SERIES TOUR with NEW RELEASE
Digging Up Bones Series
Author: TA Moore
Publisher: Rogue Firebird Press
Cover Artist: Tammy Moore
Book 1: Bone to Pick
Book 2: Skin and Bone
Book 3: Down to the Bone - Releases June 22, 2026
Book 4: SWIPE (a standalone story)
Deputy Cloister Witte has a dark past and a cute dog. He’s happy to talk about the dog.
Genres: Contemporary MM Romantic Suspense/Police Procedural
Tropes: Enemies to lovers, workplace romance, black cat/golden retriever, grumpy/sunshine, best dog in the world
Themes: Coming to terms with your past, dealing with trauma, accepting other people’s acceptance.
The stories are best read in order.
Overall Heat Rating for the series: 3.5 flames
POV/Tense: third person POV/past tense
BOOK DETAILS
BOOK 1
Book Title: Bone to Pick
Length: 261 pages
Release Date: Second Edition 2024 (originally 2017)
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Cloister Witte has a cute dog and a dark past. He’ll talk about one.
Blurb
Cloister Witte is a man with a dark past and a cute dog. He’s happy to talk about the dog all day, but after growing up in the shadow of a missing brother, a deadbeat dad, and a criminal stepfather, he’d rather leave the past back in Montana. These days he’s a K-9 officer in the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department and pays a tithe to his ghosts by doing what no one was able to do for his brother—find the missing and bring them home. He’s good at solving difficult mysteries. The dog is even better.
This time the missing person is a ten-year-old boy who walked into the desert in the middle of the night and didn’t come back. With the antagonistic help of distractingly handsome FBI agent Javi Merlo, it quickly becomes clear that Drew Hartley didn’t run away. He was taken, and the evidence implies he’s not the kidnapper’s first victim. As the search intensifies, old grudges and tragedies are pulled into the light of day. But with each clue they uncover, it looks less and less likely that Drew will be found alive.
BOOK 2
Book Title: Skin and Bone
Length: 251 Pages
Release Date: Second Edition 2024 (originally 2019)
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Cloister Witte has a cute dog and a dark past. He’ll talk about one.
Blurb
Janet Morrow, a young trans woman, lies in a coma after wandering away from her car during a storm. But just because Cloister found the young tourist doesn’t mean she’s home. What brought her to Plenty, California… and who didn’t want her to leave?
With the help of Special Agent Javi Merlo, who continues to deny his growing feelings for the rough-edged deputy, Cloister unearths a ten year-old conspiracy of silence that taps into Plenty’s history of corruption.
Janet Morrow’s old secrets aren’t the only ones coming to light. Javi has tried to put his past behind him, but some people seem determined to pull his skeletons out of the closet. His dark history with a senior agent in Phoenix complicates not just the investigation but his relationship with Cloister.
BOOK 3 - NEW RELEASE
Book Title: Down to the Bone
Length: 90 000 words
Release Date: June 22, 2026
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Cloister Witte has a cute dog and a dark past. He’ll talk about one.
Blurb
Deputy Cloister Witte has a dark past, a cute dog, and an FBI agent. It turns out that all of them are going to cause him problems.
When Cloister Witte disclosed that he was dating FBI Agent Javi Merlo he’d expected it to cause some complications. Dating in the workplace always did. He’d just expected it to be red tape, conflicts of interest, and the occasional asshole who thought his sex life gave them a remit to be funny. A concerted campaign by SSA Everett Kincaid, the new head of the LA office of the FBI, to get Cloister fired hadn’t made the list.
Yet here he is, with his case history and his childhood trauma both under review.
The problem is that Cloister is good at his job, and his K9 Bourneville is even better. So when an employee from the Plenty sub-office of the FBI goes missing, Larkin can’t afford to sideline them anymore. As they get to work Cloister starts to suspect that Larkin’s conviction his organized crime task force is the real target is as off-target as his suspicions about Cloister.
Meanwhile, for Javi Merlo the case is an opportunity to redeem himself. All he has to do is turn a blind eye to how Larkin bends the rules. If he goes along with it he could bring down a major criminal organization, and restart his stalled career…or he destroy his relationship with Cloister and the legacy of his dead mentor.
As rumors of corruption spread, Javi must choose between ambition and the man he loves.
BOOK 4
Book Title: SWIPE ( a standalone story)
Length: 215 pages
Release Date: Second Edition 2024 (originally 2019)
Tropes: Lust at First Sight, Secret Identity, Motorcycle Club, Bad Ideas, Secrets and Lies
Ii is a standalone story and does end on a cliffhanger.
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Plenty’s a hotbed of crime, but the men are even hotter.
Blurb
A Novel of Plenty, California
As one of the top trauma surgeons in Plenty’s ER, Dr. Taggart Hayes knows how to fix broken things—fractured legs, ruptured spleens, allergies, and traumatic brain injuries. He can put them back together good as new.
A broken heart, though? That’s a bit trickier. Especially when it’s his own.
When Tag swipes on the photo of the hot man in the dating app, he just wants a distraction from the wreck that used to be his life. A one- night stand with a safely inappropriate stranger, no names, no feelings, and no complications.
But the headless photo on the app belongs to a man who isn’t so easy to forget the next day... or the next week. And it becomes increasingly clear that Bass is neither safe nor uncomplicated. Drawn into the dark, criminal underworld his lover inhabits, Tag has to decide if the cure for his broken heart is worse than the disease.
Excerpt
EVERY COP had their own bible of superstitions.
