

We're celebrating the release of author Arthur Herbert's latest whodunnit, The Bones of Amoret! Read on for more details and a chance to win a signed copy of the book!

The Bones of Amoret

Publication Date: February 13th, 2022

Genre: Mystery/ Suspense

Amoret, Texas, 1982. Life along the border is harsh, but in a world where cultures work together to carve a living from the desert landscape, Blaine Beckett lives a life of isolation. A transplanted Boston intellectual, for twenty years locals have viewed him as a snob, a misanthrope, an outsider. He seems content to stand apart until one night when he vanishes into thin air amid signs of foul play.

Noah Grady, the town doctor, is a charming and popular good ol’ boy. He’s also a keeper of secrets, both the town’s and his own. He watches from afar as the mystery of Blaine’s disappearance unravels and rumors fly. Were the incipient cartels responsible? Was it a local with a grudge? Or did Blaine himself orchestrate his own disappearance? Then the unthinkable happens, and Noah begins to realize he’s considered a suspect.

Paced like a lit fuse and full of dizzying plot twists, The Bones of Amoret is a riveting whodunit that will keep you guessing all the way to its shocking conclusion.

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Excerpt

The day Blaine Beckett went missing, the day that started off the whole sordid, miserable chain reaction of events to follow, started off so peacefully you’d have been forgiven for thinking it was an omen for good things, that God wouldn’t allow anything to go wrong on any day that had such a beautiful start to it. It was a Monday and I’d had to clear my clinic schedule to see to the day’s work. I rose well before the sun and went about getting dressed and making coffee as quietly as I could to let Angelica and Miguel sleep.

Before Jimmy Wayne came to pick me up, I checked on the national news, not long enough even to sit down. I turned the volume down, so low I had to lean in to hear just two feet from the set. It was all over the television that somebody in Chicago had poisoned bunches of batches of Tylenol, killing a handful of people up there and now folks around the country were wetting the bed about it. That was one of the nice things about our little west Texas town back then in ‘82, things like that seemed far away, otherworldly from our home in the high desert hills.

My dogs trailed me onto the front porch, keeping me company while I waited. The two mutts would have been, let’s see, about three years old at the time. Sonny Fitzgerald owned a scrap metal yard in town— later on, that’ll come into the story I’m fixing to tell you— and he’d found a couple of pups beneath a clunker’s chassis one morning, as bony as the metal skeleton they were huddled under. Their mama was nowhere to be found and the poor things were starving. His first instinct when he heard their pitiful mewling was to put them down right there on the spot, but something made him stop short and call me instead. One I called Rope Tail, and he grew up lovable but dumb. If brains were hog lard you couldn’t have used his to grease a big skillet. But his sister, a brindle I named Maybelline, well, she was special. Forty-two pounds of grade-A badass and smart as a whip. Rope Tail would go on to disappear one day in ’87. Coyotes got him, I suspect. Maybelline, though, lived to a ripe old age. I miss them both, but her more.

Out on the porch, I took in a lungful of the crisp night air. That deep cleansing breath would have sent me into a coughing fit a few months prior, but it invigorated me that morning since I’d walked away from the cancer-stick habit two months before on my forty-fourth birthday.

In my rocking chair, I sipped coffee while Rope Tail dozed with his chin on my boot, his cheeks sucking in and billowing out in a sleepy cadence. Off to my right, high in the night sky a ring of stage lights lit up a water tower with the name “AMORET” painted on the tank’s gray steel plates in looping black cursive, like the title sequence in a black and white movie.

It was still dark when Jimmy Wayne Hickerson pulled up to my curb in our custom panel truck. In our teens his features had been more pretty than handsome, with long lashes that made girls swoon. But a lifetime in the desert winds had carved lines in his once-delicate face. Jimmy Wayne was an interesting man. He lived his years convinced the moon landing had been faked but alien abductions were real.

“Mornin’ Doc.”

“Mornin’.”

“You ready?”

“I been ready.”

I poured him a coffee to go while he twirled the key chain around his finger, then we loaded up and headed through the empty streets toward Shy Mike’s place. We’d put a rebuilt engine in the truck two months before— the old motor couldn’t outrun a fat man— and Jimmy Wayne was still getting to know it, babying it along through the darkness. We’d made that run many times, so I didn’t have to remind him to take the long way, skirting the edges where town met the wide expanse of the caldera and the sweep of our headlights picked up scrub brush and boulders

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About the Author

Arthur Herbert was born and raised in small-town Texas. He worked on offshore oil rigs, as a bartender, a landscaper at a trailer park, and as a social worker before going to medical school. He chose to do a residency in general surgery, followed by a fellowship in critical care and trauma surgery. For the last seventeen years, he’s worked as a trauma and burn surgeon, operating on all ages of injured patients. He continues to run a thriving practice.

In this enigmatic follow-up to his critically acclaimed debut novel The Cuts that Cure, Arthur Herbert returns to the Texas-Mexico border with this saga of a small town’s bloody loss of innocence.

Arthur currently lives in New Orleans, with his wife Amy and their dogs. He loves hearing from his readers, so don’t hesitate to email him at arthur@arthurherbertwriter.com

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