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Joni Green - Get Your Free Copy of Beastly House
Joni Green – Get Your Free Copy of Beastly House
Category:
Action/Thriller
ISBN-10: B016CMFDTM
Type: Fiction
Copyright: 2015
Price: FREE! (eBook)
1920s Jazz Age Whodunit with characters that jump off the page.
A mansion turned sanitarium. A murderer is on the loose. A cast of likely suspects.
On the lavish estate of mogul Bernard Leigh, there lurks a secret. It is the Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age, the dawning of the modern era. The war is over, American prohibition is in full force, and Leigh House, once a lavish, private home, is now a sanitarium for the wealthy. Florian Valentine Flix, a veteran of World War One, is one of the patients at this health-oriented resort. He has signed himself into this place by feigning illness.
But why?
Only after a murder is committed on the grounds of the historical B.S.T. Leigh House, or Beastly House as it is jokingly known, do the real reasons for his presence as a patient come to light. Detective Phalen Archer has been assigned to the case. The officer is delighted, but he is confused at his buddy’s presence at Beastly House. Together, Flix and Archer go after the killer, but will the murderer escape?
Beastly House is a private detective mystery novel that immerses the reader in the Roaring Twenties. It is an entertaining whodunit with characters that leap off the page.
Beastly House is the first in the Cupid/Archer crime fiction detective mystery series. Follow these two 1920s private investigators as they set out to solve this fun whodunit and unmask the killer!
Excerpt
Chapter 1
The stench of Death was unbearable. Rotting corpses turned to soup under a merciless sun. Flies fattened with abandon on a feast of filth, swarming in a frenzy of activity like peasants at the king’s banquet table. The smell of excrement from the dying, purging themselves of their last meal, should have scorched his nostrils, but he did not have time to notice.
The constant barrage of shells from the enemy made it impossible to hear what the soldier beside him was saying, if the soldier beside him roused himself to say anything at all.
Grim hopelessness lived in the trenches with the war-weary soldiers. In the No Man’s Land between the Germans and the Allies, there lay an impossible tangle of barbed wire and pitted earth. He was doomed inside this inner ring of hell.
A corpse arose from the muck, his shallow, metal helmet cocked sideways on his head. Both eyeballs lay on withered cheeks, dangling and sightless, swinging from black-veined ropes like two dripping baubles with cloudy lenses in the corrupt air. Ribbons of flesh fell from the blackened palms that lifted to a godless sky. An evil grin spread across the ghastly, blue face, and then, the soldier heard the screeching voice from the jaws of Gehenna gleefully screech, “Gas! Gas! Gas!”
He awoke screaming, drenched in sweat.
* * * * *
The B.S.T. Leigh House sat on the edge of a large lake, dour and grand, and planted on its foundation as firmly as if it had existed there for a thousand years. The one hundred and sixty room, three-story mansion, cottages, and outbuildings were constructed in the Mediterranean style, and they would have looked more at home in Florida where new oceanfront estates were being erected faster than bacon fat pops in a hot skillet. But still, the massive house looked impressive, and smugly superior, as it sat beside the dark, azure waters of Lake Winston.
The apricot stucco façade, topped with brown terracotta roof tiles, needed only a few palm trees to complete the vision, but no well-bred palms would ever deign to survive the colder climates of New England. So, the architect artfully utilized what he had at his disposal to lend an exotic ambiance—arched windows, curved balconies, and imported fountains. All of it substituted for the absence of a tropical locale.
Somehow, he had been successful, for there was something mystical and foreign about the estate, an oddity that the original owner had found enchanting.
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