Cover Artist: Brian Koch
Published: February 26th, 2015
As Chief of Police in Sweetwater, South Carolina, Will Hawbaker has seen more than his share of violent crime. But none of it has prepared him for the aftereffects of a young boy dead at the hand of his mother’s boyfriend. And when the suspected killer turns up dead himself, it raises more questions. Could this crime which has already shaken the town be even more sinister than it appears?
Camellia Abernathy has seen her own share of heartache following the violent death of the husband she only thought she knew. In returning to Sweetwater, her childhood home, Cam hopes to pick up the pieces of a shattered life for both herself and her young son. One piece of that life includes Will Hawbaker, the man who not only launched the investigation which uncovered her husband’s double life, but with whom she’s been in love since they were teens.
A rapid fire series of events turns both Cam and Will’s lives upside down, drawing them together even as they find themselves in the crosshairs of a killer.
GUEST POST
The Secret Ingredient of a Great Romantic Suspense
Wouldn’t it be nice if there actually was a secret ingredient? Something that you could pull off of the shelf and sprinkle over your manuscript, seasoning it with just the right amount of sensuality and thrills to guarantee best seller status?
Unfortunately, that’s not something you’re likely to find sandwiched between the cinnamon and paprika in your local grocery store. And in reality, what makes a romantic suspense work for one person may not work at all for the next. Literature, like all forms of art, is completely subjective. That’s why I write books that work for me, first and foremost. If I’m enjoying my characters and the situations in which they find themselves, I feel sure that at least some readers will enjoy them also. If I’m bored as I’m writing, I figure the reader was bored three pages ago.
Since a bored reader isn’t the best way to maintain a career as a professional novelist, that’s something I actively try to avoid.
In my experience, the best way to avoid boredom – both on my part and on the part of the reader – is to allow my characters to drive the direction in which the story goes. It’s not always the direction I was expecting, which, if I’m being honest, is part of what makes this process fun. I admire authors who outline their entire plot and create character profiles from which they never deviate, but I am not one of them. I’m a seat-of-the-pants writer all the way. I usually start my books with no more than a vague image of the first scene in my head and some sketchy details about the characters, the setting, and whatever mess they’ve gotten themselves into, and then go from there. Finding out the who, where and why is a discovery process that makes writing romantic suspense a bit like investigative journalism – with the promise of steamy sex and romance thrown in as a bonus.
And who wouldn’t love that?
To my mind, what makes romantic suspense so compelling as a genre is the fact that we get to see both the worst and the best of the human experience in one story. The suspense angle allows us to indulge our very natural fascination for the darker side of human nature but provides us the safety net of the romance happily ever after.
Now that I think about it, there might actually be a secret ingredient to a great romantic suspense: hope. As readers, we tolerate, even relish, the sometimes very harrowing trials of our hero and heroine because we have the assurance that things will all be okay in the end.
EXCERPT
The fog was so thick you could slice it with a knife and serve it up a la mode.
Will Hawbaker scrambled over fallen logs, wading through a sea of saw palmettoes as deep as his waist. The maritime forest was nearly impenetrable, with boggy patches of ground to catch the unwary in its earthen grip, sucking the boots right off your feet if you weren’t careful.
Will paused, shining his flashlight around, the beam a feeble weapon against the moonless night. It was hours yet until daybreak, when the sun would burn off the fog like the wispy vestiges of a bad dream.
And this was definitely a bad dream. One Will wished he could wake up from.
Even at this time of night the air felt like a slow cooker, baking him from the inside out. Sweat rolled down his temples, his back, causing his shirt to cling and his hair to drip salty tears on the fanned leaves of the nearest palmetto. Mosquitoes droned just outside the protective zone of the repellent he’d applied, black clouds swirling through the white.
Nearby, an owl hooted.
This was an uncomfortable environment for an adult, even one who was accustomed to putting himself in danger.
For a child, it had to be terrifying.
“Sam!” Will called out, listening as his voice seemed to be absorbed by the soup-like air.
He heard barking, but couldn’t tell if it was coming closer to him or moving away. The team from the Sheriff’s Department with the bloodhounds had set out at the same time he had, but they’d all headed in different directions.
They had a lot of forest to cover, and not a lot of time. The twenty-four hour window, that critical time after an abduction, was closing fast.
Hearing something – had that been a whimper? – off to his left, Will turned the flashlight that direction.
“Sam?”
Even though no response was forthcoming, Will began moving toward the sound. If the child was hurt, he may not be able to answer. If he was frightened – and why the hell wouldn’t he be? – he may be too terrified to make his hiding spot known.
“Sam!” Will called as he shoved a small sapling out of his way. “I know you must be scared, buddy, but I’m here to help you.”
And because the kid probably didn’t believe jack shit coming from adults right now, especially adults he was supposed to be able to trust, Will didn’t bother to mention anything about being a cop. That wasn’t quite the vote of confidence it once was, anyway. Better to try something on the boy’s level.
“I hear you like dogs,” he said, his voice radiating calm even as he viciously kicked at a vine that wanted to tangle him up in its thorny grip. “Do you hear the dogs barking? They’re looking for you, too.”
Fingers of fog tickled the back of Will’s neck, teasingly cool against his overheated flesh.
Mother Nature was definitely female, Will thought sourly. Soothing and confounding at the same time.
“I like dogs,” Will said conversationally, because what the hell. If nothing else, maybe the boy would get sick of hearing him yapping and tell him to shut up. “You hear those bloodhounds barking? They’re out here looking for you, too. Kind of like Timmy and Lassie.” Will paused, wondering if the kid even knew who that was. Given that this was the age of animated sponges living in undersea pineapples, probably not.
