Here’s the set-up for Clark Hays and Kathleen McFall’s Blood and Whiskey, just $4.99 on Kindle:The worst things in life always begin with a phone call.
When a young homeless woman is snatched from the streets of Portland, Oregon, she has time to make one terrified call to her uncle Lenny in tiny LonePine, Wyoming. A way-off-the-grid survivalist and paranoid conspiracy theorist, Lenny turns to his best friend Tucker for help. But Tucker’s got his own problems, including a vampire girlfriend.
A perpetually broke, down-on-his-luck cowboy, Tucker has fallen hard for Lizzie, a whip smart, big city girl and hotshot reporter. To everyone’s surprise in LonePine (all 438 of them), she’s fallen hard for him too.
Their unlikely love is central to The Cowboy and the Vampire: A Darkly Romantic Mystery when Lizzie finds out the awful truth about her heritage. Tucker, with a little help from his Dad, Lenny and an overly-sensitive cow dog named Rex, take on Lizzie’s maniacal vampire father and his beautiful consort Elita. It’s a blood-spattered undead apocalypse of terror and tumbleweeds.
In Blood and Whiskey, the second book in The Cowboy and Vampire Thriller Series, Tucker, Lizzie and the rest of the gang are back with a vengeance. Lizzie is pregnant, with a growing, unquenchable thirst for human blood and trouble on the horizon. The most powerful vampires from the ruling clans are headed to LonePine to test her new powers. If they find her lacking, Lizzie, her growing baby, and all of LonePine will be destroyed — not that it would take very long.
It’s an inconvenient time for Tucker to take a road trip, but sometimes friendship trumps common sense. With a duffle bag of improvised weapons, he sets out for Portland with Lenny to find the kidnapped girl. They end up in remote Plush, Oregon, where — smack dab in the middle of the sagebrush desert — they uncover a human blood farm run by a fearsome cowboy enemy resurrected from the Old West. His name is Henry Plummer and his sights are set on Lizzie.
As the truth about what they have uncovered dawns on Tucker and Lenny, they rush back to LonePine. The Vampire illuminati have already arrived, including Rurik, a handsome Russian vampire angling to take Tucker’s place next to Lizzie.
How far will Lizzie and Tucker go to protect their unlikely love? Can a cowboy and a vampire ever hope to find happiness?
Blood and Whiskey is a story of love, loyalty, loss and sacrifice in the modern American West. With meditations on the nature of good and evil, a new cosmology for vampires — including a meta-consciousness where vampire (and human) minds reside between deaths — and a cast of gritty, quirky, realistic western characters, Blood and Whiskey tangles the vampire and cowboy myths into a groundbreaking new “modern gothic western” genre.
From the reviewers:
Vampire Politics Gone Wild. I enjoyed reading this funny, action-packed vampire tale. – Coffee Ramblings
A Rootin’ Tooting Double Barreled Wild Ride. I really loved reading this sequel to the story. Clark Hays and Kathleen have given the old west a new twist in modern times. – S. Roedsch
This was such an awesome story. I enjoyed every minute of reading it. Vampires and cowboy’s – it doesn’t get any better than that! – N. Medina
Visit Amazon’s Clark Hays Page
I’m a writer, poet and lapsed cowboy currently living in Portland, Oregon, with my life and writing partner Kathleen McFall. “The Cowboy and the Vampire” is the first book in a thriller series that brought together the worst of the undead with the best of new West. Lizzie, a big city reporter and unwitting Vampire, falls for Tucker, a down on his luck cowboy with an overly-sensitive dog named Rex. Nothing is ever easy though, especially in love, as scheming Vampires reveal their deadly plans for Lizzie.
Our new book, “Blood and Whiskey,” keeps the adventure and the romance alive with new threats from a Vampire world on the brink of extinction and a price on Lizzie’s head. From the streets of Portland, Oregon, to the sagebrush desert of sunstone-rich Plush, Oregon, from the frozen stretches of Siberia to the truckstop in LonePine, Wyoming, “Blood and Whiskey” delivers double-barreled fun, action, romance and horror.
Learn more about the books, what it’s like to write with the person you love and find plenty of fresh, undead content at www.cowboyandvampire.com. Check out our Facebook page — www.facebook.com/cowboyandvampire — for even more fun stuff and follow us on Twitter at @cowboyvamp.
My solo projects include poetry published in a variety of probably defunct journals (I’ve got hard copies though, so I can prove it) and short fiction including “Pocket Wolves” (Opium magazine), which was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2010. “Red Winter,” a novella, is currently available as an eBook thanks to Pumpjack Press.
I grew up on a ranch in Montana and spent my formative years branding cattle, riding horses, shooting
Visit Amazon’s Kathleen McFall Page
Right now, Kathleen McFall lives in Portland, Oregon, but she grew up in the heart of Washington, D.C.
She worked as a geologist and later, a journalist, publishing hundreds of articles about energy, natural resources and the like. More recently, she’s worked as a communications professional in the academic world where she writes about science, policy and the like. She received a fellowship for fiction writing from Oregon Literary Arts.
She is an obsessive reader and writer. Stuff Kathleen likes: lava, Russian literature, neo-anarchy, dry martinis and all oceans. Stuff she hates: intermissions, Halloween corn mazes and high-speed vehicular sandwiches.
And here, in the comfort of your own browser, is your free sample of Blood and Whiskey by Clark Hays and Kathleen McFall: