ONE Friday, June 16, 1989 I walk into the pharmacy on Union Street for two things: my photographs and a pregnancy test. As I stand at the counter I feel lightheaded and thirsty. Nerves, I suppose. Or the heat. There was a piece on the radio this morning about a hosepipe ban and water rationing,…
Chapter 1: Spill the Beans! September 1894 My boots rapped smartly on the cobbles as I strode through the murky Liverpool dusk, worrying about the telegram stashed in my billfold. I’d soon join my wife Diana and her brother in the rooms he’d taken to await the arrival of our ship. Blissfully astonished to see…
Our story begins, as these stories often do, with an awfully convenient murder. Not convenient for the murder victim, of course. They probably had plans, hopes and dreams, maybe even a date or a meal left unfinished. No, I guess their murder came as a bit of a shock for them. It might not even…
One October can be a summer month in South Georgia. Temperatures in the nineties, leaves still green and locked onto the trees; humidity so thick that a small fish could swim in it. And the gnats were everywhere. I’d forgotten about the gnats. I left my bags in the beat-up old Fiat I sometimes referred…
One Wednesday, 21 June 1815 3 Bruton Place Mayfair, London, England The four o’clock hour of the morning The damning words folded in on themselves as the paper crumpled in Lady Petra’s fist. Flames danced merrily in the fireplace until one log split under the crushing heat, sparks flying like the spitting of an angry…
Chapter One CORDELIA I didn’t know how long I sat cross-legged in the snow, waiting for the dead man crumpled on the ground in front of my building to wake up. Might have been five minutes. Might have been five hours. As I watched, pellets of snow accumulated on his flannel pajama-clad legs and fuzzy-sock-covered…
Chapter Four Silence in the garden. I gaped at the pale foot and the ankle beneath it, then the boot in my hand and the sock hanging limply from it. I looked back at the foot. The freshly turned soil enveloped whatever was beneath it. “Oh my god,” someone gasped. A woman’s voice. Somewhere behind…
Chapter One WHEN BRUCE MESSANE’S PHONE WOKE HIM at half past midnight, he knew it couldn’t possibly be good news— good news never came this late. He tried to guess what calamity was waiting for him on the other end of the line. Best-case scenario was more supply chain issues and shipping delays, a constant…
Prologue Temperatures were in the high teens, and a light snow was falling on the morning of March 16, 2015, as an employee for Columbia Gas Transmission drove along County Road 1908, a narrow lane that ran through cornfields and wooded areas of Ashland County, Ohio. The driver was proceeding slowly because low fog…
Chapter 1 At 92,000 feet, the Vulture suddenly developed a mind of its own. It dove like the hunter it was, screaming down through the stratosphere, looking for something to eat. Fifty miles away, from his chair in the control center at Groom Lake, a white rectangular box about the length of a shipping…
