Pelham Flannery rejoined the world from ICU, fully aware someone had tried to kill him. To live, he went under the radar, distanced himself from music, and disguised everything that would give away his identity as Jace. After a decade, is it safe to come out of hiding?
Gaelen, delighted to be trained as a professional investigator by her new husband, continued in her new career after he was killed. Assigned to locate Jace Hastings, she isn’t told who wants to find him, but she puzzles it out. If she’s right, it’s the man who tried to kill him before. Which means she needs to find Jace Hastings and save him.
What’s your favorite way to combat stress?
Heading out to see a movie and combine it with either lunch or dinner with one of my writer friends is a lovely way to de-stress and talk about what we each care about the most: writing fiction! But when they aren’t available, kicking back for a marathon on Netflix or streaming some of my favorite movies also does the trick. Or losing myself in the adventures of someone else’s fiction characters is also good. All three take me out of my world and drop me in one that’s even more stressful for the characters on either screen or page.
Why is your featured book a stress busting read?
Well, Pel Flannery, the hero in GHOST NOTES, probably has stress enough (considering he’s been hiding out from a stalker who tried to kill him for a decade already) to make many people’s stress levels seem minor by comparison.
“I don’t understand.”
“What part?”
She sighed, irritated. “Any of it. The man is dead. Has been for nearly ten years.”
“Then prove it to the client,” the man across the desk from her said. “He believes Hastings is still alive, just in hiding.”
“Then he’s hiding for a reason. A good reason.”
“That’s not our call. We’re simply being paid to find him.”
Her sigh was louder this time. She shifted in her chair. “But he’s dead. It was in all the news reports at the time.”
“Was it?” He rifled through the papers in a folder on his desk. So old school. But when briefing an investigator, he liked to stab a finger down on each as he laid out the facts already corralled for the job.
His index finger poked the printout to her left. “Here’s the original report. She was killed outright because she was behind the wheel. He was taken to the hospital.”
“I remember,” she said. “He wasn’t expected to live the night.”
“But apparently he did. Here’s her death certificate. The funeral notice. The media coverage of both the investigation and her funeral. There’s a single line about him in one of the tabloids, that he’s in intensive care, and that’s five days after the accident.”
“Which doesn’t prove he recovered.”
“Doesn’t prove he died, either. That’s your job. Find him whether he’s alive or buried. But…” He paused for effect. Dramatic bastard. “…he’s alive. The client is very emphatic that that’s the case.”
She was silent for a full minute, studying his face, the way his hands shuffled the copies of various reports and tucked them back in the bright red folder.
“Why me?” she asked.
He leaned back in his chair. The leather groaned beneath his weight. “Not that I want this to sound like it’s sexist—”
Which meant it was very sexist.
“—but you’ve got all the qualifications necessary to draw our man from hiding.”
If he was hiding and not dead, which was far more likely.
“Meaning I’m female,” she said.
“A female with all the attributes our man was known to appreciate. You turn heads, Gaeley.”
She hated when he used the pet name. The one her husband had called her.
“Plus, you’ve got pipes.”
“Pipes! I haven’t sung in over five years. I didn’t have pipes then, so I really don’t have ’em now.”
“You got ’em,” he insisted. “You sang at the Christmas party last year.”
“Holiday party,” she corrected, “and it was a group sing-along.”
“Yours was the only voice I heard,” he said, his grin wide and a bit lascivious.
Pig. “I gave up singing because I was merely passable at it. That means not good enough to make a living from it, in case you need a translation. And besides—”
“Bullshit. You gave it up because you make far more money being one of my hounds. There’s no besides about it. You know why?”
“I’m on tenterhooks,” she said dryly.
“Because I don’t want you to follow the money on this one, honey. I want you to follow the music. That’s how to find Jace Hastings. Follow the music.”
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I liked the excerpt.
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