Next month, Thomas & Mercer are due to publish Two Truths and a Lie by Mark Stevens, the second novel in the author’s Flynn Martin series of thrillers. To mark the occasion, and give readers a short taste of the new book, we have an excerpt to share with our readers. Here’s the synopsis:
Reporter Flynn Martin gets ensnared in a copycat killer’s game where winning means solving a crime—and losing could cost her everything.
Lambasted for a tragedy caught live on camera, then lauded for her help capturing the elusive PDQ, a serial killer, Flynn Martin’s career has reached new heights. But now, the TV journalist and mother has much further to fall. And someone wants to push her over the edge.
PDQ is behind bars, for life and then some, but someone on the outside has picked up the killer’s mantle. Flynn is neck-deep in an investigation when the copycat emerges, targeting her sources and delivering cryptic messages. It’s clear that Flynn’s stories are getting deadlier. This one proves no exception.
A family of four has gone missing, leaving behind ties to New Hope Church more tangled than they appear. The dangerous web rivals the threat in Flynn’s personal life. And it’s up to her to unravel each knot.
Scandal. Conspiracy. Murder. Flynn hardly knows where to begin—and if her stalker has their way, she might not live to see the end.
*
She should have known better.
When she thought about it later, she realized she’d let herself get lulled into complacency.
Into routine or by routine.
Take your pick.
Into thinking he had changed.
For four weeks of trial, Harry Kugel walked the ten steps from the side door to the defense table with his head slumped forward.
For four weeks of trial, he sat upright. He might whisper in his lawyer’s ear. He might put his hand to his mouth and issue a soft cough. But he was a poised model of courtroom behavior.
For four weeks of trial, Flynn Martin sat in the front-row pew directly behind Harry Kugel. She didn’t need to reserve it. Her fellow reporters understood.
On day one, when Harry first walked those steps from side door to defense table, Flynn was surprised at his clueless bearing. He stared straight ahead from his chair at his counsel’s table, where he would sit for hours. He didn’t look around. He didn’t hang his head. He could have been a businessman striding to a table to close a deal, one last check of the numbers before the handshakes and champagne.
Harry Kugel’s attire took full advantage of his right to appear to the jury as an innocent state bureaucrat mistakenly identified as PDQ, the serial killer. Who, me? He walked into the courtroom as if the side door were a special portal to his mansion of carefree privilege, never mind the pair of beefy Denver cops who stared at Harry as the trial proceeded at its methodical pace toward its inevitable conclusion.
Thirteen months after the arrest, Harry Kugel had lost weight. He hadn’t had much to lose from the get-go, but on his first trip through that side door, he looked smaller than she remembered. Gaunt.
He wore the same black suit every day, but the shirts switched from gray to blue, and the ties rotated among four.
Flynn kept a running tab for amusement.
Day 1: Black suit, gray shirt, yellow paisley tie.
Day 2: Black suit, blue shirt, gray striped tie.
Day 3: Black suit, gray shirt, solid maroon tie.
And so on.
Noting his apparel was silly, but during the trial, Flynn liked to keep busy. Her notes were jotted down with all the other swirling doodles and her lame attempts, each day, to play courtroom sketch artist and generate a reasonable rendering of the ice-cool Black judge or the slender and tall assistant DA who interrogated witnesses with an easy aplomb.
The judge was no fool. Flynn kept a running tab of scratch marks under two headers. A scratch went under H. L. (“Harry Lives”) for each time the judge sided with the defense. A scratch went under H. D. (“Harry Dies”) for each time the judge agreed with the prosecution.
Even though Colorado had outlawed the death penalty, a life sentence was the same thing to Flynn. Bye fucking bye.
Harry’s case, if the judge’s daily decisions were any indication of a trend line, was circling the drain.
Given her prominent position near the front of the room, Flynn vowed that her attention would never wane. Whenever she felt a tug of weariness, she’d focus on Harry Kugel’s three victims and the brutal ways the three women had died. The effect was like mainlining four shots of espresso.
*
Marks Stevens’s Two Truths and a Lie is due to be published by Thomas & Mercer in North America and in the UK, on April 7th.
Civilian Reader 