Pages

Friday, November 03, 2017

COLD IMAGE SPOTLIGHT & GIVEAWAY

Derek Monahan sees violent death wherever he turns. His strange ability forces him to watch crimes that repeat in loops of blood and anguish. The only positive is that he is able to use his power to solve cold crimes...like the disappearances of boys from a secretive academy. 

Dr. Kate Lincoln hates that her kid brother was sent to an awful school in Georgia. The place is a nightmare--housed in what was once a brutal asylum. Now her brother has disappeared, and she's the only one who seems to care. 

Derek wants to help the beautiful doctor, but going undercover in a place that seethes with ancient violence isn't easy. When she sees just how much his job affects him, Kate realizes she wants to be the one to help heal the wounds of this strong, noble, and very sexy man. 

As long as she survives to do it. 

***GIVEAWAY***

One (1) winner will win a digital copy of Cold Image from Amazon. Please comment on this post with your favorite scary movie to be eligible. Make sure to include your email address so I can contact the winner. Giveaway runs from November 3 to November 6.  



Excerpt from COLD IMAGE by Leslie A. Kelly

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


“You know I see violent deaths, right?”
“I know you see ghosts.”
He shook his head. “Not ghosts. I’ve never seen a ghost.”
She looked up at him, her brow furrowed. “Now I really don’t get it.”
He’d explained this so many times, to so many people and knew the easiest way to make them understand. “Imagine somebody taking an old black-and-white video camera and recording the last few minutes of someone’s violent death. It’s then set to replay on a loop, over and over, at the spot where it happened.” Well, usually at the spot. There had been a few occasions when it had been an object holding the imprint. That had happened last fall, when they were investigating some murders at a carnival in north Florida.
It took a second, then came the gasp. “Wait, you see victims reenacting their murders?”
“Not always murder. Sometimes it’s deadly accidents. Suicides. And they’re not reliving it—like I said, I don’t see ghosts.”
“Then what are they?”
“I call them death imprints. Like something stamped on a spot and repeating for eternity, long after the soul or spirit of the person is gone.”
“Eternity….” She sounded horrified.
Frankly, so was he. He wondered if the images ever faded away. He’d never seen evidence of that, but hoped someday his parents would stop being brutally murdered.
“How awful. Constant death. Every death.
“Not every death, only the violent ones. They leave a mark, and I see it.”
“All of it,” she pressed.
He nodded once, knowing how carefully she watched him, though her face was shadowed by the trees.
“I can’t believe you don’t live on a deserted island. Savannah—God, a city that old?”
“I avoid certain areas.” Particularly the dangerous ones with long, ugly pasts. As she’d pointed out, in a city so old, there were lots of those. Lots of opportunities to be startled out of a regular day by walking into the path of a mob hit from Prohibition days, or shootouts with bank robbers, or innocent victims dragged into back alleys.
“I imagine you have a mental map of where it’s safe to visit.”
“Oh yeah,” he said, glad she got it and he didn’t have to explain much.
“That’s a wise thing to do. Your mind probably can’t handle the constant barrage.”
“You shrinking me, Doc?”
“No. I’m trying to put myself in your place.”
He didn’t know anybody who could do that. His Aunt Beth’s ability was minor, just a glimmer here and there. Fortunately, his Dad had known what his sister could do, and had, one night while drunk, told his buddy Abe. That was why his pseudo-uncle had trusted him, believing Derek about what he saw in Dad’s office. Abe had pressured the cops until they did a proper investigation and acknowledged the scene was a double-murder, not a murder-suicide.
A thug his father had prosecuted, and two accomplices, had been responsible for the crime. His dad’s name had been cleared. Some comfort for an orphaned twelve-year old, he supposed.
“Is there anywhere you can go in the city?”
