Famous (23 page)

Palpable suspense. Non-stop action.
Relentless and riveting. Blake Crouch is the most exciting new
thriller writer I’ve read in years.
DAVID MORRELL

Excerpt from Locked Doors…

The headline on the Arts and Leisure page
read: Publisher to Reissue Five Thrillers by Alleged Murderer
Andrew Z. Thomas.

All it took was seeing his name.

Karen Prescott dropped The New York Times and
walked over to the window.

Morning light streamed across the clutter of
her cramped office--query letters and sample chapters stacked in
two piles on the floor beside the desk, a box of galleys shoved
under the credenza. She peered out the window and saw the fog
dissolving, the microscopic crawl of traffic now materializing on
Broadway through the cloud below.

Leaning against a bookcase that housed many
of the hardcovers she’d guided to publication, Karen shivered. The
mention of Andrew’s name always unglued her.

For two years she’d been romantically
involved with the suspense novelist and had even lived with him
during the writing of Blue Murder at the same lake house in North
Carolina where many of his victims were found.

She considered it a latent character defect
that she’d failed to notice anything sinister in Andy beyond a
slight reclusive tendency.

My God, I almost married him.

She pictured Andy reading to the crowd in
that Boston bookshop the first time they met. In a bathrobe writing
in his office as she brought him fresh coffee (French roast, of
course). Andy making love to her in a flimsy rowboat in the middle
of Lake Norman.

She thought of his dead mother.

The exhumed bodies from his lakefront
property.

His face on the FBI website.

They’d used his most recent jacket photo, a
black-and-white of Andy in a sports jacket sitting broodingly at
the end of his pier.

During the last few years she’d stopped
thinking of him as Andy. He was Andrew Thomas now and embodied all
the horrible images the cadence of those four syllables
invoked.

There was a knock.

Scott Boylin, publisher of Ice Blink Press’s
literary imprint, stood in the doorway dressed in his best bib and
tucker. Karen suspected he was gussied up for the Doubleday
party.

He smiled, waved with his fingers.

She crossed her arms, leveled her gaze.

God, he looked streamlined today--very tall,
fit, crowned by thick black hair with dignified intimations of
silver.

He made her feel little. In a good way.
Because Karen stood nearly six feet tall, few men towered over her.
She loved having to look up at Scott.

They’d been dating clandestinely for the last
four months. She’d even given him a key to her apartment, where
they spent countless Sundays in bed reading manuscripts, the
coffee-stained pages scattered across the sheets.

But last night she’d seen him at a bar in
SoHo with one of the cute interns. Their rendezvous did not look
work-related.

“Come to the party with me,” he said. “Then
we’ll go to Il Piazza. Talk this out. It’s not what you--”

“I’ve got tons of reading to catch up--”

“Don’t be like that, Karen. Come on.”

“I don’t think it’s appropriate to have this
conversation here, so . . .”

He exhaled sharply through his nose and the
door closed hard behind him.

Joe Mack was stuffing his pink round face
with a gyro when his cell phone started ringing to the tune of
“Staying Alive.”

He answered, cheeks exploding with food,
“This Joe.”

“Hi, yes, um, I’ve got a bit of an
interesting problem.”

“Whath?”

“Well, I’m in my apartment, but I can’t get
the deadbolt to turn from the inside.”

Joe Mack choked down a huge mouthful, said,
“So you’re locked in.”

“Exactly.”

“Which apartment?” He didn’t even try to mask
the annoyance in his voice.

“Twenty-two eleven.”

“Name?”

“Um . . . I’m not the tenant. I’m Karen
Prescott’s friend. She’s the--”

“Yeah, I get it. You need to leave anytime
soon?”

“Well, yeah, I don’t want to--”

Joe Mack sighed, closed the cell phone, and
devoured the last of the gyro.

Wiping his hands on his shirt, he heaved
himself from a debilitated swivel chair and lumbered out of the
office, locking the door behind him.

The lobby was quiet for midday and the
elevator doors spread as soon as he pressed the button. He rode up
wishing he’d bought three gyros for lunch instead of two.

