Carla Neggers's Blog, page 32
September 2, 2011
ON THE EDGE
MIRA Books Re-issue
Mass Market Anthology
October 2011
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ON THE EDGE
Three chilling stories to keep you
on the edge of your seat.
SHELTER ISLAND by CARLA NEGGERS
What better place to hide from a deranged stalker than a ramshackle cottage on a desolate coastal island. But two men have followed Dr. Antonia Winters to her refuge. One simply wants her. The other wants her dead.
BOUGAINVILLEA by Heather Graham
After twenty years, artist Kit Delaney returns to the lush Florida estate that harbors a million childhood memories. . .and a deadly legacy. Has the man she's fallen for restored her to her birthright–or lured her to her doom?
CAPSIZED by Sharon Sala
Her cover blown, DEA agent Kelly Sloan miraculously escapes a Mexican drug kingpin's yacht and certain execution. After washing up on a Galveston beach, she awakens to a handsome rescuer and a two-million-dollar bounty on her head. Now Kelly and her Texas Ranger must race to bring down Dominic Ortega. . . or die trying.
Read Excerpt
Shelter
Island
by Carla Neggers
"Antonia . . ."
Antonia Winter stopped abruptly in the middle of the mostly empty hospital parking garage, certain she'd heard someone whisper her name. She glanced at the parked cars and the exits, but saw no one else. She took a cautious step forward, her dress shoes echoing on the concrete. She'd changed from the more casual clothes she wore in the E.R.—she had a dinner date in Back Bay.
It was tension, she decided. Simple tension had her turning ordinary garage sounds into someone whispering her name.
"Antonia Winter . . . Dr. Winter . . ."
She gasped and ran the last five steps to her car, clicking the button on her key that automatically unlocked the door. Her hands shaking, she ripped open the door and three herself in behind the wheel. She hit the button that locked all four doors.
This couldn't be happening to her. She had to be imagining it.
This wasn't the first incident.
Wasting no time, Antonia stuck the key into the ignition and started the engine. It was just after seven o'clock on Saturday evening. It was just after seven o'clock on Saturday evening. She'd been on duty a full twelve hours. She was a trauma physician in the busy emergency room of a downtown Boston hospital. None of her cases today had been easy ones. But that was her job, and she was good at it—she was accustomed to dealing with its demands. She wasn't one to go off the deep end and imagine things that hadn't happened, draw the most dramatic conclusion to innocent events.
At least she'd never been that sort. Maybe the demands of the rest of her life had finally gotten to her. Demands like Hank Callahan, she thought. He was her dinner date that night. She'd been half in love with him for months, but their relationship had complications. Her work, his work. Her family. His past. Her past.
Hank . . .
No. She couldn't blame him—she wouldn't.
She wasn't hearing things or making up things that hadn't happened. That was the problem. They were real.
Someone had just whispered her name in the parking garage.
She edged out of her space, glancing in the rearview mirror and side mirror every few yards as she made her way to the exit. She almost asked the parking attendant if he'd heard anything, but she knew he wouldn't have. Once out on the street, she forced herself to take several deep breaths.
Yesterday, it had been an anonymous instant message. The third in a row. Your patients trust you, Dr. Winter. What if you betrayed their trust?
All were on the same theme. A doctor's trust. A doctor's betrayal of that trust. Without going into detail, she'd asked a friend more familiar with computers than she was about instant messages, and he'd said that tracking down an instant messenger who wanted to remain anonymous was very difficult, if not impossible.
There was nothing overtly threatening in the messages. And certainly no mention of Hank Callahan, a candidate for an open U. S. Senate seat from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The election was the first Tuesday in November, less than two months away. If the messages had mentioned him, Antonia would have to report them, tell Hank? She didn't want to cause an unnecessary stir—she wanted a sensible explanation for what was going on. If something was going on. She still didn't want to believe someone was trying to get under her skin. Creep her out.
