Kindle Edition
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pjshann.com
Category:
Crime
Price: $4.19 (eBook)
In this dark, crime/mystery, two women are caught up on the fringes of a a brutal murder inquiry on the South Coast of England.
A badly mutilated body washes up on the Sussex coastline, and suddenly dark secrets from the past begin to bleed into the present.
Two otherwise unconnected women find themselves drawn into a savage murder inquiry that will change both their lives forever.
Two ruthless detectives are coldly determined to discover the truth before another live is taken.
One brutal murderer plays out an intricate and deadly game to its logical, bloody conclusion.
Everyone is searching for their own personal state of grace...but which of them will survive to find that elusive perfect peace?
PERFECT PEACE is a dark crime novel that unfolds across a broad canvas of mystery and suspense, and builds to a thrilling, shocking finale.
Approx' 157,000 words.
Excerpt
He waited until the SOCOs had gone and then went down on one already sodden knee beside the body and took a second look at it, a longer and closer look than the first time around, and found himself no less sickened or outraged.
It had been immediately apparent that this death had not been accidental. The injuries the body had received were many. They were huge and terrible, some running bone deep, and immersion in the sea had not only washed the body clean but also seemed to have entirely leeched it of all its natural fluids, bringing an awful, stark clarity to the wounds. Not one single solitary detail had been left either masked or mercifully diffused by a scrim of drying blood, and Abbot found himself reminded of a long-ago boyhood trip to Madame Tussauds Wax Museum on a family holiday to Blackpool.
He remembered the gruesome spectacle of the bloodless anatomical models that had been on display in a series of glass cabinets, of internal organs laid bare, and coils of viscera, and foetuses in utero, and numerous other pallid horrors besides, and he remembered the cloying, nauseating stench of the old wax that in conjunction with the images had eventually driven him outside gasping for fresh air before he was forcibly parted from his guesthouse breakfast. There was no smell here this morning except the overwhelming briny smell of the sea, but the body with its unlikely, bloodless injuries looked exactly like a waxwork, false, and vaguely surreal in this setting.
But that was exactly the sheer bloody hell of it, Abbot thought, it wasn’t false. He felt a familiar pressure of anger and a sense of injustice building up inside him as they always did, and God willing always would, no matter how many bodies he saw. The pitiful, ruined object before him was no skilful example of wax modelling, a vaguely macabre but otherwise harmless entertainment. Not so very long ago this had been a living, thinking, feeling human being. This had been somebody’s beloved son. Somebody’s friend or brother, husband or lover. Somebody’s father, perhaps. Somebody’s victim, certainly.
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