Death Master ~ Paperback ~ Anna-Marie Morgan

Her head was yanked back by the hair as a large, tanned hand moved menacingly down her throat. Her sobs flecked his shirt with tears, which now flowed freely, their salty water aggravating the wounds accumulated on her naked flesh over the endless days she had been held captive. The end must be near now and she was so sure that it must end. She tried in vain one last time to wrench free her hands, but the bindings held firm. Knees, so long on the floor, would not have held her up anyway - had she tried to run. He was calm. She was wretched. Instinctively, she pulled her thighs to her abdomen to protect her unborn child. His hands tightened, her eyes widened - pleading. His pressure did not relent and slowly everything faded... After months of mental and physical therapy, Yvonne Giles, an Oxford DI, is back at work and that's just how she likes it. So when she is asked to hunt the serial killer responsible for taking apart young women, the DI jumps at the chance but hides the fact that she is suffering debilitating flashbacks. The victims appear to meet their murderer willingly, telling their families they're going on vacation. No one sees them again until their macabre death scenes. A quirk of the killer's signature is the food and wine stains he leaves on the backs of the girls. Yvonne is told to work with Tasha Phillips, an in-her-face, criminal psychologist. The DI's previous experience of working with a profiler involved having a case thrown out by the Crown Prosecution Service for reasons of entrapment. She's not enamoured with the idea of working with one again. Tasha has a lot to prove. The DI has a lot to get over. A tentative link with a 20 year-old cold case brings her closer to the truth, but leaves her staring her own mortality directly in the face..Author BiographyI grew up in the small market town of Newtown in Mid-Wales, thirty miles from the English border. From the age of three, I was an avid reader of anything I could lay my hands on and later wrote poetry and short stories for my school magazine. I left Newtown to study for a degree in biochemistry at UCW Aberystwyth on the Welsh coast and followed this with a PhD in medical biochemistry at the University of Bath and then ten years of research, at the Metabolic Research Lab in Oxford. Meanwhile I 'gigged' on the Oxford music scene with my band called IRIS. In the last two years before I left Oxford, I joined the Police Special Constabulary, going out on an eight hour shift every Friday night, as part of a response unit. It was after a particularly harrowing shift that the ideas for my novel first formed. In 2003, and following much soul-searching, I moved back to my home town here in Wales to be near my family and begin a new life and career in Criminal Justice. I have two wonderful cats and a home set in a picturesque welsh village. Besides writing, I enjoy oil painting and photography. I am now working on my second novel.