WATTYS WINNER 2020
Two interconnected murders, 64 years apart. One woman's search for truth and identity.
Readers' comments: 'a masterpiece', 'impeccably written', 'amazing', 'superbly crafted page-turner', 'hauntingly beautiful', 'tremendous plot a...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
What if it came to the starkest of all choices: kill, or else suffer the loss of a loved one?
Kill Who You Want is a re-edited version of a twisty suspense novel which I originally posted over the winter of 2017-18.
Readers' comments on original version: 'one of the best and most beautifully written stories I've had the privilege to read', 'loved every chapter', 'great read', 'you still come up with twists?', 'very moved', 'you always make me want more', 'wonderful, great, wow, could go on', 'great character development', 'heartbreaking' and many more
Plot: When a pregnant doctor is brutally murdered in her own kitchen, the husband claims to have some weeks earlier received an anonymous and darkly menacing letter. For the small town of Ravensby, it's just the start of a living nightmare - one in which nobody is spared from the murderous cross hairs, and which will drive Detective Inspector Kubič to the edge of his own sanity...
Genre: suspense/thriller
Length: 70,000 words (approx. 275 standard novel pages)
Target readership: Though aimed primarily at adults, the novel features several teenage characters and so may also appeal to a younger audience
Posting schedule: Sundays and Thursdays from the end of November 2019 to early spring 2020
Extract:
Aother patrol car blared around the corner the corner outside, came screeching to a halt. The whole living room was pulsed a strobing white, the venetian blinds in the front window slicing perfect knife strokes through the incoming light
"I know this is hard Adam. All such a lot to take in right now."
Detective Sergeant Annie Wye touched a finger to Butterfield's cheek, rotated his head thirty degrees. Forced him to look at her. His was a shivering, huddled figure there on the settee beneath her, his eyes wide, unblinking, as if what they had witnessed had frozen them hard. He would be in his early-thirties, she judged, a year or two older than herself. Hair blonde like her own, eyes a similar shade of bluish grey. WPC Cathy Hargreaves was crouched beside him, her hand circling his lower back. A thick smear of blood gleamed across the shoulder of his coat, the shirt beneath.
"I need you to help me though. Think you can do that Adam?"
He frowned up at her, as if unsure of where he was, how he might have come to be there. Trembling from the shock, the after-reverberations of a hammer blow. They needed to get him cleaned up, Wye thought. Get him out of there. Away.
"You say you've been at work all day. I need you to tell me where that is exactly."
His gaze had slipped back towards the half-opened kitchen door. The angle mercifully acute, only the bloodied sole of a slipper was visible.
"Adam, look at me please." She was forced to repated the the same head-rotating gesture as a moment earlier. "We need to know where you work Adam."
Dry lips twitched finally into motion. "Epcott and..." A deep, stuttered exhale was required to get it all out. "And Preston."
Wye snapped her fingers purposefully at DC Larkinson behind her. The constable remained motionless however, unstirred, his gaze similarly fixed on the kitchen doorway. There was something about him, a certain long-limbed awkwardness, which made him seem a decade younger than his twenty-five years. A mere kid playing at being a plain-clothed copper. Never more so than that particular moment, his flesh noticably paled, did he seem a fish floundering out of water.
"Larkinson! Epcott and Preston. I need you to get on it please."
The added volume to her voice, its hissed no-nonsense urgency, was enough to snap him back to attention, have him wheel dutifully away, phone fumbled from pocket.
New to Ravensby, she wondered what Epcott and Preston was precisely. Some kind of law firm? Solicitors? Wondered too why the hell Inspector Kubič wasn't picking up his damn phone. It wasn't lost on her that for the moment at least she was the most senior officer in attendance at a murder scene. An unprecedented state of affairs, one which required the calmest of heads, the steadiest of nerves. She'd attended enough training sessions on serious incident response to know just how crucial those first few minutes were, how any oversight or misjudgement could potentially compromise an entire investigation.
"During the afternoon, at work." Her attention had once more turned to the forlorn figure beneath her. "Did you pop out at any point?"
He appeared not to register the question though. Just looked through her. Beyond her. The frown again, that awful constant tremble.
"I thought it was just a... just a crank. A sick joke." His head tumbled between palms. "Something like that... Christ. If you took it seriously..."
He looked back upwards then, gaze direct this time, pleading somehow.
"Well, you... you'd go round the bend. Lose your bloody mind."
Like the sound of it? To access the novel, just click on my profile icon...
