NBtM Virtual Book Tour and Giveaway: The Duty Bound Duet by Sydney Jamesson

Welcome to my stop on the NbtM virtual book tour for The Duty Bound Duet by Sydney Jamesson. This book tour was organized by Goddess Fish Promotions. On my stop, I have an excerpt for you as well as a guest post from the author. There's also the tour wide giveaway for a chance to win a $50 Amazon or Barnes & Noble gift card. Be sure to check out the other stops on the tour for more content. Enjoy!

--

Title: Duty of Care
Series: The Duty Bound Duet #1
Author: Sydney Jamesson
Publication Date: August 18th 2020
Print Length: 300 pages
Genre: Psychological Suspense Thriller

~

On her death bed Emily Derbyshire’s mother made her promise to take good care of her little sister. Keeping her promise, twelve-year-old Emily did exactly that and became five-year-old Rita’s benefactor and bodyguard.

After eighteen years of sisterly devotion Emily receives some shocking news! Rita has committed suicide. When disturbing details start to surface, Emily puts her highflying career on hold to seek out those responsible. She hires an American private investigator Robert Blackmoor; a motorbike riding, no-frills, computer hacker who will use any means necessary to unearth the truth.

Not surprisingly, Robert uncovers secrets from Emily’s troubled childhood and chips away at the glossy veneer of deceit which masks the truth behind, not only Rita’s life, but Emily’s imperfect life too.

Together they assemble the pieces of a sinister puzzle, revealing a cruel and corrupt world of exploitation and murder: a Dark Web into which Rita has become entangled.

As dark forces encircling Emily tighten their grip, and with everything to lose, she must make a life and death decision that she may live to regret.

Goodreads * Amazon

---

EXCERPT:

May 1998

MAY CAME WITH A vengeance. Mid-month, there was an outbreak of whooping cough.

Like a wrathful ogre wielding a scythe, it struck down the young, the frail and faint-hearted. Aged five, Rita Derbyshire was incapable of escaping its relentless assault. Emily was quick to read the signs: a lack of appetite, flushed cheeks and a wracking cough that had her gasping for breath.

Despite the outbreak, an ineffectual night shift worker was reluctant to respond. He locked the office when Emily asked to use the phone to call for an ambulance and staggered to bed stinking of whisky and tobacco, claiming it was too late to drive anyone to the hospital.

Fearing Rita might die, Emily raised hell, had the O’Farrell twins rouse anyone who was not struck down with the illness to dress warmly, to put on gloves and meet her in the kitchen. When they were assembled, bleary eyed and shivering, she explained that if they did not work as a team that night, then some of them would die.

Remembering what she had read on the computer at school about the illness, she paired them up and handed one of them a bowl of steaming water. Their partner was to guide them slowly to one of the ailing girls. They were to hold the whooping girl over the bowl under a towel and encourage her to inhale the steam. Once the water had stopped steaming, then they had to do it all again. Having organised them, she returned to Rita and did the same for her. The caravan of bowl carriers continued through the night.

When the day shift worker, Cassie Hendricks, arrived at eight in the morning, she was horrified to see the kitchen in disarray and bowls of every shape and size scattered on corridors amid puddles of freezing water. She assumed they had been having a pyjama party or a midnight feast of some sort. It was not until Emily appeared wearing yesterday’s clothes carrying a pale faced little girl across her arms fighting for breath that she realised what had gone on.

Close to exhaustion, Emily cried out, “Cassie, Rita needs to go to hospital, right now!” Around her stood a group of ashen faced girls, some still clutching bowls. “You need to call a doctor because there are lots of sick kids here.”

Without saying a word, Cassie pulled her phone out of the back pocket of her jeans and made a couple of calls.

---

Title: The Caretakers
Series: The Duty Bound Duet #2
Author: Sydney Jamesson
Publication Date: August 25th 2020
Print Length: 240 pages
Genre: Psychological Suspense Thriller

~

Emily Parsons is a product of a difficult childhood: self-reliant, fiercely protective and willing to do whatever it takes to safeguard the wellbeing of those in her care. She has even slayed a monster, or two … or three in the name of poetic justice, and yet she is haunted by the image of a beautiful blond girl.

Sixteen-year-old Louise Travis has been abducted.

Louise’ fate rested in Emily’s hands, but she let her slip through her fingers like gold dust, only to be swept away by a malevolent band of brothers.

By once again enlisting the help of computer hacker, Robert Blackmoor, Emily must find Louise before she is lost forever in a Dark Web of heinous crimes, cruelty and corruption. The clock is ticking, and Emily’s investigation is drawing the wrong kind of attention, but she will not back down. She is duty bound to protect those she loves.

With skeletons from her past being unearthed, who can she turn to, and who can she trust with her own sinister secrets?

Goodreads * Amazon

---

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Sydney Jamesson is a USA Today bestselling author by night and an English teacher by day. She is nocturnal by nature and loves nothing more than staying up late, listening to music and being inspired to write. She has always written creatively; in her home is one enormous wastepaper basket full of discarded phrases, opening lines and pieces of dialogue that have hit her like lightning in the middle of the night. Her USA Today bestselling trilogy, THE STORY OF US sold worldwide, and she has been thrilled to continue Ayden Stone's and Beth Parker's epic love story in The Story of Us Series: Into the Blue, featuring Blue Genes, Blue Hearts, and Blue Moon.

