The Deadly Caress

Amanda Blake sets out to find her mother's murderer. She gets more than she bargained for and becomes a target herself.

Amanda Blake, a Sydney based freelance photographer, discovers she has been adopted and seeks out her natural mother Jean Campbell in California. When it becomes evident that her mother has been murdered, Amanda sets out to discover her mother's killer. Her quest takes her back to Sydney to see the man who she thinks holds the answer to the killer's identity. While visiting this man, she has to run for her life as a hail of gunshots pockmark the walls and shatter the windows. Someone will stop at nothing until she is dead. If she thought things were bad enough, they are about to get much worse...

What some of my beta readers said...

"Bravo for a plot that grabs the reader! The characters are intriguing and in the early chapters you've stirred up enough suggestion of internal conflict for at least Amanda, and Dorian to make readers want to go deeper into their lives and individual situations."

"This book moves at a brisk pace from the very beginning, Amanda meeting her mother Jean for the first time after many years. The backstory surfaces rapidly, Amanda adopted out in Australia when Jean was seventeen and penniless, but now a rich widow in California able to call them back together. It is a busy plot around diverse characters eyeing a huge inheritance while a murder takes place and suspicion is rife, giving investigators a puzzle to unravel. Your prose is clearcut and to the point in both narration and dialogue, making the story easy to follow. Thank you so much for the captivating read."