Relentless and riveting. Blake Crouch is the most exciting new thriller writer I’ve read in years.
DAVID MORRELL
The headline on the Arts and Leisure page read: Publisher to Reissue Five Thrillers by Alleged Murderer Andrew Z. Thomas.
All it took was seeing his name.
Karen Prescott dropped The New York Times and walked over to the window.
Morning light streamed across the clutter of her cramped office--query letters and sample chapters stacked in two piles on the floor beside the desk, a box of galleys shoved under the credenza. She peered out the window and saw the fog dissolving, the microscopic crawl of traffic now materializing on Broadway through the cloud below.
Leaning against a bookcase that housed many of the hardcovers she’d guided to publication, Karen shivered. The mention of Andrew’s name always unglued her.
For two years she’d been romantically involved with the suspense novelist and had even lived with him during the writing of Blue Murder at the same lake house in North Carolina where many of his victims were found.
She considered it a latent character defect that she’d failed to notice anything sinister in Andy beyond a slight reclusive tendency.
My God, I almost married him.
She pictured Andy reading to the crowd in that Boston bookshop the first time they met. In a bathrobe writingin his office as she brought him fresh coffee (French roast, of course). Andy making love to her in a flimsy rowboat in the middle of LakeNorman.
She thought of his dead mother.
The exhumed bodies from his lakefront property.
His face on the FBI website.
They’d used his most recent jacket photo, a black-and-white of Andy in a sports jacket sitting broodingly at the end of his pier.
During the last few years she’d stopped thinking of him as Andy. He was Andrew Thomas now and embodied all the horrible images the cadence of those four syllables invoked.
There was a knock.
Scott Boylin, publisher of Ice Blink Press’s literary imprint, stood in the doorway dressed in his best bib and tucker. Karen suspected he was gussied up for the Doubleday party.
He smiled, waved with his fingers.
She crossed her arms, leveled her gaze.
God, he looked streamlined today--very tall, fit, crowned by thick black hair with dignified intimations of silver.
He made her feel little. In a good way. Because Karen stood nearly six feet tall, few men towered over her. She loved having to look up at Scott.
They’d been dating clandestinely for the last four months. She’d even given him a key to her apartment, where they spent countless Sundays in bed reading manuscripts, the coffee-stained pages scattered across the sheets.
But last night she’d seen him at a bar in SoHo with one of the cute interns. Their rendezvous did not look work-related.
“Come to the party with me,” he said. “Then we’ll go to Il Piazza. Talk this out. It’s not what you--”
“I’ve got tons of reading to catch up--”
“Don’t be like that, Karen. Come on.”
“I don’t think it’s appropriate to have this conversation here, so . . .”
He exhaled sharply through his nose and the door closed hard behind him.
Joe Mack was stuffing his pink round face with a gyro when his cell phone started ringing to the tune of “Staying Alive.”
He answered, cheeks exploding with food, “This Joe.”
“Hi, yes, um, I’ve got a bit of an interesting problem.”
“Whath?”
“Well, I’m in my apartment, but I can’t get the deadbolt to turn from the inside.”
Joe Mack choked down a huge mouthful, said, “So you’re locked in.”
“Exactly.”
“Which apartment?” He didn’t even try to mask the annoyance in his voice.
“Twenty-two eleven.”
“Name?”
“Um . . . I’m not the tenant. I’m Karen Prescott’s friend. She’s the--”
“Yeah, I get it. You need to leave anytime soon?”
“Well, yeah, I don’t want to--”
