Two Chicks On Books: Release Day Blitz- DAY DRINKERS by Kitty Turner With An Excerpt & a #Giveaway!

I am so excited that DAY DRINKERS by Kitty Turner & Daily House is available now and that I get to share the news!

If you haven’t yet heard about this awesome book, be sure to check out all the details below.

This blitz also includes a giveaway for a copy of the paperback courtesy of Kitty & Rockstar Book Tours. So if you’d like a chance to win, check out the giveaway info below.

About The Book:

Title: DAY DRINKERS

Author: Kitty Turner

Pub. Date: September 2, 2025

Publisher: Daily House

Formats: Paperback, eBook

Pages: 356

Find it: Goodreads, Amazon

Read for FREE with a Kindle Unlimited membership!

From the author of Zone Trip comes a bold tale of survival, identity, and the price of secrecy.

From her office window on St. Columba, Gemma gazes out at the mysterious pleasure island just beyond the reef. Owned by country music legend Cowboi Rivers, the exclusive retreat lures the world’s wealthy and powerful with promises of secrecy and illicit pleasures. Meanwhile, the locals keep their distance, wary of the wild parties and whispered rumors of drugs and disappearing girls.

Desperate to escape her dead-end job, Gemma seizes a risky opportunity to captain the sailing vessel Mariposa for Cowboi’s shadowy empire. She finds herself swept into a world of corrupt elites. When a cocaine pickup in the Dominican Republic spirals into a deadly double-cross, Gemma and her crew enlist the aid of a Vodou priestess, the ghost of a hard-drinking mariner, and a rumba-loving boat boy to escape. With her enemies closing in, Gemma sails toward Cuba, facing a storm that threatens to push her over the edge.

Day Drinkers is where the American dream washes ashore.

Day Drinkers is a tantalizing medley of Saint X and Don’t Stop the Carnival, seasoned with a dash of The Rum Diary. Drawing from her ten years as a liveaboard sailor and Caribbean travel writer, Kitty Turner, an American Absurdism revivalist, delivers a gripping tale of identity and redemption through her unique talent for rollicking storytelling and deep philosophical inquiry.

Excerpt:

Chapter 1 Excerpt

Boon held court under a blue FEMA tarp stretched taut by furring strips screwed between two ramshackle sheds. The equatorial sun shone through the plastic roof and flooded the poor excuse for a chandlery with the color of tropical seawater. Greybeards and the occasional sea-hardened woman sat in a circle of mismatched chairs, cast off from luxury vacation rentals and salvaged from the island dump. Boon and only Boon sat behind the workbench, scrutinizing the crowd from his behemoth leather office chair, creaking and patched with a crisscross of duct tape. His orange Croc-covered feet were beacons propped up amid a scatter of carburetors, boat zincs, and wayward projects abandoned in the shop for a day, a week, or forever.

At Boon Dock Marine, the coffee was free, but Heinekens from the jumbo Igloo cooler required a deposit in the ‘honor’ jar, and Boon ensured all remained honorable like a hawk. The industrious ones, those who still had their knees and backs intact, worked for Boon—a bottom paint job here or an outboard repair there. These youths, beers beaded with condensation in hand, waited next to Boon’s open-air desk for assignments, which came infrequently and were executed haphazardly. Most of the harbor’s liveaboards, those either passing through or permanently moored in Sargasso Cove, spent their lazy days earning a few dollars from pickup labor and tending the low flame of a perfect buzz.

Staticky Cowboi Rivers songs romanticizing American life played from the worn speakers of a decades-old radio set sitting on a shelf above Boon’s head. The multiple Grammy-winning country singer got plenty of airplay and cred around Boon Dock Marine, perhaps more than his due, because of his status as an honorary islander and Boon’s friend. Cowboi owned property all over St. Columba, most notably an exclusive resort on a mysterious private island that was swimming distance from the west side.