“That was an old show I used to watch, about this awesome collie that was always saving this kid Timmy’s butt. I thought it would be cool to have a dog that could get help when you did something dumb like fall down a well, but I couldn’t have one when I was a kid. My mom didn’t want one. She thought it would mess up the house and was too much responsibility.”
His mother didn’t particularly want him or his siblings either, for much the same reason. But that was beside the point.
“Your mom told me that you’ve been asking for a dog.” Will stopped, shone his flashlight toward the base of the enormous oak tree off to the right. Was that a flash of red he’d just seen?
“But that you two had been debating about that responsibility thing, too. And that line about a boy who can’t even pick up after himself not being responsible enough to take care of a dog? I heard that one too, and it sucks. But the thing is, your mom is kind of right. I think she’s willing to give you a chance though. She told me that when you get back home, safe and sound, she’s taking you to the pound, first thing.”
“Liar!”
Will froze. It had been the merest whisper of sound, ephemeral as the fog itself. He half thought it was wishful thinking on his part.
“Now, I’ve got no reason to pull your leg about that, son. Dogs are a pretty serious business. A lot more serious than putting away your Legos and getting your dirty clothes in the hamper. You’ve got to make sure you feed them and water them and take them for walks… but maybe you’re not ready for all that responsibility.”
“Am too!”
That was definitely no figment of his imagination.
Covering his relief with a look of exasperation, Will followed the voice with the beam of his flashlight.
Nine-year-old Sam Bryant peered back at him from one of the branches of the oak tree.
“Pretty good climber, are you?”
The kid looked terrified, but defiant. “Yes. But my mom…” his voice trembled on the word “tells me that I’m going to fall and break my head.”
“Your head looks pretty hard to me.”
“She’s dead.”
“Excuse me?”
“He…” the kid’s whole lower face started to quiver. “He said my mom was dead. So you’re lying about the dog.”
Will swallowed the curse he wanted to say, but silently wished all the seven plagues to be visited upon the man in question. Hopefully while he was naked. And staked out on a fire ant mound. Why the hell would he say such a thing?
“He lied,” Will told the boy. “He’s the liar.”
He was Matthew Hastings, Sam Bryant’s mother’s boyfriend. After a particularly nasty argument over Hastings’ belief that Sam’s mom was coddling him too much because she was squeamish about Sam learning to hunt, Hastings decided to take the kid out into the woods anyway while his mom was at work. He’d abandoned him there, with no food, no water, and little hope of finding his way out. Apparently this was meant as an illustration of the importance of developing survival skills.
Luckily they’d managed to track Hastings car to this area, a stretch of uninhabited woodland used primarily for a hunting club.
Hastings seemed to have abandoned his car along with the boy, which meant he was in the wind somewhere. But the important thing was that they’d found Sam, alive and in one piece.
At least he looked to be in one piece.
“Sam, I need you to listen to me, okay? Your mom is fine. She’s worried sick, but she’s fine. But I need to know if you’re hurt anywhere.”
“I’m thirsty.”
“I’ll just bet.” The kid had been alone in the woods for almost eighteen hours. Given the fact that it was August in South Carolina, dehydration was a given. Will pulled a bottle out of the pocket of his cargo pants.
“Lucky for you I brought some water with me. Now, I have to contact the other people who are looking for you, so that everyone knows you’re okay. Can you climb down from there, or do you need help?”
“I can do it.”
“Good man.” But because Will didn’t want to take any chances, he moved closer to the base of the tree even as he thumbed on his radio. “Found him,” he said, and gave his approximate coordinates. “I’ll give you a status report on his condition just as soon as I have a chance to check him out.”
Fog swirled, obscuring his view of the boy, the tree, and Will moved his flashlight around in an attempt to see through it. “Sam?” he said, but received no answer.
“Sam?” he said again. “Be careful climbing down.”
That would be just what they needed at this point, for the kid to fall out of the tree and actually break his head.
Concern niggled. “Sam? Maybe you should just stay put, buddy, and let me help you.”
Will closed the final distance to the tree, but he tripped over an exposed root near the base and nearly went sprawling.
“Some help I am,” he muttered. “Pretend you didn’t see that,” he called out. But still the boy didn’t respond.
“Sam?” Will aimed his flashlight toward the branch of the tree where he’d last seen the kid sitting. Empty. He started moving the beam lower.
“Sam!” he said one more time when he saw no sign of the boy on any of the branches. The nerves that had so recently calmed began to jump beneath his skin. Shit. Had the boy fallen? He shone his flashlight at the ground, the boiling fog making it nearly impossible to distinguish shapes, around the side, back toward that root he’d tripped –
“Oh Jesus. Oh no.” Will stumbled the two steps that would take him to where the boy lay, dropping down on his knees beside him. How could he have fallen without Will hearing a thing?
“Sam?” Will reached out, turned the boy over.
And felt the blood drain out of his head.
The boy hadn’t fallen. He’d been shot.
And he’d been dead for quite some time.
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About the author:
One fine day in the not-too-distant past, Lisa Clark O'Neill left Wittenberg University with a BA in English, which she promptly neglected. After working as an interior designer, decorative artist, and Montessori art teacher (there may have been a BA in art as well,) she finally settled into the role of mother to two very fine children.
However, two years of doing the stay-at-home-mom brain cell melt drove her to pull out a pen and one of her old college notebooks.
That turned into six manuscripts.
Lisa spent subsequent years avoiding housework by burying her nose in just about every romance novel she could get her hands on, after completely falling in love with the genre. Her own work falls into the romantic suspense sub-genre, with strong comedic undertones.
Lisa currently lives in the Atlanta area with her family, her dog, her cat and her daughter's pet rabbit. When she isn't attempting to keep the rabbit from eating the woodwork, she's hard at work on her next novel.
3 comments:
This book looks intriguing. Hope to read soon.
Looking forward to reading this!
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