More recently, Sydney has focused on psychological suspense. THE DARKEST CORNERS was her first venture into the new genre: a complex love story filled with lots of angst, emotional scenes and edge of your seat suspense as a single father and a troubled young woman confront their deepest, darkest fears together. The twists come think and fast and the ending is unforgettable!

In her latest novels, DUTY OF CARE and THE CARETAKERS - THE DUTY BOUND DUET -readers explore the seedier side of the Dark Web; witness abduction, human trafficking, and a devoted sister’s willingness to do whatever it takes to safeguard the wellbeing of those in her care. It’s a real page turner, filled with incidents which are heart-breaking and heart-stopping in equal measure!

Website * Amazon * Facebook *
Goodreads * Instagram * Twitter

---

GUEST POST:

- Where do authors get the ideas from for their books?

DUTY OF CARE-LESSNESS!

The idea for my latest books DUTY OF CARE and THE CARETAKERS came about in response to a news article I read in early 2019. That article detailed the extent to which grooming of young girls was going on in the North West of England and in other towns and cities across the country. Having a daughter, myself—now in her early thirties—I couldn’t help but find the report shocking and repulsive. How could a gang of men, predominately Asian, abduct young girls as young as eleven, drug them, rape them, pimp them out to other men and subject them to the most horrific sexual abuse without anyone noticing?

The answer was—they couldn’t.

The authorities knew and the police knew, even the girls’ doctors and teachers who had been approached by the girls for help knew. They did not take them seriously and either dismissed their claims as the fantasies of an overactive imagination or attention seeking lies. The grown-ups had a duty of care to protect the girls and yet all they offered was incompetence and carelessness!

It took a statement from former detective Maggie Oliver, turned whistle-blower, to make the authorities face up to what was happening and do something about it, by which time some of the girls were dead and most of them were damaged—physically and psychologically.

For days after reading the article, I found myself thinking about those poor girls; as a teacher, I see teenagers every day and can’t envisage anything quite so hellish happening to them. I was prompted to read more on the subject, intending to use what I had learned to educate my pupils in a CPSHE (non academic) lesson but, the more I read, the more I realised that this was not an isolated incident, it wasn’t merely a national outrage: it was an international scandal.

I discovered that a form of modern slavery exists across the world and the number of human trafficking victims worldwide in 2018 was almost 86,000—that’s in one year! One in seven reported runways in the U.S. in 2018 was likely a victim of child sex trafficking. Now there are almost four million victims of sex trafficking globally. Almost 99% of those trafficked are women and girls.

It’s a billion-dollar industry.

Even more worryingly, international gangs are very well organised; they have networks around the world where ‘merchandise’ can be moved across borders without anyone noticing. It’s a fact that in the 90’s girls from the Far East, the Middle East and from Eastern European countries like Romania and Latvia were seduced with promises of jobs in Europe and America as beauticians and nannies, when really they were being forced into prostitution and sexual slavery as a way of paying back the cost of their flights. Most of the girls had paid back the cost of their air tickets a hundred times over before they were released.

When that ploy began to fail, traffickers began to use other means to recruit their merchandise. These days, they make use of social media to lure unsuspecting women and girls into their web of corruption and exploitation by arranging meet-ups, blind dates and parties.

Social media has been used by traffickers to recruit victims and to control them through restricting their social media access, impersonating the victim or spreading lies and rumours online to shatter their self-confidence and alienate them from their friends and families. Once they have who they want, they set up brothels, use buses to move their victims around to hotel rooms and use banks to store their earnings. Everything they do is premeditated and done with supply and demand in mind.

In THE DUTY BOUND DUET, like most people, Emily Parsons has no concept of human trafficking and sexual exploitation, why would she? She’s a banker with plenty of money, living a lifestyle that keeps her well away from the seedy, back streets of London. It isn’t until she smooths away the glossy veneer to reveal a dark underworld, that she comes face to face with the kind of people who consider young girls nothing more than bargaining chips and merchandise to be rented out by the hour or sold to the highest bidder. When her sister Rita commits suicide, little does Emily know where the rabbit hole her ally Robert Blackmoor has opened up for her, will lead; but all roads take her back to her childhood and her first encounter with rats; human vermin who prey on young children.

From the age of twelve, Emily learned to be self-reliant and unforgiving. She had a duty of care to the young girls who looked up to her, especially her sister, Rita, and she was unflinching in her willingness to do whatever necessary to keep those in her charge out of harm’s way. Now she’s older she still feels the same way.

When the Bhardi brothers and their associates meet Emily Parsons they discover, to their peril, that they have met their match.

Enjoy THE DUTY BOUND DUET!

---

GIVEAWAY:

One randomly chosen winner via Rafflecopter will win a $50 Amazon or Barnes & Noble gift card. To increase your chance of winning, leave a comment at a different stop on the tour each day. Good luck!

a Rafflecopter giveaway