Singled Out
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4.2 • 5 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Cassandra Leigh has a long-term lover who is handsome, charismatic, sophisticated--and married. Now Max has abandoned Cass and taken his wife off to America, leaving Cass all alone in her damp little cottage.
Cass always dreamed that one day she and Max would be married and have children, but now she is waking up to reality. Not only is the prince missing, there isn't even a half-way decent frog in the vicinity.
Meanwhile, Jason, one of her oldest friends, has developed a worrying crush on her--she's also had an encounter of a closer kind than she bargained for with Dante Chase, the new owner of the U.K.'s most ghost-infested manor house, a man even more haunted by his past than Cass is by hers.
Now, the vicar wants to sell Cass off to the highest bidder at the local charity slave auction, and Max, Jason and Dante are each determined to bid for her. And somehow Cass knows that they're all after more than a little light dusting . . .
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rough dialogue, intricate plotting and cascading suspense mark British author Lawrence's excellent debut, in which four bodies are found sitting almost casually in a circle in a nondescript London flat: three are suicides, the fourth is stabbed through the heart. Det. Sgt. Stella Mooney, an intense, troubled and dogged investigator, learns that small-time crook Jimmy Stone, the murder victim, was an active trader in "murderabilia," such as a scene-of-crime photo of the Manson killings and O.J. Simpson's autograph. Jimmy's story is one of many subplots that lend depth to this absorbing police procedural. The trail leads Stella into contact with a crime family and into delicate turf wars and accommodations within her own organization as well as with other agencies whose aims are not always the same. The enslavement and prostitution of East European women is yet another element the author uses to telling effect, as is the crisis in Stella's relations with her housemate provoked by a persistent journalist. Lawrence smoothly shifts focus, allowing the reader to follow Stella, a prostitute, the journalist and a chillingly efficient and ruthless Serbian assassin, among other distinctive characters. Readers are sure to want to see more of the memorable Stella in further adventures.
