We are so excited to be a part of a 2-part tour for the release
of best selling author Mary Kubica’s new psychological thriller, When
the Lights Go Out!
Follow along the excerpt tour beginning in August, with long
excerpts in consecutive order at each tour stop, followed by an Instagram tour
and review tour beginning in September! Links can be found below.
Author: Mary Kubica
Publisher: Park Row
Date of publication: September 4, 2018
Jessie Sloane is on the path to rebuilding her life after
years of caring for her ailing mother. She rents a new apartment and applies
for college. But when the college informs her that her social security number
has raised a red flag, Jessie discovers a shocking detail that causes her to
doubt everything she’s ever known.
Finding herself suddenly at the center of a bizarre mystery,
Jessie tumbles down a rabbit hole, which is only exacerbated by grief and a
relentless lack of sleep. As days pass and the insomnia worsens, it plays with
Jessie’s mind. Her judgment is blurred, her thoughts are hampered by fatigue.
Jessie begins to see things until she can no longer tell the difference between
what’s real and what she’s only imagined.
Meanwhile, twenty years earlier and two hundred and fifty
miles away, another woman’s split-second decision may hold the key to Jessie’s
secret past. Has Jessie’s whole life been a lie or have her delusions gotten
the best of her?
“Kubica brilliantly unravels the lives of two women in this
tense and haunting tale of identity and deceit. WHEN THE LIGHTS GO OUT will
keep you questioning everything-and everyone-until the riveting conclusion. A twisty,
captivating, edge-of-your-seat read.” –Megan Miranda, New York Times
bestselling author of ALL THE MISSING GIRLS
Excerpt #10:
“What do you think?” Lily asks over the noise
of the hair dryer and I can’t help myself.
“I hate it,” I say, for the eighth
or ninth time in a row, one for as many apartments as we’ve seen. Insomnia does that too. It keeps us honest because we don’t have the
energy to manufacture a lie.
“How come?” she asks, and I tell
her about the hair dryer next door. How
it’s loud.
Lily keeps composed, though inside
her patience with me must be wearing thin.
“Then we keep looking,” she says as I follow her out the door. I’d love to believe that she wants me to be
happy, that she wants me to find the perfect place to live. But ultimately it comes down to one thing: my
signature on a dotted line. What a lease
agreement means for Lily is that an afternoon with me isn’t a complete waste of
time.
“I have one more to show you,” she
says, promising something different from the last umpteen apartments we’ve
seen. We return to the Kia and I buckle
up in the back seat, behind the purse that’s already riding shotgun. We drive.
Minutes later the car pulls to a sluggish stop before a greystone on
Cornelia, gliding easily into a parking spot.
The street is residential, lacking completely in communal living
structures. No apartments. No condominiums. No high rises with elevators that overlook
crappy convenient marts. No strangers
milling around on street corners.
The house is easily a hundred years
old, beautiful and yet overwhelming for its grandeur. It’s three stories tall and steep, wide steps
that lead to a front porch. A bank of windows
on each floor. A flat-as-a-pancake
roof. Beneath the first floor there’s a
garden apartment, peeking up from beneath concrete.
“This is a three flat?” I ask as we
step from the car, envisioning stacks of independent units filling the home,
all united by a common front door. I
expect Lily to say yes.
But instead she laughs at me,
saying, “No, this is a private residential home. It’s not for sale, not that you could afford
it if it was. Easily a million and a
half,” she says. “Dollars, that is,” and
I pause beneath a tree to ask what we’re doing here. The day is warm, one of those September days
that holds autumn at bay. What we want
is do climb into sweaters and jeans, sip cocoa, wrap ourselves in blankets and
watch the falling leaves. But instead we
drip with sweat. The nights grow cold,
but the days are hot, thirty degree variants from morning to night. It won’t last long. According to the weatherman, a change is
coming, and it’s coming soon. But for
now, I stand in shorts and a t-shirt, a sweatshirt wrapped around my
waist. When the sun goes down, the temperature
will too.
“This way,” Lily says with a slight
nod of the head. I hurry along after
her, but before we round the side of the greystone, something catches my
eye. A woman walking down the sidewalk
in our direction. She’s a good thirty
feet away, but moving closer to us. I
don’t see her face at first because of the force of the wind pushing her dark
hair forward and into her eyes. But it
doesn’t matter. It’s the posture that
does it for me. That and the tiny feet
as they shuffle along. It’s the
unassuming way she holds herself upright, curved at the shoulders just so. It’s her shape, the height and width of
it. The shade and texture of a
periwinkle coat, a parka, mid-thigh length with a drawstring waist and a hood,
though it’s much too warm for a coat with a hood.
