An Overdue Truce

By Kari Kilgore

When Family Secrets Turn Poisonous
A family torn apart many long years ago.
Two brothers, each sure they know who to blame.
On opposite sides of the divide, now and forever.
Unless uncovered secrets alter their memories and reality, and push them both back to the beginning.
Originally appeared in Mystery, Crime, and Mayhem: Sins of the Father, Knotted Road Press, 2020

 

An excerpt from An Overdue Truce:
Digging Out the Toxins of the Past
The truth was Sean had always quietly wondered why his mother didn't get the house, or any kind of spousal support that anyone knew of. She never actually talked about it, but Sean knew she hadn't minded if people believed his father was just too cheap. Or that she'd refused his help.
Sean figured then and now he just didn't understand.
Brad figured their father had done something to weasel out of it.
With both parents gone now and himself nearly into his fifties, the time for waiting and wondering had surely come to an end.
Before another fifteen minutes passed, Sean had his phone out again.
"Hey Brad, Sean here. ... Yeah, I'm at Dad's. I think you should come over. ... No, not to help clean up, don't worry. There's some things here you need to see."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Spiral Publishing, Ltd
• Release date: Apr 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9781393332404

Kari Kilgore

Kari Kilgore started her first published novel Until Death in Transylvania, Romania, and finished it in Room 217 at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, where Stephen King got the idea for The Shining. That’s just one example of how real world inspiration drives her fiction. Kari’s first published novel Until Death was included on the Preliminary Ballot for the Bram Stoker Award for Outstanding Achievement in a First Novel in 2016. It was also a finalist for the Golden Stake Award at the Vampire Arts Festival in 2018. Recent professional short story sales include three to Fiction River anthology magazine, with the first due out in the September issue. Kari also has two stories in a holiday-themed anthology project with Kristine Kathryn Rusch due out over the holidays in 2019. Kari writes fantasy, science fiction, horror, and contemporary fiction, and she’s happiest when she surprises herself. She lives at the end of a long dirt road in the middle of the woods with her husband Jason Adams, various house critters, and wildlife they’re better off not knowing more about. Kari’s novels, novellas, and short stories are available at www.spiralpublishing.net, which also publishes books by Frank Kilgore and Jason Adams. For more information about Kari, upcoming publications, her travels and adventures, and random cool things that catch her attention, visit www.karikilgore.com.

Book preview

An Overdue Truce

For everyone who always wondered why

An Overdue Truce

Kari Kilgore

Spiral Publishing, Ltd.

An Overdue Truce

It was the strangest thing, how houses seemed to die as soon as their owners did.

Sean leaned against the doorway to his father’s home office, sort of a grandiose title for the room where the old man always paid the bills. He could still see a ghostly afterimage of his father sitting there at his plain wooden desk, most likely rescued when the old high school in town was torn down about fifty years back.

Not much more than a rectangular hulk with three drawers on each side. Almost unrecognizable compared to the sleek, angular, metal and glass structures he saw in so many modern offices.

Or had seen, before he moved from St. Louis back home to tiny Fincastle, Illinois, to help his father five months ago.

Sometimes Sean felt like enough time had been compressed into those months that people might be working from floating desks that hovered in clouds over open WiFi spots all over the world.

He snorted, then breathed in the already stale air scented with coffee and his dad’s aftershave.

Walter Hopkins had been willing to trade in his high-test morning cuppa joe for decaf when his doctor insisted. But he wouldn’t have given up his cinnamon and musk