“I know which streets are safe to walk on.” And which weren’t. “I avoid the intersection at Skidaway Road and Victory Drive—lots of car accidents there.” Bodies flung through windshields, pedestrians hit by buses. “There’s a block on Bryant Street I steer clear of, too. A banker took a high-dive from a ninth floor roof. He almost landed on my head the first time.”
He tried to shrug, as if it were routine. In truth, though, he never got completely accustomed to it, especially when he saw something new, though there wasn’t much he hadn’t experienced by now. Well, maybe an official prison execution, though he’d certainly seen his fair share of hangings, almost always self-inflicted.
A painful visual immediately surfaced. He shoved it away, back into the deepest recesses of his mind where the grief over his parents still lingered.
She gasped, suddenly realized something he’d hoped she wouldn’t grasp for a while. “Oh my God, this place is going to be very bad for you, isn’t it?” she asked as they reached the center of the woods, where the ground was marshiest and little light shone through.
“Probably.”
“I wasn’t thinking so far ahead. I thought you saw the occasional ghost. But you will see every horrible death that ever happened here!”
He didn’t reply, silently acknowledging that fact.
“For you to come to a former asylum…from the days when the treatments were barbaric and dangerous,” she said in a broken whisper. “Why did you agree?”
“It’s my job.”
True, but there was a lot more to it, including his own need to pay debts owed to the dead, as he’d once paid his parents’. “Plus, I’ve worked in hospitals before.”
“But here! This is different. There was no care or therapy in those days. This was simply a place for people to dump their unstable relatives and forget about them.”
“Don’t forget the unwanted wives,” he growled, remembering some of what he’d uncovered doing more research last night. There’d been a famous case some decades ago when a millionaire had accused his wife of “hysteria” and had her committed here. She’d died a suspicious death not long afterward, and he’d married his mistress a month later.
He wondered briefly if the wife had been the blonde, but quickly realized she hadn’t been. He’d seen grainy old newspaper pictures of her. She was dark-haired, with sad, dark eyes. Still, her fate could certainly have been the same as the woman he’d just watch die.
“Oh, God, and tuberculosis!” she exclaimed, her hand on her mouth. “It’s so ugly.”
Yeah. He’d researched that disease, too. Natural deaths were one thing. Choking because your own lungs are useless and fluid-filled? Well, it wasn’t exactly a peaceful way to go.
“Oh, Jesus, somebody else should do this, not you.”
She sounded so horrified, so remorseful for not having known the possible ramifications, he had to put a hand on her chin and lift her face. “It’s okay. I’ll be fine.”
“No, you won’t. I know how brains work, I know about repressed memories, how witnessing shock and trauma damage a person. You are not okay, and this place will make you less okay.”
What luck to land with a clinical psychiatrist who could so easily analyze him and put her finger right on the truth of what he did and what it did to him. He so didn’t need to have this conversation right now.
“Look, you were right there while I watched a woman being strangled to death, and I got through it.”
Grimacing as he revealed another detail of the brutal attack he’d witnessed, she twisted her long, elegant fingers into knots. “I am so sorry I dragged you into this.”
He eyed her, knowing she meant it…but not entirely. “If it means you finally get answers about your brother, it’ll be worth it though, right?”
Her teeth caught her bottom lip. Finally she nodded. “Worth it for me, yes. I don’t suppose it’s ever worth it for you.”
“Sure it is.” He thrust off the thoughts of all he’d seen, all the murders from so long ago there was no way he could help resolve them. But he’d seen the most important one, the one that had put him on this deadly path.
His parents murders had been solved, the killers incarcerated. So yeah. It was worth it.
“And you pray for them?” she whispered.
He nodded. He’d never really talked about that before; honestly, he wasn’t sure he’d done it aloud in front of anyone before, his final condolences often a whisper in his mind. She just made him feel at ease enough to pray for the poor, lost woman aloud.
“Next time,” she whispered, her eyes gleaming with emotion, “I’ll pray with you.”


Buy Links:





No comments:

Post a Comment