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Tightly plotted, brilliantly suspenseful, and beautifully written, Hunting Season offers solid evidence that mankind can be as unpredictable and dangerous as the great outdoors.
When Anna answers a call to historic Mt. Locust, once a producing plantation and inn on Mississippi’s Natchez Trace Parkway and now a tourist spot, the last thing she expects to encounter is murder. But the man Anna finds in the stand’s old bedroom is no tourist in distress. He’s nearly naked, and very dead, his body bearing marks consistent with an S&M ritual gone awry. On a writing table nearby is an open Bible, ominous passages circled in red.
It seems the deceased is the brother of Raymond Barnette, local undertaker and a candidate for sheriff, who wants to keep any hint of kinkiness out of the minds of the God-fearing populace. Ray may be hiding a house full of secrets in the old family homestead, but before Anna can start her investigation, she’s waylaid by malevolent poachers, peevish coworkers, and a suddenly turbulent romantic life. And when hidden agendas and old allegiances are revealed, it’s suddenly Anna’s life that’s on the line.
Tightly plotted, brilliantly suspenseful, and beautifully written, Hunting Season offers solid evidence that mankind can be as unpredictable and dangerous as the great outdoors.
The priest was droning on inexorably toward "till death do us part," and Anna began to get nervous. At some point over the years, the well-worn phrase had come to feel more like a sinister threat than a romantic promise.
Death had parted Anna from her husband years before, sudden and pointless death delivered by a cab driver on Ninth Avenue in Manhattan. Judging from the internal damage to Zach's body, the NYPD accident investigator estimated the cab was traveling at fifty to sixty miles per hour on a city street. The impact had knocked Zach out of his shoes. They were found, still laced, sixty feet from his body, a detail Anna hadn't needed to know then and didn't like remembering now.
Nearly a hundred people had witnessed the accident; a baker's dozen stayed to tell their story to the police. No one had gotten the cab's license plate number. No one heard the squeal of brakes. There were no marks on the asphalt to indicate the cabbie had tried to stop or ...
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