The murder of two women in the basement of Thomas Marshall’s home goes undetected. Years later, Marshall’s daughter, Maria Anna, becomes a target for murder. Someone wants to silence her latent memories from childhood—someone with secrets worth killing for. With time running out, her fiancée, Private Detective Sam Hesston, must stop a diabolical killer before Maria Anna becomes a fatal victim.
FULL SYNOPSIS:
Two young women are murdered in the basement of Thomas Marshall’s elegant home. The crime goes undetected. Many years later, Maria Anna Marshall, lives with a sense of terror that consumes her every time she steps inside the front door of her late father’s home. The strength of that terror centers on a basement door, locked for years and made inaccessible to her. She knows she isn’t crazy, but the house gives her strange chills and causes her to suffer bouts of anxiety heightened by terrible nightmares that spiral when...
Someone Wants Her Dead
Someone has a stake in silencing Maria Anna’s latent memories from childhood, someone with secrets worth killing for. All her chilling fears coalesce, and her fiancée, Private Detective Sam Hesston, who vigorously investigates the case, becomes her only hope of staying alive.
Excerpt
Prologue
Thomas Marshall drove from the hospital to his home, a bandage covering his forehead where he sustained a cut during a minor car accident. It was Saturday night, his card-playing night. His friends would likely be well into the game by the time he arrived home since he had spent a considerable time in the hospital waiting room. Nonetheless, he had called home to tell one of his live-in housemaids to inform his friends he would be late.
It was a dark night outside, but unusually cool for that time of year. He drives through the gated entry to his estate and down the long drive circling in front of his spacious home. Eager to participate in the card game in his basement, he parks behind the other cars and hurries inside.
When he opens the basement door, everything is unusually quiet downstairs. He smiles, thinking his card-playing friends are engrossed in their game.
“I apologize for being so late, fellows,” he says when he nears the bottom of the stairs. “A van with parents and four children were in a bad wreck and they arrived ahead of me at the emergency room, so...” His voice fell silent. He stares in disbelief. His friends aren’t sitting around the card table as he expected. His face contorts into a worrisome frown. His breath quickens.
He sees Yolanda’s body on the floor. “God almighty, what has happened here?” he gasps out in a raised voice brimming with shock.
No one spoke.
Thomas ran and knelt down by Yolanda’s unmoving body. He sees her panties draped around one ankle. He checks her pulse. With shock and puzzlement marring his usually calm features, he looks from one man to the next, and then back again to the most composed of the three who stood in the doorway of the little reading room containing a daybed. Thomas spots Pia’s prone body behind his old friend on the daybed. Touching Yolanda’s neck again for a pulse, he shakes his head mournfully and comes to his feet.
Pushing past his friend whose bulk is blocking the doorway he stops dead in his tracks to stare at the still form on the bed. A pillow covers the beautiful young woman’s face. Thomas snatches it off and checks her pulse, shaking his head in sheer horror and disbelief at the bloody sheets between her legs. He turns about so he can see the three men all at once, his face ravaged with shock.
“What in God’s name have you done?” Thomas Marshall cries.
What if you were named as heir to a Will that you knew nothing about and members of your family were being kidnapped and tortured for information they didn't have? What if you went to the police only to find out the Russian Mafia and your own govern
