Guest Post: Excerpt from A Stone-Cold Murder: The Reluctant Psychic Mystery series by Kris Bock

 

Please welcome talented author Kris Bock back to the blog today. Her new series, The Reluctant Psychic Mystery series, launches on 4/28 with A Stone-Cold Murder. Published by Thule Publishing, the read is available in digital format at Amazon.

 

 

Petra Cloch has the psychic ability of psychometry – she can glimpse the history of an object by touching it. If Petra touches a watch or ring someone has worn for years, she can sense the wearer’s personality and what they care about most. If she touches an object used as a murder weapon, she might sense the emotions of the killer and the killed – but that doesn’t mean she can identify them.

 

To save her sanity, Petra avoids close relationships except with her many pets. She studied geology, because rocks rarely speak to her. Her new job is supposed to focus on the rocks and minerals wing of a peculiar private museum in a small southwestern town. But she can’t avoid the echoes of violence all around her. If she doesn’t want murderers to go free, she’ll have to find evidence beyond her psychic senses. 

                                                       A Stone-Cold Murder

Everyone says her predecessor died in a car crash, but when Petra picks up a jagged crystal in her new office, flashes of rage, fear and death hit hard. What if Reggie Heap was actually murdered? Under normal circumstances, Petra would never become involved, but if the previous curator died because of something he did on the job, she could be next. Can she trust her chatty colleagues who invite her to lunch and to join a book club? And what about the far too watchful Sheriff who keeps showing up unexpectedly… 

 

                                                             A Stone-Cold Murder excerpt:

 

It’s no fun sorting through the belongings of a dead man. I assume that’s true for most people, except maybe antique dealers or historians. But I think it’s worse for me.

That’s not because I’m a narcissist. (As far as I know. I admit I’ve never been tested.) It’s because of my psychometry. It might sound cool to pick up vibrations left behind on objects, giving me glimpses of the items’ histories.

But I didn’t want to know more about the man who’d had my job before me. Everything so far suggested Reggie Heap was an ordinary man who had more chest pains and heart palpitations than he let on. I might have warned him to get that checked out, if he hadn’t already died of a massive heart attack that killed him even before his car ran off a mountain road.

It was my office now, and I needed to scrub away all traces of the former occupant. Does that sound harsh? Think about it like this: It might sound cool to have telepathy, if you assume you could choose when and where to use it. But imagine if you had to hear every thought of every person nearby.

Yeah, you’d probably just stay home.

I was about as far from a people person as one could be, so I needed a job that paid well enough that I could live alone, just me and my pets (ten at the current count). Ideally, the job wouldn’t bring me into contact with a lot of other people or their stuff. I hoped I had that job now, working in a small museum in a tiny town in a state with something like twenty people per square mile.

…

I looked around the office. Besides the desk and file cabinets, it had wooden shelves along one wall. They held some rather nice geologic samples, though presumably not quite nice enough to make the main collection. I picked up a piece of smoky quartz. A prism, longer than my hand, thrust up like an obelisk from a cluster of smaller crystals at the base. A little label on the bottom confirmed my identification, while a clean spot on the shelf showed how much dust had piled up around the samples.

I might as well clean the shelf and its displays. My boss had given me boxes for packing up Reggie Heap’s stuff. I grabbed an empty one and started loading rocks and minerals into it. I’d definitely keep the frothy, seafoam-green Smithsonite. Maybe not the stringy bit of copper, which was interesting but not all that pretty.

A sample as big as two fists together was made up of cubic crystals in a lovely shade of lilac. Some marks showed where small pieces had broken off, which might be why it was in the office instead of on display. Fluorite, with some impurities to give it the purple shade? Tests could confirm that, but I wouldn’t need them if it was properly labeled.

I picked it up with both hands.

Rage. The desire to hurt.

Fear. An explosion of pain. Panic dissolving into darkness.

I staggered and dropped the mineral. When my vision cleared, I was leaning against the desk with both hands pressing down on it. Fortunately, I’d dropped the crystal cluster on the desk and not my foot. It would have been hard to explain breaking my foot in that manner.

But not as difficult as explaining why I thought these crystals had been used as a weapon.

 

Kris Bock ©2025 

Kris Bock writes adult mystery, suspense, and romance novels, many with outdoor adventures and Southwestern landscapes as well as other books. Learn more at www.krisbock.com.