But who would want to?
Why?
Was someone stalking her?
No. It couldn't be. Tension, fatigue and her imagination must have turned the whir of a car engine or an exhaust fan into someone whispering her name. Maybe the instant messages were from someone whose screen name she just didn't remember. A friend or colleague working on a paper or struggling with an ethical question, idly instant messaging her. Maybe they weren't to be anonymous or creepy.
But when she reached the restaurant, Antonia paid extra to have her car valet parked and avoided another parking garage. She stood in the warm evening air and took several deep breaths to calm herself. There. It'll be all right. I can do this.
She had on a simple black dress, black stockings, black heels. Gold earrings. Her dark auburn hair, chin-length and straight, was tucked neatly behind her ears. No lipstick—she didn't have time for it now.
As promised, Hank was waiting for her at their table. He was, she thought as she smiled at him and waved, the most drop-dead handsome man she'd ever met. Forty-one and tall, with graying dark hair, a square jaw and eyes so blue they took her breath away. She'd met him last November in Cold Ridge, her small hometown in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. His weekend in New Hampshire was to have been a break, Hiking with his air force pals, Tyler North and Manny Carrera. Instead they'd come upon Antonia's younger sister, Carine, a nature photographer, being shot at in the woods. Later that same weekend, Hank, Ty and Manny had rescued a wealthy Boston couple stranded on the ridge for which her hometown was named.
Complications, Antonia thought. So many complications.
Hank smiled, getting to his feet. Other diners watched. He was a man in the spotlight. There didn't seem to be any reporters around, but she couldn't know for certain, another reminder that it wasn't just her reputation as a respected physician that would suffer if she rushed to judgment or cried wolf about a possible stalker. His would, too, as a man who was asking Massachusetts voters to trust him. With just weeks left in the campaign, she had to be sure before she said anything, although she had to admit, her own nature made her reluctant to speak up. She was thirty-five and accustomed to handling her own problems.
But it wasn't just Hank's campaign or her own reserve that made her cautious—it was Hank himself. He was a Massachusetts Callahan, the current most visible member of a visible family of dedicated men and women who were expected to do their share in the military, in public service and in business. Hank had left the air force two years ago as a major, a helicopter pilot who'd flown countless search-and-rescue missions: on his last mission, he and a team of pararescuers had performed the dangerous high seas recovery of five fishermen whose boat had capsized. It had put his picture on the front pages of newspapers across the country. While emergency operations conducted in conjunction with civilian agencies sometimes hit the press, his many combat search-and-rescues hadn't received such coverage—Antonia had learned that the military didn't necessarily publicize when and how it went after aircrews downed behind enemy lines.
Hank would come to her rescue in a heartbeat.
And not just because he was trained to rescue people.
He lost his family ten years ago when his wife and young daughter were killed in a car accident while he was serving overseas. It still haunted him—everyone knew it, could see it. He wasn't even on the continent when the accident happened, a head-on collision with a car driving on the wrong side of the interstate. The other driver was a woman in her mid-fifties who'd had a stroke. Brittany Callahan, three, was killed instantly. Her mother, Lisa, thirty, never regained consciousness and died in the hospital three hours later. Hank wasn't with them—it wasn't possible for him to have been with them. But he didn't look at it that way, at least not emotionally, and probably never would, no matter how much he'd come to accept that his wife ad daughter were gone.
No, Antonia thought, making her way to their table. She couldn't just think she might have a stalker or some weirdo trying to get under her skin. She had to be certain before she breathed a word of her fears to anyone—even Hank. Maybe even especially Hank.
SAINT'S GATE
MIRA Books Hardcover
September 2011|400 pages
First Time in Print
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CAUGHT AT THE CROSSROADS
OF ART AND MURDER
New York Times bestselling author Carla Neggers is widely acclaimed as a master of atmospheric romantic suspense. Now she returns with an engrossing tale of two people isolated by their pasts, and the obsessive killer who will force them together.
