COVER REVEAL + EXCERPT: THE KIND TO KILL BY TESSA WEGERT
AVAILABLE DECEMBER 6, 2022
From Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta series to Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy to Jo Nesbø’s Harry Hole series and beyond, many of the crime books that have been most influential in my reading life—the books that made me fall in love with this genre in the first place—have been series installments. To this day, as much as I always love a great stand-alone crime novel, there’s something uniquely special to me about finding a crime fiction series to fall in love with. The experience of getting to know a protagonist over the course of multiple books - and having that wonderful “coming home” feeling of returning to a universe you love with each new series installment - simply never gets old for me. There are a handful of crime fiction series I will always keep up with, including books from Jo Nesbø, Lars Kepler, Sara Blaedel, Yrsa Sigurdardottir, and today’s featured author, Tessa Wegert. Tessa is the author of an excellent crime fiction series set in upstate New York, following Senior Investigator Shana Merchant. Shana, a former NYPD detective-turned-small town police officer, is exactly the kind of series protagonist that always keeps me coming back for more. She is smart, strong, independent, relatable, flawed, and very human, and over the course of Tessa’s books, readers peel back the many layers not only of Shana’s skills as an investigator, but also the many layers of Shana as a person grappling with dark secrets from her past. Over the course of the three books published in this series thus far, readers have followed Shana as she solved a locked room mystery, faced down secrets from within her own family, grappled with local politics in her new hometown, and wrestled with her ties to a serial killer.
Today, I’m so honored to be able to share with CBTB readers some very exciting news: later this year, Shana will be back! In December, Tessa will publish her newest Shana Merchant novel—THE KIND TO KILL (available December 6). Today on CBTB, I have the honor of revealing the book’s gorgeous cover, and giving you a sneak peek into this new series installment! In today’s blog post, you can learn more about the book, check out its beautiful and atmospheric cover, and read an early excerpt from its first chapter. (Plus: if you’re totally new to Tessa’s work, be sure to scroll all the way to the bottom of this post for a quick overview of the Shana Merchant series thus far.)
Huge thanks to Tessa and her publisher for allowing me to give CBTB readers this exclusive glimpse into THE KIND TO KILL—I’m such a fan of this series, and so honored to be able to share this sneak peek with you today! Happy reading! xx A
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COVER REVEAL: THE KIND TO KILL BY TESSA WEGERT
AVAILABLE DECEMBER 6, 2022
ABOUT THE KIND TO KILL:
Former NYPD detective Shana Merchant is a skilled Senior Investigator keeping New York's beautiful Thousands Islands community safe. She's a loving partner. A strong woman. A survivor.
She's also bound by blood to a serial killer. And after months of concealing the truth from the world as she hunted Blake Bram down, her secret is finally out.
Shana just wants to get on with her life and win back her community's trust. But as Alexandria Bay fills up with tourists in advance of the annual festival known as Pirate Days, a visitor goes missing, and the case threatens to destroy not just the celebrations, but what remains of Shana's reputation.
Shana's not to blame for the killer in her family, but people are starting to whisper that she attracts trouble. That A-Bay was safer before she arrived. And as the investigation deepens, Shana starts to fear that they may be right.
Because while Bram is gone, he is far from forgotten.
READ AN EXCERPT FROM THE KIND TO KILL:
ONE
The knock on my office door gave me a jolt. Panicked, I stuffed the latest issue of Us Weekly under a stack of papers. Just when I thought the press had finally moved on, an old friend from high school tipped me off to the article inside. If the reporter responsible for the feature had reached out for a comment, I wouldn’t have known it; I’d long since stopped answering calls from numbers I didn’t recognize, could hit Decline with record speed. I wasn’t responsible for the sordid story on my desk, but my cheeks still flushed red when I spied Don Bogle hovering in the window.
“We could use you out here,” he said, cracking open the door. The man’s voice was grim.
Every now and then, it occurred to me that Bogle had missed his calling. With his clean-shaven head and the height of a retired NBA power forward, he could have made a killing playing a Bond villain or mob movie hitman if he’d only gone to Hollywood. Instead, the poor bastard had stayed in Alexandria Bay to become one of three Troop D investigators who had to take orders from a vilified minor celebrity.
With a nod, I followed Bogle down the hall.
Jeremy Solomon waved me over when he saw me, mouthed the word wait. Ear pressed to his phone, he was jotting notes, interrupting the caller every few seconds. Spell the last name? Sure, I know it—behind the Admiral? Okay. Right. Thanks.” He put down the phone, and looked up.
Fleshy-cheeked and freckled, Sol had the look of an overgrown boy who’d spray-painted his hair gray for Halloween, but he aged rapidly when a situation was dire. There were creases around his eyes now. “That was the Alex Bay PD,” he said. “Gorecki. Know him?”
Immediately, my mind went to Tim. Tim, who knew almost everyone in town and helped me navigate the local community. But Tim was out on a criminal mischief case. When I didn’t reply, Sol said, “Ivan Gorecki’s a Jefferson County Deputy Sheriff.”
“What’s going on?” I asked. The Alexandria Bay Police Department was small, mostly comprised of part-time officers who worked for other agencies. Officers like Gorecki. The village police took what we called a broken window approach to keeping the peace, shutting down disorder before it got out of control. In little A-Bay, that usually meant noise complaints, security alarms, public intoxication. When a bigger case came in, the State Police assumed control. We dealt with narcotics, child abuse, and serial crimes. Felonies. On those rare occasions when our interests overlapped and it was all hands on deck, you could count on it being a major investigation.
