Shadow Slain

At thirty-six, Jefferson Wintry has every reason to feel like a failure: a writer who never lived up to his youthful promise, plagued by a lifetime of writer’s block, and father to a six-year-old son who, growing up with his mother and stepfather, is becoming steadily estranged from him, he fritters away his time in a state of perpetual idleness.It is on such a night of pointless Internet surfing that he comes upon a mention of The Book of Roses – a novel that supposedly kills whoever reads it. And though at first he dismisses the claim as one of the countless hoaxes circling the Net, when his agent is contacted by a woman named Vivian Darkbloom, who purports to be the authoress of the aforementioned book, and wishes to be represented by her, he is spooked and intrigued – especially since this strange fellow writer has attached a sample of her work to her missive. And when his agent is found dead, the victim of a grotesque and baffling suicide, Jefferson begins to realize that this allegedly murderous book may well be intended for him to read.A (hopefully) fast-paced, gripping literary thriller, Shadow Slain is, like the fictional killer novel it revolves around, meant to be read in one sitting.

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