What do we do at the Written Word? Among other things, edit manuscripts to turn them into great books! Here’s an excerpt of another I edited
Written by Samuel W. Gailey
Ending the pain should’ve been easy, but it wasn’t. She should’ve driven faster but didn’t. At the last moment, Tess hit the brakes instead of the gas pedal. Human instinct kicking in, against her will.
Now she was stuck in the middle of nowhere and her car was in the bottom of a ravine.
She pressed her eyes closed and forced herself to breathe easy—to take small, deep breaths to keep the mounting panic at bay. She needed to keep it together. Stay calm. Think.
Tess opened her eyes and stared through the windshield toward the man who called himself Cap—a funny name for a grown man. Especially a pastor. He seemed nice enough, but something about him felt a little off—like he might be hiding something. At least he didn’t speak slow and exaggerated like most people did after learning that she was deaf. Most people either tried to ignore her or spoke to her like she was a small child or mentally disabled.
Cap talked with two men who looked exactly the same, standing in front of an auto shop. Same height. Same weight and build. Same nose and cheekbones and color of hair. Both covered with grease. They smoked cigarettes, faces void of expression as they listened to what Cap was telling them. The only difference between the two men was that one sported a close-cropped beard, and the other did not.
Tess couldn’t read Cap’s lips from the truck, but he’d occasionally point in her direction, explaining the situation.
The truck engine idled. The vents blew a steady flow of warm air against her face. She felt sleepy even though she wasn’t tired. Her eyes fell on the keys dangling in the ignition and she considered her options.
Her hands still shook a little as she replayed the final moments before her Pinto slid off the road and into the ditch. That moment—maybe two or three seconds—moved so slowly. Snow slapping against the windshield, the rumbling sensation of the car as it skidded off the road, the row of trees racing toward her, then closing her eyes and waiting for everything to be over in a split second.
She looked at Cap again. The first thing she had really noticed about the man was his harelip. Maybe he thought that his mustache concealed the flaw, but it did not. She knew why he tried to hide the crease in his lip—people could be so cruel. A defect was a defect. Didn’t matter whether it was visible or not.
Tess found her eyes going back to the keys and she resisted the growing impulse that coursed through her—to slip behind the wheel and drive and keep driving until she woke from this nightmare. Then she felt the heaviness in her purse and that gave her some kind of comfort.
Come Away from Her
COME AWAY FROM HER is a boldly written mystery-suspense novel set in the rural town of Black Walnut. The story revolves around the arrival of Tess, a deaf woman running from her past, who unwittingly sets into motion a chain of disturbing events as she is forced to share her secrets with the strangers around her. Her presence upsets the status quo for the townspeople, none more so than for Cap, the pastor of the local church whose life has been marred by substance abuse and tragedy. The morning that Cap discovers a dead body outside the church, life as the town knows it is forever changed.
In the vein of Big Little Lies, the identity of the victim is concealed until the climatic end of the story, but everyone in town, including Cap, has a motive. There is Maggie, an unmoored woman who numbs reality with pharmaceuticals and strange crimes; Wade, whose philandering ways are town gossip; Butch, a teenager struggling over his parent’s divorce and his own identity; and Robin, who is desperate for a way out of her marriage to Chuck, a violent man driven by ignorance and self-loathing.
Written in Gailey’s critically-acclaimed style described by the NY Times as “Beautiful and brutal,” portrays its characters with compelling nuances, peeling back layer after layer until we discover the truth about the murder and its aftermath in a series of brilliant twists.
Find it on Amazon.