This week we welcome Emma Jane to Book Fun Friday.
Bio:
Janis Lane lives outside a small town on acreage in Western New York with her patient husband. She has two grown children and two delightful grands. She writes cozy mysteries set in small town America when she isn’t working at her son’s plant nursery playing with the flowers. She belongs to RWA, the national organization for romance writers and is a member of her local chapter, WNYRW. She also writes Regency Romances for another publisher under the pen name of Emma Lane.
Book Feature:
MURDER IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD Mystery-Romance
Log Line: A detective and a reporter seek clues to solve a murder in
small town America.
Book Tag Line: Detective
Fowler races the clock to catch a madman intent on killing respectable citizens
in small town America,
even as Beverly Hampton, home town reporter, captures his heart.
Book Blurb:
Sparkling black eyes, or the elusive psychopath creating
panic in his small-town community. Together, the detective and the reporter
race to find the monster in their midst and return the town to the desirable
place where people come to raise their families in peace and contentment. Can
they sort through their differences to find romance even as they search for a
determined stalker with murder on his mind? The clock ticks down on a man in a
rage with a deadly mission.A killer is attacking
respectable citizens in picturesque Hubbard,
NY, and leaving
corpses on their front steps in the middle of the day. Detective Fowler isn’t
certain who causes him to lose the most sleep, a certain sexy reporter with
bouncing curls and sp
Excerpt:
Fowler supposed it was as good a day as any to die. He had seen
bodies frozen in the snow, rotting in the rain and in sun so hot the flesh
cooked on the bones before the vultures could find them. This death was almost
dignified in contrast. The woman looked as if she had decided to take a rest on
her front steps and someone had come along and taped her face. There was no
sign of a struggle. The body was still stiff with rigor mortis.
The detective bent down and studied the corpse closely and
carefully, imprinting it on his brain.
One brown eye bugged out, staring sightlessly up at the blue sky.
Wide gray duct tape crisscrossed the lower half of her face, covering her nose,
mouth, and one eye. Dyed blond hair, roots showing an inch of gray, stood
thinly away from her scalp. Pudgy hands with candy pink fingernails curled into
claws. Her face, what was showing of it, a vivid purple, so swollen her ears
jutted out from a head on fat-padded shoulders.
Wide jeans were rolled up at the ankles and a pair of scruffy
bedroom slippers stuck out at right angles. A sweatshirt reading, ‘Gentlemen
prefer blondes,’ undulated across the mounds of her breasts. Sitting to one
side on the top step with dried grass sticking out of its head, a plastic
jack-o-lantern grinned grotesquely, signaling the season.
Behind him, Eddie, the rookie cop, pinned yellow crime scene tape
to the nearby shrub causing small, golden leaves to rain down on the lawn.
Overhead a canopy of ancient sugar maples radiated fall and dropped blood-red
leaves. A vagrant breeze picked up and swirled them gently over and around the
corpse where they collected in a pile underneath her outstretched arm.
It was a near perfect, early October day, the third on a Wednesday;
temperatures in the mid 60’s, sun shining with a mild zephyr puffing by now and
then. An expectant hush had fallen over one of the residential neighborhoods of
the Town of Hubbard located
in Western New York. The
neighbors had to be peeking out their windows—two black and whites parked in
the front yard—but were respectfully remaining inside for now.
There’s a surprise for
anyone who follows the clues and guesses the identity of the madman before the
last chapter. Notify the author.This mystery is fun but a challenge for casual
sleuths.
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