Blog Tour – A Numbers Game – RJ Dark.

I’m excited to be working with Zooloo’s Blog Tours today to be bringing you an extract for my stop on the A Numbers Game Blog Tour. As usual I’ll give you a little information about the book, and then the extract, followed by links of where to find on the internet.

One dead man and a missing lottery ticket.

Two family members who need that money to get away from the rundown Blades Edge estate.

Three local gangsters who want that money for themselves.

Meet Malachite Jones – the foremost (and only) psychic medium on the gritty Blades Edge estate. All he wants are two things: a name that isn’t ‘Malachite’, and a quiet life. And maybe some real psychic powers, but he’s making a living without them.

Janine Stanbeck wants to find her dead husband Larry’s winning ticket and escape Blades Edge with her son. And she thinks Mal can help her.

But Larry’s dad is the crime lord of the estate, and he wants that ticket for himself, and worse for Mal, he’s not the only criminal with his eyes on it. Add in two coppers desperate to nick Mal’s best, only, and admittedly quite dangerous, friend, Jackie Singh Kattar, and Blades Edge is getting pretty crowded.

Malachite Jones might not really be able to talk to the dead, but if he and his friend Jackie Singh Kattar can’t find that money and a solution that pleases everyone they’re likely to be in need of a psychic medium themselves.

The first Mal Jones and Jackie Singh Kattar adventure: a chaotic rollercoaster ride through a Yorkshire landscape full of double crossing friends, dogged police, psychotic gangster and voices from the other side.

Published: June 4th 2021. Wavesback. 282 pages.

How good does this book sound?! It’s time for the extract!

Jackie Singh Khattar first hit me when I was eight. I thought he wanted to scare me, which he succeeded in. He thought he wanted to scare me too, so he enjoyed it. I was too young, and so was he, to understand that violence was his only way of forming an emotional link with another human being.
He hit me again when I was twenty-eight, but for very different reasons.
‘I’m going to hit you in the stomach,’ he said.
‘Please don’t.’
‘I’m going to hit you in the stomach, and I want you to try and stop me.’
‘I don’t know how.’
‘I’ll show you.’
And he did, and I got hit in the stomach a lot before I finally mastered the sweep of my arm that would knock away the incoming blow. Then Jackie taught me a counter that would hurt my opponent enough for me to run away. I’m not a naturally physical person, so it took me almost six months before I could do it fluidly enough to make him happy.
There was never any chance of me saying no to this – Jackie doesn’t really understand the idea of no. Once he has what he thinks is a good idea in his head, then it’s happening. You can not do it, but that doesn’t mean he will stop trying to convince you that you should be doing it, or that he will not do whatever it is he has decided he wants to do anyway. As I didn’t want to be hit in the stomach every time I saw Jackie, I had to learn to defend myself.

What do you think? Does this seem like a book you’d enjoy? Let me know in the comments.

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