This listing is for the electronic version of Still Life with Devils. (If you're looking for the print version, please visit our retail partners Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Powell’s, Better World Books, IndieBound,)
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In the city of San Francisco, it’s mid-October, darkness comes early, and a killer who strangles pregnant women is just claiming victim number six.
Homicide chief Cassy Chant is running the manhunt for
the serial killer the cops call Captain Nemo. The team, including
Cassy’s right-hand man Detective Inspector Jim Delgado, have been
hunting Nemo for nearly ten weeks.
Nemo’s getting more brazen with every death. The cops
are exhausted, the public is scared, the press and City Hall are
getting shrill. To add to Cassy’s worries, half his department is down
with the flu.
The seventh murder, done in broad daylight, has a
witness. Homicide’s staff artist is out with the flu, and Cassy asks
his sister Leo, a well-known painter, to do the Identikit sketches from
the old man’s description.
Leo Chant has a unique, and secret, talent: the ability
to walk into her own paintings. As she sketches, she realizes that,
though she can’t remember why or when, she’s drawn this face before.
Nemo gets more careless with every killing. The first
break in the case comes when the Chinatown witness remembers a single
fact that may point them in the right direction: the killer’s warped
fascination with feng shui, the Chinese art of geomancy.
When Nemo attacks a friend of Leo’s, she decides to use
her secret talent to identify the killer. But painting Nemo’s world and
walking into it could be more dangerous than Leo realizes, because Nemo
may not be what he seems. And the confrontation, explosive and
dangerous, may mean this painting is a trap Leo can’t walk back out of.
Publisher's Weekly
Review:
Grabien (New-Slain Knight) turns to supernatural crime with an
artistic twist in this eerie thriller. Leo Chant and her brother, SFPD Lt.
Cassius Chant, join forces to identify Captain Nemo, a psycho who kills pregnant
women and then arranges their corpses according to feng shui principles. After
Nemo claims a seventh victim in broad daylight, an elderly Chinese eyewitness
helps Leo provide the police with a sketch, but the almost demonic features give
Leo a shock. Has she seen them before? Digging through old sketchbooks with
Mara, her preternaturally wise teenage niece, leads Leo to a dangerous attempt
to catch Nemo by entering the “shadowlands of painted reality” through Leo's
painting of the killer. Leo's blend of art and magic is a novel and intriguing
method for closing cases and will leave readers hoping that a sequel is in the
works. (Dec.)
Violence, minor sexual content, adult themes.
Deborah Grabien
Electronic Format
220 Pages
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