Chapter 1 Wait, you’re just going to leave us here? Alone?” Ellery Hathaway had faced down serial killers and lived to tell about it, but she felt a cold trickle of fear as she glanced at the lone child playing nearby on the grass. “I believe your ex-wife specifically forbade this proposition. In writing.…
Chapter 1 ST. VALENTINE’S DAY MASSACRE The Slasher He reached over to the wooden block of serrated steak knives on the kitchen counter and yanked one out, clutching it in his fist. He slashed and slashed, and the blood splashed and splashed. Over the walls. Over the counter-tops. Over the floor. Over skin and clothing…
Chapter 1 Beijing The huge gray transport shook as it corkscrewed downward, and a barrage of violent bangs rattled the fuselage. Decoy flares being fired? The slim, fair-haired woman gripping the armrests hoped so. No doubt, to lessen the chance of some rogue commander targeting them as the mission came in to land. No…
“You look like you just saw a ghost, Doc,” Mort noted. “Couple of them, it turns out,” Seth told us both. “Because there’s not one set of bones buried in that hole; there’s two. The second set looks to have belonged to a woman, and she didn’t die a couple hundred years ago either.” His…
Chapter 1 I lifted the curtain flap. Twilight was one of my new favorite things; an extended time here in my new neighborhood in Alaska before and after real sunrise and sunset. As we came upon the end of October, twilight in Benedict lasted about forty minutes at each end of the shorter days. We…
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“But to begin at the beginning…” said Corporal Benjamin Grier. “If you wouldn’t mind,” said Holmes. Sitting back, the American commenced his narrative. “I was owed several weeks’ leave by the army, and got it into my head that I should visit with my old pal Henry all the way across the Atlantic. I was…
FEBRUARY 20, 2003, 11:07 P.M. It takes ninety seconds to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Human beings, on average, can hold their breath for up to ninety seconds. A typical person needs ninety seconds to read one page of this book. Ninety seconds marked the moment between life and death on the night of February 20,…
“Hard Times is the best country noir I’ve read in a long while. A knife-edged, cold-eyed story of love and hate at their most visceral, it’s worthy of a place of pride on the shelf next to William Gay and Daniel Woodrell.”—Scott Phillips, author of Ice Harvest and That Left Turn at Albuquerque Take a first look at…
Prologue “Will it hurt?” Patty Cakes paused, the tattoo needle in her hand, looking at the man who lay facedown on the table. He was as white and hairless as a worm. She could have lied to him, but she never did that. “Yes,” she said. The man took a long time before he…