A call from Gorecki was a bad sign.
“We’ve got a missing woman,” Sol said, staring down at the phone in his hand. “She and her husband were staying at the Admiral Inn last night. Tourists in from Oneida County.”
“They were staying at the Admiral?”
A nod. “Gorecki says they had some kind of argument. The wife stormed out and never came back.”
“I didn’t realize the Admiral was open again,” said Don Bogle. Decades of smoking had shredded his voice; he would have done well cast as a timeworn cowboy, too. “Was it roaches last time they shut down, or rats?”
Honestly, it could have been either. If my family ever came to visit me in Alexandria Bay, a scenario that was looking increasingly unlikely, I’d put them up pretty much anywhere other than the Admiral Inn. Unlike the other hotels and resorts in town, it hadn’t been renovated in at least thirty years, but its biggest offense was that the place was nowhere near the water. While the cheapest motel in town was as likely to attract budgeting families as the uncouth, calls about drunken dust-ups on the ramshackle property weren’t uncommon.
I listened as Sol explained that, the night before, the village station received a call from the motel’s night clerk. Several guests had complained about the shouting, so the couple took their dispute outside. Things escalated after that, to the point where the clerk felt the need to report it. An officer had gone out to the motel, but by then the husband and wife were back in their room. And here we were the next morning, with the husband filing a missing persons report.
Most people think you have to wait 24-hours to report a person missing. TV and the movies have hammered that falsehood into everyone’s heads, which is a problem because when a person goes missing, a swift response is critical. I didn’t know whether the husband of the missing woman knew that was a myth or not, but he’d done the right thing by going to the police. The fresher the trail, the better our odds of locating the wife.
Even so, I didn’t like what I was hearing. “This argument,” I said. “Was it violent?”
“Seems that way. One of the guests told the night clerk there was some pushing and shoving outside. The husband denies it,” said Sol.
Of course he does.
“But he knows there were witnesses,” said Bogle. “Right? There’s no covering up the fact that they fought. And he went down to the station this morning anyway?”
“Yep,” I said. “Which tells me either this guy’s trying to play us, or he’s genuinely concerned about his wife.”
I leaned against Sol’s desk, the sun that angled through the nearby window hot on the back of my neck. I still wasn’t used to that. Where my hair once curled down past my shoulders there was nothing now but naked skin that prickled at my touch, vulnerable and unfamiliar.
A month ago, while in the shower, I’d soaped my head and watched with detached horror as a tangle of hair swirled like seagrass down the drain. The stress I’d been under was taking its toll, and my decision was a quick one. Sarajane, who ran a salon in the back room of her weather-beaten bungalow, beamed when she set down her scissors and dusted away the stray hairs. Not everyone can pull this off, honey, but you look pretty, she’d declared, gazing at my reflection in the mirror on the wall. The cut was almost as short as my brother’s, and significantly shorter than Tim’s, but that was fine. I didn’t care about pretty. All I wanted was to look different. A shot at regaining the anonymity I feared I’d lost for good.
“They argued,” I said at length, thinking it through. “Things got rough. If this woman was afraid of her husband and what else he might do to her, it makes sense that she’d run.” Maybe our missing person wanted to be invisible, too.
At the same time, there was something about the account that sat uncomfortably in my stomach like a creamy, overly rich meal. Far too many victims of domestic violence were doubted and ignored as it was; I couldn’t take the chance that this woman wasn’t still in serious danger. “Gorecki’s gonna need help locating her,” I said. “Got a name?”
Sol consulted his notes. “Rebecca Hearst. The husband’s name is Godfrey Patrick Hearst III.”
Bogle raised an eyebrow. Click. Clack. He had a habit of cracking his fingers, and Sol winced as his colleague pressed each crooked digit in against itself. “Seriously? What is he, a lord or something?”
“Godfrey only knows.” Sol’s face split into an ear-to-ear grin.
“Okay,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Jesus guys. And Hearst, he still at the station?”
“He is.”
I nodded. Good. “I’d like to have a few words with him.”
“Thought you might,” Bogle said.
SHANA MERCHANT SERIES DETAILS:
Book 1: DEATH IN THE FAMILY
A locked-room mystery set on a private island, where a man from an affluent family has gone missing.
Publisher : Berkley (August 18, 2020)
Language : English
Paperback : 320 pages
ISBN-10 : 059309946X
ISBN-13 : 978-0593099469
Book 2: THE DEAD SEASON
A murder case sends Shana back to the one place she swore she would never return: home.
Publisher : Berkley (December 8, 2020)
Language : English
Paperback : 352 pages
ISBN-10 : 0593097912
ISBN-13 : 978-0593097915
Book 3: DEAD WIND
Shana must dredge up dark secrets and old grudges to solve the murder of a prominent local citizen in the Thousand Islands community.
Publisher : Severn House; Main edition (April 5, 2022)
Language : English
Hardcover : 240 pages
ISBN-10 : 1448307120
ISBN-13 : 978-1448307128
Book 4: THE KIND TO KILL (Available December 6, 2022)
When a tourist goes missing during a local annual festival, the case threatens to destroy not just the celebrations, but Shana’s reputation, too.
Publisher : Severn House
Language : English
Hardcover : 240 pages
ISBN-10 : 1448307139
ISBN-13 : 978-1448307135
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