The coat is the same one as Mom
had.
I feel my heart start to beat. My mouth opens and a single word forms there
on my lips. Mom. Because that’s exactly
who it is. It’s her; it’s Mom. She’s here, alive, in the flesh, coming to
see me. My arm lifts involuntarily and I
start to wave, but with the hair in her eyes, she can’t see me standing there
on the sidewalk six feet away, waving.
Mom doesn’t look at me as she
passes by. She doesn’t see me. She thinks I’m someone else. I call to her, my voice catching as the word
comes out, so that it doesn’t come out.
Instead it gets trapped somewhere in my throat. Tears pool in my eyes and I think that I’m
going to lose her, that she’s going to keep walking by. And so my hand reaches out and latches on to
her arm. A knee-jerk reaction. To stop her from walking past. To prevent her from leaving.
My hand grabs a hold of her
forearm, clamping down. But just as it
does, the woman frees her face of the hair and casts a glance at me. And I see then what I failed to see before,
that this woman is barely thirty years old, much too young to be my
mother. And that her face is covered in
an enormity of makeup, unlike Mom who wore her face bare.
Her coat is not periwinkle at all
but darker, more like eggplant or wine.
And it has no hood. As she nears,
I see more clearly. It isn’t a coat
after all, but a dress.
She looks nothing like Mom.
For a second I feel like I can’t
breathe, the wind knocked out of me. The
woman tugs her arm free. She gives me a
dirty look, scooting past me as I slip from the sidewalk, my feet falling on
grass.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper as she
skirts eye contact, avoids my stare. She
moves to the far edge of the sidewalk where she’ll be two feet away, where I
can’t reach her. “I thought you were
someone else,” I breathe as my eyes turn to find Lily with her arms folded,
trying to pretend that this didn’t just happen.
Of course it’s not Mom, I tell
myself as I watch the woman in the eggplant dress move on – faster now, no
longer shuffling along but now walking at a clipped pace to get away from
me.
Of course it’s not Mom, because Mom
is dead.
Purchase Links
About Mary Kubica
Mary Kubica is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling
author of THE GOOD GIRL and PRETTY BABY. She holds a Bachelor of Arts
degree from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, in History and American
Literature. She lives outside of Chicago with her husband and two children and
enjoys photography, gardening and caring for the animals at a local shelter.
Connect with Mary
Excerpt Tour:
Monday, August 20th: Palmer’s
Page Turners
Tuesday, August 21st: Books
and Cats and Coffee
Wednesday, August 22nd: Mystery
Suspense Reviews
Thursday, August 23rd: Book Reviews
and More by Kathy
Friday, August 24th: A
Bookworm’s World
Monday, August 27th: Novel
Gossip
Tuesday, August 28th: Books & Spoons
Wednesday, August 29th: Read Love Blog
Thursday, August 30th: That’s What She Read
Friday, August 31st: From the TBR Pile
Instagram Tour:
Monday, September 3rd: @brookesbooksandbrews
Tuesday, September 4th: @chapter_break
Tuesday, September 4th: @girlandherbooks
Wednesday, September 5th: @kate.olson.reads
Thursday, September 6th: @jennblogsbooks
Friday, September 7th: @bookishconnoisseur
Sunday, September 8th: @girlsinbooks
Review Tour:
Tuesday, September 4th: Literary Quicksand
Wednesday, September 5th: Diary of a Stay at Home Mom
Thursday, September 6th: Books & Bindings
Thursday, September 6th: Book Reviews and More by Kathy
Friday, September 7th: No More Grumpy Bookseller
Monday, September 10th: The Book Diva’s Reads
Tuesday, September 11th: Thoughts on This ‘n That
Wednesday, September 12th: Books and Cats and Coffee
Thursday, September 13th: Thoughts
from a Highly Caffeinated Mind
Friday, September 14th: Becky
on Books
Friday, September 14th: From the TBR Pile
Monday, September 17th: Moonlight Rendezvous
Monday, September 17th: Staircase Wit
Tuesday, September 18th: @booknerdnative
Wednesday, September 19th: Palmer’s Page Turners
Thursday, September 20th: Mystery Suspense Reviews
Friday, September 21st: Girl Who Reads
Tuesday, September 25th: Bewitched Bookworms
Tuesday, September 25th: Why Girls are Weird
Wednesday, September 26th: @hollyslittlebookreviews
Thursday, September 27th: Mama Reads Blog
Thursday, September 27th: Jathan & Heather
Friday, September 28th: Kritter’s Ramblings