The doors opened again and he walked onto the
twenty-second floor, fishing the key ring containing the master
from the pocket of his enormous overalls.

He belched.

It echoed down the empty corridor.

Man, was he hungry.

He stopped at 2211, knocked, yelled through
the door, “It’s the super!”

No one answered.

Joe Mack inserted the master into the
deadbolt. It turned easily enough.

He pushed the door open.

“Hello?” he said, standing in the threshold,
admiring the apartment--roomy, flat-screen television, lush deep
blue carpet, an antique desk, great view of SoHo, probably loads of
food in the fridge.

“Anybody home?”

He turned the deadbolt four times. It worked
perfectly.

Another door opened somewhere in the hallway
and approaching footsteps reverberated off the hardwood floor. Joe
Mack glanced down the corridor at the tall man with black hair in a
black overcoat strolling toward him from the stairwell.

“Hey, pal, were you the one who just called
me?” Joe Mack asked.

The man with black hair stopped at the open
doorway of 2211.

He smelled strange, of Windex and lemons.

“Yes, I was the one.”

“Oh. You get the lock to work?”

“I’ve never been in this apartment.”

“What the fuck did you call me for--”

Glint of a blade. The man held an
ivory-hilted bowie. He swept its shimmering point across Joe Mack’s
swollen belly, cleaving denim, cotton, several layers of skin.

“No, wait just a second--”

The man raised his right leg and booted Joe
Mack through the threshold.

The super toppled backward as the man
followed him into the apartment, slammed the door, and shot the
deadbolt home.

Karen left Ice Blink Press at 6:30 p.m. and
emerged into a manic Manhattan evening, the sliver of sky between
the buildings smoldering with dying sunlight, gilding glass and
steel. It was the fourth Friday of October, the terminal brilliance
of autumn full blown upon the city, and as she walked the fifteen
blocks to her apartment in SoHo, Karen decided that she wouldn’t
start the manuscript in her leather satchel tonight.

Instead she’d slip into satin pajamas, have a
glass of that organic chardonnay she’d purchased at Whole Foods
Market, and watch wonderful mindless television.

It had been a bad week.

Pampering was in order.

At 7:55 she walked out of her bedroom in
black satin pajamas that rubbed coolly against her skin. Her
chaotic blond hair was twisted into a bun and held up by chopsticks
from the Chinese food she’d ordered. Two unopened food cartons and
a bottle of wine sat on the glass coffee table between the couch
and the flat-screen television. Her apartment smelled of
spicy-sweet sesame beef.

She plopped down and uncorked the wine.

Ashley Chambliss’s CD Nakedsongs had ended
and in the perfect stillness of her apartment Karen conceded how
alone she was.

Thirty-seven.

Single again.

Childless.

But I’m not lonely, she thought, turning on
the television and pouring a healthy glass of chardonnay.

I’m just alone.

There is a difference.

After watching Dirty Dancing, Karen treated
herself to a soak. She’d closed the bathroom door and a Yankee
candle that smelled of cookie dough sat burning in a glass jar on
the sink, the projection of its restless flame flickering on the
sweaty plaster walls.

Karen rubbed her long muscular legs together,
slippery with bath oil. Imagining another pair of legs sliding
between her own, she shut her eyes, moved her hands over her
breasts, nipples swelling, then up and down her thighs.

The phone was ringing in the living room.

She wondered if Scott Boylin was calling to
apologize. Wine encouraged irrational forgiveness in Karen. She
even wished Scott were in the bathtub with her. She could feel the
memory of his water-softened feet gliding up her smooth shinbones.
Maybe she’d call and invite him over. Give him that chance to
explain. He’d be back from the Doubleday party.

Now someone was knocking at the front
door.

Karen sat up, blew back the bubbles that had
amassed around her head.

Lifting her wineglass by the stem, she
finished it off. Then she rose out of the water, took her white
terrycloth bathrobe that lay draped across the toilet seat, and
stepped unsteadily from the tub onto the mosaic tile. She’d nearly
polished off the entire bottle of chardonnay and a warm and
pleasant gale was raging in her head.

