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Book Blurb
Author: Cathy Perkins
Genre: Romantic Suspense
Length: 367 pages
Release Date: May 2013
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-62266-097-1
Imprint: Suspense
When Holly Price trips over a friend’s dead body while hiking, her life takes a nosedive into a world of intrigue and danger. The verdict is murder—and Holly is the prime suspect.
Of course, the fact that the infinitely sexy—and very pissed off—cop threatening to arrest her is JC Dimitrak, who just happens to be Holly’s jilted ex-fiancé, doesn’t help matters.
To protect her future, her business...and her heart...the intrepid forensic accountant must use all her considerable investigative skills to follow the money through an intricate web of shadow companies, while staying one step ahead of her ex-fiancé. She better solve the case before the real killer decides CPA stands for Certified Pain in the Ass...and the next dead body found beside the river is Holly’s.
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Guest Post
When you ask a mystery writer for a Top Ten List, events can take a random turn.
You are talking with a person who kills people on a regular basis. Well, on paper anyway!
While none of us like to think about death for real, sometimes the circumstances can be bizarre, weird or unpredictable. In researching this topic, I found there are thousands of bizarre ways to die, from an insane fit of laughter (breathing optional) to the macabre (which I'll mostly pass on for this post). Even natural causes like heart failure can be brought about by pretty strange circumstances. So while a death certificate may read, "died while sleeping," the fine print might say, "after a satellite fell through the roof."
I decided, however, the Darwin Awards already have their own category. So here, in no apparent order, are 10 particularly strange ways to die.
1) Attempting to prove a window is shatterproof. From the 25th floor. It wasn't. (Now this could be added to the Darwin awards but the guy considered this stunt his parlor trick and had successfully bounced off his window numerous times before. Note – at times, “stop while you're behind” makes sense.)
2) Elevators. How many books have you read that included killing off a character with the missing elevator? I always wondered how you could not notice there wasn't a floor before stepping inside, but according to the Center for Construction Research and Training, about 30 people die every year in elevators. Let's ignore the one where the guy got shuck part way through the door and the cage started moving and oh yeah... gruesome.
3) Sex. We are talking Entangled Suspense here! Forget the heart attacks. Do the Viagra commercials crack you up? (No one I could find had actually died from the commercial – but they really are cheesy, aren't they?) There is at least one documented case where a guy tried to, shall we say, go for a record and ingested an entire bottle of Viagra. Apparently he died happy.
4) Video games. More people die of heart attacks playing video games than they do while having sex. Okay, I made that statistic up. Hey, I write fiction. And people make up statistics all the time. But people have died from either exhaustion or excitement while playing video games. No word on whether they were happy.
5) Tennessee Williams died by choking on a bottle cap. Surely someone told him at some point to remove the cap before he tried to drink the contents.
6) Beer flood. Nope, nothing as tame as a pony keg at a frat party. This one is real – a 22-foot high, 130,000-gallon vat of beer exploded in a London brewery. The explosion and flood of beer ruptured other vats and about 300,000 gallons of beer smashed through brick walls and swamped the surrounding streets. At least one of the deaths came from alcohol poisoning as apparently Londoners flocked to the scene with pots, pans and everything else that would hold beer.
7) Deodorant. A 16-year-old boy who either had serious hygiene issues or picked a bizarre item to huff sprayed himself repeatedly with an aerosol deodorant. (The autopsy revealed massive amounts of butane and propane in his system – propellants in use during the 1990s. No word on whether the Brits have changed the propellent. The British Aerosol Manufacturers' Association researchers were unable to reproduce conditions where excessive spraying in a confined space could lead to harmful effects.) Notice the guy's death certificate did not say “heart attack.”
8) Hungry sheep. Clean up your thoughts, people. This one was a sheep stampede. You didn't know sheep could stampede? They're usually pretty tame, but a particularly hungry flock charged after the farmer's wife as she drove a load of hay to the field to feed them. Unfortunately, the field overlooked a quarry and the hungry sheep knocked her off the ATV and into the pit. The fall didn't kill her. The sheep also turned over the ATV, which fell into the quarry and crushed her.
9) Lightening. Lightening takes a toll every year, but I'd like to highlight (no pun intended) two versions. Shortly after Benjamin Franklin did his kite flying experiment, a German physicist living in Russia, attempted his own variation of the feat. While attending a meeting of the Academy of Sciences, he heard thunder, and ran home to capture the event for posterity. During his experiment, unlike Franklin's successful venture, ball lightning struck Richmann's forehead. His death certificate probably said “heart attack.”
In a more recent version, a bra did in the unlucky wearer. Two friends were walking through Hyde Park when a thunderstorm came through. The pair sought shelter under a large tree (always a bad idea) and a massive bolt of lightning struck them both. Apparently the metal wiring in the women's bras acted as conductors, although the coroner believed that they would have died even if they hadn't been wearing the underwire bras. The official cause of death was "misadventure."
10) The Hollywood sign. What an icon attached to hopes and dreams and more than a few shattered ones. Among the earliest sad encounters with the hilltop sign was a young woman who found a small measure of success, but her one piece of film-work ended up on the cutting room floor. On Sept. 16, 1932, Peg Entwistle climbed to the famous Hollywood sign and became a symbol of failure and tragedy. (At the time, the sign read "Hollywoodland" and was simply an advertisement for a new housing development.) She left a suicide note, climbed up and leapt from the top of the letter "H."
In an ironic twist, a letter arrived for Entwistle the day following her death, offering her a part in a movie about a woman on the verge on suicide.
And as a bonus:
Rock & Roll – your mama told you it'd kill you, right? Guitarist of Stone the Crows, Les Harvey (not to be confused with Les Paul of guitar fame) was rocking his instrument on stage when rock and roll took his life. He was electrocuted by touching an ungrounded microphone with wet hands. Presumably he died happy, doing what he loved.
Happy Fourth of July to American readers. Enjoy the holiday – and don't do silly things with fireworks or anything that starts with the phrase, “Hey, I bet I can...”
Author Info
She lives in the Pacific Northwest, the setting of FOR LOVE OR MONEY, with her work-a-holic husband, a 75-pound Lab who thinks she’s still a lap-puppy and a Wirehair puppy’s who’s intent on digging her way to China.
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