RELEASE DAY: Kimberley Troutte "God Whisperer"

 

Blurb:

A frightened mother on the run…

LONNIE HOGAN has lived and breathed fear for the eight years that she and her son have been on the run. She cut ties with the past and is hiding out in a small offbeat Danish community in California. Will the killers find them? She’s ready to run again, or fight for her son’s precious life, but she won’t let anyone take David.

A desperate man searching for his family…

Few people on St. John, Virgin Islands, know that their favorite doctor, MARK NORTON, is a desperate man searching for the life that was stolen from him. After hours, he surfs the internet for leads and retraces paths gone stone-cold to find his missing family. He’ll do anything to find them and get his son back.

Will sacrifice everything to protect the boy who hears God…

DAVID HOGAN is a regular kid, if you don’t count the one-ear thing. He didn’t mind being deaf in one ear, but it hurts his mom, way down deep, as if she caused it. Why won’t she see that bad things can happen for good reasons? Like the surgery that allows him to hear God. Talking to God is one of the greatest things that’s ever happened to him, even if Mom doesn’t believe it. But the killers could find them now. Can one little kid save them all?

 

 

Author:

Kimberley Troutte has been an accountant, substitute teacher, caterer, financial analyst for a major defense contractor, aerobics instructor, real-estate broker, freelance writer, homework corrector and caregiver to all the creatures the kids/hubby/dog drag in. She lives with her husband, two sons, one dog, a wild cat and four snakes in Southern California.

She goes for long walks, is learning how to breathe in yoga, and gets her heart pumping in spin classes. You might see her editing her books on the elliptical machine at the gym. She writes books to her heart's content, usually about love, because honestly what is more important than love? She adores interacting with readers.

 

Please visit her at www.kimberleytroutte.com to sign-up for the newsletter.

 

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Excerpt:

Chapter One

Eight-year-old David Hogan was being sucked into a scary hole—not black, as he’d imagined from those medical shows, but fuzzy and gray like the thick fog that oozed over the mountains back home. Except he wasn’t home in Solberg. He was lying on a hard table in Westwood Hospital, L.A., about to have his skull drilled open and his ear ripped off.

As cool as it sounded to his friends, David was scared. No, scratch that, he was beyond scared. If there was a word for terrified-times-a-million, that’s where he’d be right now.

“Is he ready?” Dr. Mason asked the nurse behind him. David hoped she’d say, “No, and he never will be. Let’s all go home and forget this operation stuff.” But instead, she answered, “Yes. Vitals stable.” He couldn’t tell for sure, but the wrinkles around her eyes made it seem like she was smiling at him under her light-green mask.

The guy who’d introduced himself earlier by some long word—any-these-o-logist?—leaned over the table and blocked the light shining in David’s eyes. “Okay, kiddo, here we go. Start counting, just like we talked about, backwards from one hundred.” He placed a mask over David’s face and in his good ear said, “And relax. We’ve got this.”

Relax? David could hear his heart beating on the monitor behind them. It sounded like a ticking bomb.

He did what he was told and started counting. “Ninety-nine, ninety-eight…” Maybe if he made it to zero, they’d stop this whole thing. He wanted to go home now.

When the smiley nurse rubbed his arm, he wished it was his mother instead. If Mom held his hand and said everything was going to be okay, his stomach would quit flopping. He might even feel as brave as the day he lied about wanting the operation. He didn’t want it, not really, but Mom did. Even though she never said so in words, her sad eyes told him how much she wished she had a normal kid. Not a deformed freak-boy.

“Ninety-seven…” His voice croaked like a sick frog’s inside the oxygen mask.

It was hard to breathe. His chest felt funny, tight, as if an alien was going to bust out as it did in that scary movie he wasn’t supposed to watch.

“Ninety…” He struggled to suck in another breath. “Ninety-sssixx…”

The heart-machine beeped like a crazy alarm going off. He couldn’t count anymore.

****

Lonnie Hogan glanced around a room designed to be calming. It came complete with pale-blue walls, plush couches, and plastic bouquets decorating each endtable. Lonnie was miles from calm. Her nerve endings were on fire.

She didn’t want to think about what was happening to her baby behind those double-doors, but her mind swirled with endless horrors. What if something went wrong in the operating room? Guilt and terror were a toxic mix.

She jumped up from the couch and paced. Ten steps to pick up a magazine she couldn’t concentrate on. Fifteen steps to the back window with the view of the boulevard. How she envied those people going to work out there. It was a normal day for mommies with safe, healthy kids. Her heart squeezed. Ten long strides to the other side of the room where she smacked the rolled up magazine against the wall, over and over.

A hand grabbed the back of her shoulder and Lonnie’s worst fears caught up with her.

He found us.

Eight years of running and he’d caught her today with David in surgery? Gripping the magazine as a weapon, she spun around, ready to fight for her life. To fight for David.

A little cry escaped her lips. She wasn’t eye-to-eye with the man who tried to kill her, but the startled face of her only friend, Carrie Beth.

“Whoa, hold on there, Slugger. The magazine’s dead, but go on, give it one more whack for good measure. It’ll make you feel better.” Carrie Beth chuckled.

Lonnie let out a deep breath. “You came all this way.”

“What kind of friend would let you go through this alone?” Carrie Beth’s hair was orange with silver spikes that morning. When she tipped her head, her bangs moved as one hair-sprayed wave. “How long has he been in there?”

“An hour? Three years? I didn’t think it would be so hard.” Lonnie swallowed the sob that stuck in her throat. If she started crying, she might never stop.

Carrie Beth patted her arm. “I know, hon. When your baby suffers, you suffer more. It’s one of those unwritten laws of motherhood. This is exactly why I never had kids. I wouldn’t survive it. But you will. You’re the strongest person I know.”

As a single mother raising a boy like David, she had to be tough. But today she had no strength left. “I’ve waited so long for this surgery. But now…oh, C. B., I’m scared.” She sank into the couch. “Have I made a terrible mistake?”

“You’re nervous, that’s all. It’ll work out for the best, you’ll see.”

Lonnie’s face heated up with resentment. Nothing in her life had worked out for the best. “David’s my world.”

“Yes, he is. But don’t forget I’m here too. You and David are the only family I’ve got who are not livin’ and dyin’ in Alabama.”

That touched Lonnie. No one had been there for her in a long time. The coil around her heart eased a little. “Thank you.”

“Besides, David’s doctor knows what he’s doin’. Look at his awards.” Carrie Beth stood up and read one of the plaques touting the Westwood Hospital’s excellence in head and neck surgeries. “Dr. Mason is a rock star.”