Karen crossed the living room, heading toward
the front door.

She failed to notice that the cartons of
steamed rice and sesame beef were gone, or that a large gray
trashcan now stood between the television and the antique desk
she’d inherited from her grandmother.

She peeked through the peephole.

A young man stood in the hallway holding an
enormous bouquet of ruby red roses.

She smiled, turned the deadbolt, opened the
door.

“I have a delivery for Karen Prescott.”

“That’s me.”

The delivery man handed over the gigantic
vase.

“Wait here. I’ll get you your tip.” She
slurred her words a little.

“No ma’am, it’s been taken care of.” He gave
her a small salute and left.

She relocked the door and carried the roses
over to the kitchen counter. They were magnificent and they
burgeoned from the cut-glass vase. She plucked the small card taped
to the glass and opened it. The note read simply:

Look in the coat closet

Karen giggled. Scott was one hundred percent
forgiven. Maybe she’d even do that thing he always asked for
tonight.

She buried her nose in a rose, inhaled the
damp sweet perfume. Then she cinched the belt of her bathrobe and
walked over to the closet behind the couch, pulling open the door
with a big smile that instantly died.

A naked man with black hair and a pale face
peered down at her. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand
and swallowed.

The cartons of leftover Chinese food stood
between his feet.

She stared into his black eyes, a coldness
spreading through her.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she
said.

The man grinned, his member rising.

Karen bolted for the front door, but as she
reached to unhook the chain he snatched a handful of her wet hair
and swung her back into a mirror that shattered on the adjacent
wall.

“Please,” she whimpered.

He punched her in the face.

Karen sank down onto the floor in bits of
glass, anesthetized by wine and fear. Watching his bare feet, she
wondered where her body would be found and by whom and in what
condition.

He grabbed her hair into a ball with one hand
and lifted her face out of the glass, the tiniest shards having
already embedded themselves in her cheek.

He swung down.

She felt the dull thud of his knuckles crack
her jaw, decided to feign unconsciousness.

He hit her again.

She didn’t have to.

ABANDON

Published July 2009 by Minotaur Books

DESCRIPTION: On Christmas Day in 1893, every
man, woman and child in a remote mining town will disappear,
belongings forsaken,  meals left to freeze in vacant cabins,
and not a single bone will be found--not even the gold that was
rumored to have been the pride of this town will be found either.
One hundred and thirteen years later, two backcountry guides are
hired by a leading history professor and his journalist daughter to
lead them into the abandoned mining town to learn what happened.
This has been done once before but the people that went in did not
come out. With them is a psychic and a paranormal photographer--the
town is rumored to be haunted. They’ve come to see a ghost town,
but what they’re about to discover is that twenty miles from
civilization, with a blizzard bearing down, they are not alone, and
the past is very much alive....

Crouch does a great job of pacing, going back
and forth between the two stories and the two time periods. The
characters are authentic and interesting. He keeps up the suspense
until the very end. It’s a great book. Crouch is a great writer. Go
and get it.
TORONTO SUN

In
Abandon
, Crouch blends elements of
modern-day Colorado with its violent and storied past to create a
tapestry of love, greed and revenge…unforgettable.
JOHN HART

Excerpt from Abandon…

Thursday, December 28, 1893

Wind rips through the crags a thousand feet
above, nothing moving in this godforsaken town, and the muleskinner
knows that something is wrong. Two miles south stands Bartholomew
Packer’s mine, the Godsend, a twenty-stamp mill that should be
filling this box canyon with the thudding racket of the
rock-crushers pulverizing ore. The sound of the stamps in operation
is the sound of money being made, and only two things will stop
them—Christmas and tragedy.

He dismounts his albino steed, the horse’s
pinked nostrils flaring, dirty mane matted with ice. The single-rig
saddle is snow-crusted as well, its leather and cloth
components—the mochila and shabrack—frozen stiff. He rubs George
the horse’s neck, speaking in soft, low tones he knows will calm
the animal, telling him he did a good day’s work and that a warm
stable awaits with feed and fresh water.