Featured September Release - Portrait of Murder by Faye Daniels

ABOUT THE BOOK:

Erin Martin has just come home to the beach-side community of Del Mar, California to care for her sister, Kayla, a troubled teen dealing with the cyber bullying of the Queen Bees at her trendy high school. Little does Erin know that the killer who murdered her sister, Jillian, fifteen years earlier is not safely behind bars at San Quentin but still on the loose and has taken a deadly interest in her.

Former FBI profiler Mark Wesson has been hired to look into the case, and sparks fly until he convinces Erin that the man incarcerated for the crime is innocent and the murderer still at large. Together, they must piece together the clues to find the true identity of the killer before he can put Erin's portrait next to her sister's on his trophy wall with those of all his other victims.

EXCERPT:

Erin sat on the sofa looking out the huge plate-glass windows, and she opened her eyes wide to watch a dark cloud roll across the back lawn immersed in dense fog. She rose unsteadily and wove her way through the living room and kitchen, letting herself out the back door. The rush of the wind engulfed her, and her long dress billowed out behind her in undulating waves. She felt a rush of freedom and euphoria as the waves broke and splashed on the shore below, the air redolent with the smell of the sea. She kicked off her shoes and walked barefoot on the sodden grass toward the edge of the bluff, forgetting about the cloudy figure she'd seen in the fog until she heard a whisper in the wind, a name spoken with a sibilant undertone of menace.

She turned around.

A form clothed in black, blurry and undefined, shrouded in the snowy cloud of haze, and then she saw a glint of silver in the moonlight. Did it move toward her, or was she imagining it? She didn't even know if she were dreaming, or awake, as she backed away to the very edge of the bluff, her heels at the end of crumbling sandstone. She remembered a tourist died last summer underneath an avalanche of a sandstone bluff, and this was her last thought as the water-weakened earth gave way beneath her. It collapsed sending her down into a torrent of age-old sediment, rock, and stone.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Writing and I are old friends, and much the characters in my books, we often have a rocky relationship. Like the characters in my books, hopefully, we resolve our differences long enough to create something fulfilling and memorable. My objective is to take you on a journey of escape for just a little while. When I'm engaged in the tribulations of a character I can identify with because she's a mother, a working woman, or simply because she's a female falling in love, I can forget for a little while that I've actually been waiting in the dentist's office for my daughter for an hour and a half when it was supposed to be a quick half-hour appointment. Something I learned early on in motherhood -- you don't go anywhere without a good book. (I keep a back-up in the car just in case.)

I reside in San Diego with my family, live close to the beach and enjoy many of the amenities of living in a sand and surf city. We have three cats, all with various infirmities, (but we love them anyway). I hope you go along with me on my 'journeys' and enjoy them as much as I do.

Desert Breeze congratulates Faye on her latest release!