“I heard Rivers’ wife divorced him because he’s into jailbait,” said one of the sailors. This conjecture about Cowboi’s illicit love life was the first thing Gemma heard as she ducked under the tarp to fill her mug from the crusty Mr. Coffee, its hotplate caked with the sediment of a hundred overflowed pots. Her gold name tag glinted from the lapel of a navy blue blazer, accessorized with yellow flip-flops and a matching vinyl roll-top dry bag. The uniform gave away that she was among the legitimately employed, a rarity around Sargasso Cove.

“Biggest mistake of Cowboi’s life—marrying that Hollywood bitch. She’s got a mouth as big as a barn door. That’s where those rumors come from, and I won’t listen to them around here,” Boon said with irritation.

As Gemma's eyes adjusted to the blue-tinted shade, she greeted the crowd with the customary "mornin'." Her gaze rested on Boon, who nodded in her direction. The color of Boon’s hair could be described as dull blond, if someone were forced to describe its nondescript, salt-stiffened hue. It hung in long clumps around a face that years of island living had etched with a nautical map of broken capillaries and wrinkles, framing blue eyes that could change as fast as the skies from clear to stormy. Boon was substantial in the way that someone becomes when they've thoroughly claimed a space, his faded t-shirt bearing the silhouette of some long-forgotten regatta stretching across a torso that had rounded with age.

Gemma knew from experience that Boon shut down any loose talk about his hero before it could gain momentum. On this island, Cowboi was more legend than man, and legends bred stories. Out of courtesy, Gemma shifted the subject to something of more importance than the alleged sexual activities of a music star.

“Any news on Vaughn?” she asked.

Boon flashed her an indecipherable look.

Some days, especially after post-work drinks, Gemma gossiped and joked with the best of the Heineken crew. But today, she stood somber, speculating about the disappearance of one of their own. Vaughn, a Boon Dock regular, hadn’t shown up at the tarp-covered hangout for over a week. Vaughn had been known to sleep off a particularly nasty hangover for a few days, but he’d never been missing for this long without a word.

“I saw him getting on the airport ferry. It was Vaughn, I swear,” Crab said.

If you could have a first mate on land, then Crab would be Boon’s. Crab reminded Gemma of a Slim Jim wearing a Greek fisherman’s cap. His desiccated arms and legs were permanently tanned and salted. In the leather of his face, pale eyes burned with the fever of a consistent .08 blood alcohol level. Crab, a friendly soul, was always happy and ready to motor out to the lobster traps to feed the crowd from a big steel pot he tended over a propane barbecue. He had the jovial nature and skills of a man born to boats.

“Cheese and bread, Crab, you must have spent your day in a bottle again if you saw Vaughn. That drunk is drowned and rolling at the bottom of the bay, as sure as I am sitting here in front of you.” Boon pursed his lips and scowled at his friend with disdain.

Crab and Boon were always at each other’s throats in a brotherly way. To Boon’s dismay, Crab plucked a pepperoni off a piece of day-old pizza, greasy and gathering flies, and flung it at Boon’s head like a frisbee. Slightly off target, it pucked off the back of Boon’s hand and landed in the bottom-paint-poisoned dust beyond the glowing blue light of the shack. A one-eyed Siamese streaked out from between the dirt foundation and the plank floor to snap up the meaty prize.

Gemma would have to wait until after work to find out if Crab had truly discovered anything new about Vaughn’s disappearance. Her commute across the island took thirty minutes on a good day, and today was not so good. A hangover of the alone-drinking variety parched her palate and sucked the energy from her legs…

About Kitty Turner:

Kitty Turner’s circus and showgirl career spanned five years. Until 2017, she toured the Caribbean casino and resort circuit along the Antilles chain with her husband and a rotating cast of international circus performers aboard a 47-foot sailboat. Before moving to the Caribbean in 2007, Kitty co-owned the nightclub 12 Galaxies in the Mission District of San Francisco. After hurricanes Irma and Maria destroyed her sailboat home, Kitty relocated to the Reno area and founded the book marketing company Daily House Media.