[As a break from non-stop erotica and romance, I've got a sneak peek at a great mystery for you today. Libby's giving away a $50 gift certificate as part of her tour. Enter using the Rafflecopter at the end of the post! ~ Lisabet]
Blurb
Hired
to produce a candyfloss profile of Chicago-based aviation giant,
Delcroft, Ellie is dismayed when company VP Charlotte Hollander, the
architect of a new anti-drone system for Delcroft, trashes the
production and cancels the project. Ellie believes Hollander was
spooked by shots of a specific man in the video footage. But when
Ellie arranges to meet the man to find out why, he’s killed by a
subway train.In the confusion, she finds a seemingly abandoned pack
of cigarettes with a flash drive inside that belonged to the now dead
man.
Ellie has the drive’s contents decrypted, but before
long she discovers she’s under surveillance and thrown into the
middle of a situation filled with drones, hacking, and Chinese spies
that put her life and those she loves in mortal danger.
Excerpt
Chapter
Two
Monday
Before
my gangstah-rap neighbor emptied his AK-47 into his buddy, the most
exciting thing to happen in our village was the opening of a new
grocery store. The store hired a pianist who played Beatles tunes, no
doubt to persuade shoppers to part with their money more easily. My
neighbor, rapper King Bling, was helping his fans part with their
money too, but the shooting ended all that. Once he made bail, he
moved and hasn’t been heard from since.
And
so it goes in my little corner of the North Shore, about twenty miles
from downtown Chicago. There are benefits. The King, as he’s known
to his disciples, gave our cops something to do besides ticket
speeders. And the new grocery store gave me the chance to buy
prepared dinners so I could dispense with cooking.
Both
of which come in handy when I’m producing a video, as was the case
now. We didn’t finish the shoot until seven. I raced up the
expressway toward home, dropped into the store, and was eyeballing a
turkey pot roast—the only one left—when my cell trilled. I fished
it out of my bag.
“Mom,
where did you get the shoes?” I heard chatter and giggles in the
background.
“What
shoes, Rachel?”
“The
ones you gave Jackie.” My daughter, Rachel, had successfully, if
unbelievably, graduated from college and lived in an apartment in
Wrigleyville. Jackie was her roommate. “Everybody thinks they’re
awesome.”
About
the Author
Libby
Fischer Hellmann left a career in broadcast news in Washington, DC
and moved to Chicago 35 years ago, where she, naturally, began to
write gritty crime fiction. Twelve novels and twenty short stories
later, she claims they’ll take her out of the Windy City feet
first. She has been nominated for many awards in the mystery and
crime writing community and has even won a few. *
With
the addition of Jump Cut in 2016, her novels
include the now five-volume Ellie Foreman series, which she describes
as a cross between “Desperate Housewives” and “24;” the
hard-boiled 4-volume Georgia Davis PI series, and three stand-alone
historical thrillers that Libby calls her “Revolution Trilogy.”
Her latest release, The Incidental Spy,
is a historical novella set during the early years of the Manhattan
Project at the U of Chicago. Her short stories have been published in
a dozen anthologies, the Saturday Evening Post, and Ed Gorman’s “25
Criminally Good Short Stories” collection.
*
She has been a finalist twice for the Anthony, twice for Foreword
Magazines Book of the Year, the Agatha, the Shamus, the Daphne and
has won the Lovey multiple times.
Author
of Compulsively Readable Thrillers
Google+:
google.com:+libbyhellmann
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Link
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