Excerpt: Welcome to the Murder of the Month Club

Part II of monthly, subscriber-only excerpts.

This is the second in a series of excerpts from our novel, published monthly for paid subscribers. The first can be found here. Rest assured we endeavor to avoid spoilers and preserve the mystery. Thank you for reading, and subscribing.

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Welcome to the Murder of the Month Club

As a little girl, Mickey was a voracious reader. By the time she was 10, she had burned through almost complete sets of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books handed down to her from an aunt. After thrilling to the antics of the teenage crime fighters, nothing but crime seemed to satisfy her reader’s mind. She wasn’t concerned with boy wizards or princesses who kept diaries. She wanted to know about people with pernicious plots and those who worked to catch them. So she graduated to more mature fare. She read Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie and even some Raymond Chandler. She tried Poe but it was too much of a slog, and she never could forgive him for the trick ending of Murder in the Rue Morgue that revealed the perpetrator as a deranged orangutan. 

Then, one day at a bus stop, when she was 12, she found a copy of The Stranger Beside Me under a bench. She knew immediately from the cover that it was taboo, and secreted it home. In the middle of the night, as everyone slept she’d read about author Ann Rule's strange acquaintance with serial killer Ted Bundy and the cold and grisly details of his crimes.

Mickey considered reading that book a formative experience. A core memory. The story of Bundy frightened her senseless and yet, the darkness sparked fires of curiosity inside her. The fear was terrible but also life affirming, because when she looked up from the book she would be back in her safe and quiet quilted room. It was the feeling she got when she was in the house during a terrible storm. The peril was present but muted. Outside, the windows trees might fall and streets might flood but she could watch it all from behind rain-streaked windows. It was a state-of-being she could only think of as dangerously safe.