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About the Book

There’s no safety in numbers …

Eve Singer needs death. With her career as a TV crime reporter flagging, she’ll do anything to satisfy her ghoulish audience.

The killer needs death too. He even advertises his macabre public performances, where he hopes to show the whole world the beauty of dying.

When he contacts Eve, she welcomes the chance to be first with the news from every gory scene. Until she realizes that the killer has two obsessions.

One is public murder.

And the other one is her …

Contents

Cover

About the Book

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Part One

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Part Two

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Part Three

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Belinda Bauer

Copyright

Thanks to the Cardiff Poker Tour for all the laughs and free money …

Look at the beauty that only death can bring.

See Medusa’s raft, where the waxen corpses recline careless on the splintered timbers, fists unclenched and eyes closed on the horrors of the world. At peace at last, their faces are serene, while those of the luckless survivors twist in shipwrecked shock.

See Death claim his Maiden, his flesh still rotting on his bones. See her turn her head away in modest horror – while one sly arm embraces him …

See the two martyrs in the arena as the snarling tiger reaches them. They, too, are beautiful.

Calm – even as the first claw punctures the flesh. Their hands are linked in the certain knowledge that the agony of existence will pass and that they will be together on the other side …

A great artist knows how to lead us uncomplaining out of this life and into the next. The Old Masters did it with china-white and elegant hands, with lashes closed on pale cheeks – with stoic mourners and tragic heroes.

Who wouldn’t want to be remembered thus? Who wouldn’t relish everlasting life in a world that’s kinder than this one? Who wouldn’t want to be so beautiful?

Be honest, dear reader.

Who wouldn’t rather be dead?

PART ONE

1

1 December

LAYLA MARTIN’S SHOES were killing her.

She had bought them on Thursday even though they rubbed her little toes.

A hundred and thirty pounds. A third of her weekly wage.

She’d worn them on Thursday night and again on Friday night while making cheese on toast for tea. And she had worn them to work on a Saturday even though she knew she’d be the only person on the eighth floor – quite possibly in the whole building. She’d wanted to break them in for Monday, when she was planning to walk past the glass-walled office of the new accounts manager at least twenty times, because he had a sports car and a great bum, and the ridiculously high heels made her calves look fabulous.