When Emma Sharpe is summoned to a convent on the Maine coast, it's partly for her art crimes work with the FBI, partly because of her past with the religious order. At issue is a mysterious painting depicting scenes of Irish lore and Viking legends, and her family's connection to the work. But when the nun who contacted her is murdered, it seems legend is becoming deadly reality.
Colin Donovan is one of the FBI's most valuable assets—a deep-cover agent who prefers to go it alone. He's back home in Maine after wrapping up his latest mission, but his friend Father Bracken presents him with an intrigue of murder, international art heists and a convent's long-held secrets that is too tempting to resist. So is Emma Sharpe. As the danger spirals ever closer, Colin's certain of only one thing—Emma is at the center of it all.
A ruthless killer has Emma and Colin in the crosshairs, plunging them into a race against time and drawing them deeper into a twisted legacy of betrayal and deceit.
Read an Excerpt
Saint's Gate, Carla Neggers
1
Emma Sharpe steeled herself against the sights and sounds of her past and kept up with the nervous woman rushing ahead of her in the dense southern Maine fog. They came to a tall iron fence, a folk-art granite statue of Saint Francis of Assisi glistening with drizzle among purple coneflowers and cheerful golden daylilies by the gate.
The little bird perched on Saint Francis's shoulder still had a couple of missing tail feathers.
Sister Joan Mary Fabriani stopped at the gate. On the other side was the "tower," the private workspace where the Sisters of the Joyful Heart performed their restoration and conservation work. In violation of convent protocol, Sister Joan had escorted Emma onto the convent grounds without having her first stop at the motherhouse to register as a visitor.
And a visitor she was, in boot-cut jeans, a brown leather jacket, Frye boots and a Smith & Wesson 442 strapped to her left calf.
"The gate's locked," Sister Joan said, turning to Emma. "I have to get the key."
"I'll go with you."
"No. Wait here, please." The older woman, who'd spent the past thirty years as a member of her order, frowned slightly at the gate, which crossed the meandering stone walk two hundred yards from the main gate at the convent's entrance. "I thought I left it unlocked. It doesn't matter. I'll only be a few minutes."
"You're preoccupied, Sister," Emma said. "I should go with you."
"The shortest route to the tower is through an area restricted to members of our community here."
"The meditation garden. I remember."
"Yes. Of course you do."
"No one will be there at this hour. The sisters are busy with their daily work."
"I'm in no danger, Emma." Sister Joan smiled, her doe-brown eyes and wide, round face helping to soften her sometimes too-frank demeanor. "It's all right if I call you Emma, isn't it? Or should I call you Agent Sharpe?"
Emma noted an almost imperceptible bite in Sister Joan's voice. "Emma's fine."
With a broad hand, Sister Joan brushed a mosquito off the wide, stretchy black headband holding back her graying dark hair. Instead of the traditional nun's habit, the Sisters of the Joyful Heart wore plainclothes; in Sister Joan's case a dark gray hand-knitted sweater and calf-length skirt, black tights and sturdy black leather walking shoes. The simple silver profession cross hanging from her neck and the gold band on her left ring finger were the only external indications that she was a Roman Catholic nun.
She looked pained. "I've already broken enough rules by having you here without telling anyone."
Sister Joan hadn't given any details when she'd called Emma in Boston early that morning and asked her to make the two-hour drive north to the convent, located on a small peninsula on a beautiful, quiet stretch of rockbound coast above Kennebunkport.
"At least give me an idea of what you want to talk to me about," Emma said.
Sister Joan hesitated. "I'd like to get your opinion on a painting."
As if there could be any other reason. "Do you suspect it's stolen?"
"Let me get the key and show you. It'll be easier than trying to explain." Sister Joan stepped off the walk onto the lush, wet grass, still very green late in the season, and looked back at Emma. "I want to thank you for not bringing a weapon onto the grounds."