Down in vice, cockeyed Jimmy Daley swore that every time he pulled in one particular red-haired hooker, the week went to hell. Lieutenant Frome would never admit it out loud, but whenever he hit red at the Mendes and Third intersection, he brought a black mood to work with him. When Deputy Kelly Tancredi was pregnant last year, her biggest complaint was that her lucky bra was uncomfortable.
Cloister knew it was going to be a bad night when the devil winds came rolling in from the desert. It was a given that Southern California was always hot, but the winds parched it dry as well. You couldn’t even sweat without it turning to salt, and where it wasn’t salty, it was sandy.
It was more than just batterers and brawlers pushed over the edges of their own worse natures, though. The winds blew in the sort of bad shit that stuck in your nightmares—little corpses, bruised thighs, questions that never got answered.
Worst thing was, there was no calling in superstitious in the Plenty Sheriff’s Department. You knew everything was going to go to hell, but all you could do was turn up for work and wait for the shit to hit the fan.
Three hours into the midnight shift, and Cloister was still waiting. Maybe he was wrong, but the drunk-and-disorderly collar of a barefoot meth head didn’t weigh on his conscience that much.
Ignoring the yelled orders to “Get down!” and “Put your hands where I can see them!” the weathered, desert-dried-out man had scrambled out of a broken window and run across the parking lot. He ran like an Olympic athlete in the weeds, with his arms pumping and his head thrown back so the tendons in his neck strained under his faded blue tats. It wasn’t going to do him any good, but he put his all into it.
“Why do they always run when it’s hot as hell?” Cloister asked. Nothing ran like a guilty conscience, whatever the weather. Besides, his partner wasn’t one for much chat. Cloister stooped and unclipped her collar in one smooth, practiced motion. She perked up, and her shoulders tensed under her thick ruff of tan-and-black hair, but she held herself back. Cloister put the command snap in his voice. “Fuss!”
She went.
Cloister had worked with a lot of dogs over the years, from his stepdad’s hunting pack to an idiot-savant spaniel in Iraq—it ate rocks but could find explosive residue after five days—but none of them had a prey drive like Bourneville. The black shepherd went off the blocks like a greyhound and cleared the window in a long, clean leap—low enough to make Cloister wince as the shards of broken glass in the frame brushed through her fawn stomach fur. She hit the ground running.
He flicked the leash, wrapped the heavy nylon around his wrist, and took his turn through the window. He felt the constriction of the bulletproof vest as he ducked, and the glass caught in the heavy canvas fabric of his trousers as he folded his six-foot-two length through the dry-rotted wooden square.
Across the parking lot, the meth head scrambled up and over the chain link fence. The barbed wire at the top caught his shirt and ripped it off, leaving a flapping, bloodied rag dangling. He kept running and dodged behind a row of houses.
Bourneville didn’t lose a step as she jumped onto the hood of a parked truck, not even stopping to measure the distance. She stumbled over her paws on landing, nearly cracked her chin, and then was up and off again.
The fence rattled as Cloister hit it, and it swayed as he scrambled up and over. He caught his hand on the wire, and a spur dug into the meat under his thumb. The jab of pain made him grimace, but he didn’t slow down.
He dropped onto the other side and followed the wolf brush of Bourneville’s tail down the back of the houses. The shout and scuffle of the raid at the drug house faded behind him. The habit of risk assessment made him drop his hand to his gun, and his fingers found their familiar spots in the molded plastic grip.
The Heights wasn’t a bad area of town. It was just poor. Unlike some of the other deputies, Cloister had grown up in a place where it was important to know the difference. Poor still meant closed curtains and minding your own business because the sheriff’s gratitude didn’t have the half-life of the local gangs’ resentment.
Couldn’t really blame them. They had to live there, raise their kids there. The last thing they wanted was trouble.
So Cloister kept his hand on his gun, but the gun stayed on his hip.
At the end of the alley, the meth head grabbed a recycling bin and spun it around to shove behind him. It tipped over and spilled bundles of cans and crumpled plastic bottles onto the ground. The obstacle gave him a second’s head start on Bourneville as the dog scrabbled briefly to dodge the skidding box. He gained a few more when Cloister had to kick it out of the way.
It was enough for Cloister to lose sight of Bourneville for a second as she skidded around the corner while he skidded on a piece of greasy plastic wrap. He swore under his breath, put on a burst of speed, and nearly tripped over Bourneville as he raced around the corner to find her just standing still.
Her head was cocked to the side, and she watched the meth head with a confused look. Cloister couldn’t blame her. The scrawny man—all bone and muscle under shrink-wrapped skin—had grabbed a little girl’s bike from the garden. It was pink and still had training wheels on, but the guy was trying to ride it to freedom. His bare feet balanced on the narrow pedals, his skinny ass was in the air, and his knees pumped furiously. All that effort didn’t do him much good. There was more side-to-side motion than forward, but he seemed committed.
“Jesus,” Cloister muttered.
He glanced down at Bourneville, and she looked up at him with the “what now?” tilt to her head that meant her training had briefly been derailed. Her head went to one side and then the other, and her fuzzy black ears flopped.
“Yeah, I’m with you, girl. This is going to be fun to write up.”
About the Author
TA Moore is a Northern Irish writer of romantic suspense, urban fantasy, and contemporary romance novels. A childhood in a rural, seaside town fostered in her a suspicious nature, a love of mystery, and a streak of black humour a mile wide.
Coffee, Doc Marten boots, and good friends are the essential things in life. Spiders, mayo, and heels are to be avoided.
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