A Murder Foretold

Before she found the body of her best friend, she had already written about it—as fiction.
This wasn’t just any body. The murdered woman was the next intended victim of serial killer Charlie Novak. Part of a black widower scheme: his partner marries a series of young women, insures them, and when he's away on business, Charlie stages fatal accidents. Big payoff, no investigation. But this time, homicide detectives are involved. Fortunately, Charlie is an insurance investigator — so he gets to monitor the case, steer the cops away from his partner, and hunt the real killer himself. Then he crosses paths with Sydney Waters, writer and close friend of the victim. She's still writing about this murder. Her fictional description of her friend’s bloody death, written before it happened, was so close to the truth that the cops suspect she may be the killer. Charlie thinks so, too. But he’s disturbed when her questions about the case come closer and closer to the truth. He’s also disturbed by his attraction to her. Charlie, disfigured since childhood, has never known love. In his coal-black heart, something stirs. And then he begins to make mistakes. The twisted conclusion not only upends everything Charlie thought he knew, it even begins to mend his troubled soul.

Readers of The Talented Mr. Ripley, by Patricia Highsmith, or Presumed Innocent, by Scott Turow, or The Collector, by John Fowles, will enjoy inhabiting the mind of this conflicted serial killer as he begins to fall in love.