Emma made no comment about the .38 tucked under the hem of her jeans. She'd left her nine-millimeter Sig Sauer locked in its case in her car outside the convent's main gate but had never considered going completely unarmed.
Without waiting for a response, Sister Joan followed the fence into a half dozen mature evergreens. The evergreens would open into a beautiful garden Mother Superior Sarah Jane Linden, the foundress of the Sisters of the Joyful Heart, had started herself more than sixty years ago, in a clearing on a rocky ledge above a horseshoe-shaped cove. The sisters had added to it over the years—Emma herself had planted a pear tree—but the design remained essentially the one Mother Linden, who'd died almost twenty years ago, had envisioned.
As she lost sight of Sister Joan in the fog and trees, Emma stayed close to the tall gate. Even the breeze drifting through the evergreens and the taste of the salt in the damp air called up the longings of the woman she'd been—the possibilities of the woman she'd never become.
She pushed them aside and concentrated on the present. The morning fog, rain and wind would have attracted passing boats into the protected cove, one of the well-known "hurricane holes" on the Maine coast.
Watching guys on the boats when she was supposed to be in deep reflection and contemplation had been an early clue she wasn't cut out to be a nun.
Sister Joan, honest and straightforward to a fault, had always known. "You're an art detective, Emma. You're a Sharpe. Be who you are."
Emma touched a fingertip to a raindrop on Saint Francis's shoulder. The statue was the work of Mother Linden, an accomplished artist who'd have considered the absent tail feathers part of its charm as it aged.
The Sisters of the Joyful Heart was a tiny religious order, independently funded and self-sufficient. The twenty or so sisters grew their own fruits and vegetables and baked their own bread, but they also ran a shop and studio in the nearby village of Heron's Cove—Emma's hometown—and were skilled in art restoration, conservation and education. During the summer and early fall, the convent held retreats for art educators and conservators, as well as people who just wanted to learn how to protect family treasures. Various sisters were dispatched to Catholic schools throughout the region as art teachers. Hope, joy and love were central to their work and to their identity as women religious sisters.
All well and good, Emma thought, but hope, joy and love hadn't prompted Sister Joan's call early that morning. Fear had.
"It's a personal favor," she had told Emma. "It's not FBI business. Please come alone."
Emma felt the cold mist gather on her hair, which she wore long now, and sighed at Saint Francis, the beloved early-thirteenth-century friar who had given up his wealth to follow a life of poverty. "What do you think, my friend?" She peered through the gate and made out a corner of the stone tower in the gray. "I know."
Sister Joan was afraid, and she was in trouble.
—
Copyright © 2011 by Carla Neggers
Permission to reproduce text granted by MIRA Books
Permission to reproduce text granted by MIRA Books. Cover art used by arrangement with Harlequin Enterprises Limited. All rights reserved. ® and ™ are trademarks of Harlequin Enterprises Limited and/or its affiliated companies, used under license.
With a great plot and excellent character development, Neggers's (Cold Dawn) latest thriller, the first in a new series, is a fast-paced, action-packed tale of romantic suspense . . .
—Library Journal on SAINT'S GATE
BOOK CLUBS:
As a Main Selection in:
• Rhapsody (RBC)
Featured Alternate in:
• Doubleday Book Club
• Literary Guild
• Mystery Guild
• Doubleday Large Print
• Columbia House DVD and CD clubs
• And BOMC2 online only
IN THE MEDIA:
Savannahnow.com / Savannah Morning News
The story behind Carla Neggers' 'Saint's Gate' by Linda Sickler.
New York Times bestselling author Carla Neggers is a people person, known for creating memorable characters and placing them in extraordinary situations.
Her latest book, "Saint's Gate," introduces readers to FBI agent Emma Sharpe, a former nun who is now an expert in art crimes, and Colin Donovan, a deep-cover agent. They are embroiled in a murder and art theft case that will take them from Maine to Ireland. Read More
