Love a good mystery? Here’s a sample from a book edited by The Written Word: 15 Times a Killer, the first police procedural set in the U.S., by million-seller Alan McDermott.
The FBI received many tip-offs each and every day, and while some were clearly hoaxes, each had to be acted upon. If just one rejected call turned out to be genuine, careers would end.
What had piqued her interest was the fact that it was addressed to her personally at the office on Wilshire Boulevard, not to the FBI in general.
It was one of the strangest tips she’d ever received: ///Gentle.solo.join.
Just three unrelated words, plus a warning that this was the first of many.
The significance hadn’t been obvious, so she’d entered the words into a search engine. That had been a waste of time, so she showed the note to a colleague who liked to do puzzles during his lunch hour. He recognized the format of the words right away, telling Corrina to download What3Words. That had given her a location in the woods just south of Tuna Canyon Road. It was a one-way road network, so she had to drive the long way around, toward Topanga.
Sunset turned the autumn sky the color of blood as she took a right onto Fernwood Pacific Drive. Fitting, she thought.
When she reached the trail head fifteen minutes later, McCrae was resting his butt on the hood of his car. He straightened when Corrina climbed out of her Ford.
“Two years and you haven’t changed a bit,” McCrae said with a smile as he took the coffee from her hand.
“Neither have you.”
In fact, it was like seeing him again after a weekend off. Same suit that hugged the contours of his body, the same James Dean haircut, the same aftershave, subtle but heady…It wasn’t that McCrae was particularly handsome, but he’d drop everything to help a friend. Whenever Corrina needed cheering up, he’d been there for her.
She could have used some of that recently.
“How’s Jean?” she asked.
“Aye, she’s fine. Still lecturing.”
McCrae’s Scottish accent was barely noticeable, but he sometimes dropped an incongruous word or phrase into his conversations. His parents hailed from Glasgow, but had moved to California when he was a baby—or bairn, as he sometimes liked to say.
“Lecturing? I thought she was a nurse?”
“Yeah, and she lectures me every day on the dangers of sugar and saturated fat.”
Corrina chuckled, but she knew McCrae’s wife didn’t need to cajole him into taking care of himself. He’d played football at school and college, and the worn equipment in his home gym suggested he used it regularly.
As did his body, which she found herself staring at.
“So, what did you drag me out here for?” McCrae asked, breaking the awkward silence.
Corrina shook herself back to the moment and took out her phone. “This app is called What3Words,” she said. “I got a letter, addressed to me at the office, with the phrase Gentle.solo.join. I typed it in, and it gave me a location near here. The letter also said this was the first of many.”
“And you think it’s real?”
“No, but we have to check out every lead.”
She went to the trunk of her car and took out a pair of disposable gloves, shoe coverings and a flashlight, then walked back over to her former partner.
“Come on, it’s this way.”
Corrina led the way down a dirt path. They climbed over a barrier and followed her flashlight beam for a couple of hundred yards until Corrina’s phone told her to take a left, into the trees.
Corrina wondered if the killer had chosen to bury the body here for dramatic effect. Shadows danced as she played her light across the ground, giving her the feeling that something was hovering just outside her field of vision. A chill went through her as a nocturnal creature cried out, and she almost jumped when her jacket snagged on a bush.
Get your shit together!
They reached the spot a few minutes later. The marker on the app told her she was in the right location, and she played her flashlight along the ground as she walked, careful where to put her feet in case she obliterated any footprints that might belong to the killer.
The light settled on two sticks that had been laid one on top of the other, forming a cross. What made them stand out was the pale color, the bark stripped away. The ground underneath them looked like it hadn’t been disturbed in years.
“X marks the spot?” McCrae raised an eyebrow. “A little cliché, don’t you think?”
“What did you expect? A neon sign?”
“A body would have been nice. Well, not nice, but you know what I mean.” He thrust his hands in his pockets. “Probably just kids messing with you.”
Corrina was scanning the nearby area with the flashlight. “Probably,” she admitted. The beam fell on a bush, and something caught her eye. Something man-made.
“Over here.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know.” There was a folded plastic stationery pouch lodged in the foliage, with what looked like a few sheets of letter-size paper inside. She used a pen to straighten the pouch. On the visible page was one line of text.
Fifteen Times a Killer
“Confession letter, maybe?”
“We can only hope,” Corrina said. Much as she wanted to take out the pages and read them, there was a slim chance that the perp had left DNA samples or fingerprints on the paper. If there even was a body. It could be an elaborate hoax, but something inside her said this was the real deal. Better to let the lab guys to work it up first. “Call in the field investigation unit.”
“I’m on it.”
Intrigued? Check out the book
15 Times a Killer
When journalist Jess Duffey gets the first chapters of a bad serial-killer novel, she dismisses it as a prank, a ploy for publicity. Until she follows the writer’s directions to the grave and stumbles head-first into an FBI investigation of a grisly cold case. The manuscript is not fiction. It’s true crime. The anonymous chapters keep coming, leading Jess and the police to more horrifying discoveries of brutal murders committed years earlier. The killer wants Jess to publish his account, word for word, and doing so is the only way Jess and FBI Agent Corrina Stone can find the killer before he completes his evil mission: to kill Fifteen Times.
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Alan McDermott
is a husband, father to beautiful twin girls, and a full-time author. Alan lives in the south of England, and in 2014 he swapped writing critical application for the NHS to penning thrillers that have gone on to sell over a million copies. His debut novel, Gray Justice, was well received and earned him membership of Independent Authors International. That book launched in July 2011, and by the time he’d written the follow-ups, Gray Resurrection and Gray Redemption, it had attracted the attention of a major publisher. Alan signed with Thomas & Mercer in 2013 and has now written seven novels in the Tom Gray series and a spinoff called Trojan, which was shortlisted for ITW Best E-book Original Novel award 2018. Alan also has four books in the Eva Driscoll thriller series as well as three standalones.
To know that someone has read my work and really enjoyed it is what keeps me writing!
Find out more about Alan on his website.