A Natalie McMasters Mystery, Book 7
Crime Fiction
Date to be Published: Dec 5, 2022
Publisher: Tekrighter, LLC
What do you do when you find out your twin sister is a stone-cold killer? Love her anyway!
Twentysomething detective Natalie McMasters comes face-to-face with the awesome power of money and privilege in her latest adventure. After she finds out that she has a twin sister who’s committed a heinous crime, her son Eduardo falls into the clutches of a perverted billionaire who plays with peoples lives for sport. Getting into his futuristic walled estate is a piece of cake, but getting out again is another matter entirely. While her friends and fam battle endless frustrations trying to convince the cops and the courts that Nattie and Eduardo are in deadly danger, she plays a risky game with a malignant narcissist, his venomous consort, and some unexpected houseguests, fighting for the souls of her sister and her son. How can she ever succeed against such impossible odds? The twisted ending packs a punch you won’t soon forget!
Sister! is the perfect read for fans of Karin Slaughter, Ruth Ware and Mary Kubica.
Excerpt
A man and a boy are kneeling in the
center of an expansive emerald lawn behind a rambling, glass-walled A-frame
mansion.
The man, solidly built with short blond
hair, and dressed in a white t-shirt, camo pants and combat boots, is Danny
Merkel, Natalie McMasters’s husband. The boy is Eduardo Ibáñez, the biological
son of Lupe, Nattie’s wife, and he just turned ten last week. With his great
shock of black hair and dark Latin eyes, he’s big for his age and could easily
be mistaken for a sixth or seventh grader.
They are fussing over a small object on
the ground, or rather, Danny fusses while Eduardo watches. Over his mother’s strenuous
objections (she doesn’t want to spoil him), Danny bought him a birthday
present—a drone, complete with a video camera that will transmit pictures back
to a PC via the internet. Danny, nothing but a big kid himself, spent over $500
on the thing, though no one in the fam but him knows that. The only difference
between men and boys is the size and the price of their toys.
The drone is remarkably compact—less
then a foot long and only a few inches wide and deep. Danny extends four
folding legs, equipped with propellors that tightly hug the sides of the body,
then removes the protective cover from the camera and inserts a memory card in
a slot near the front. He places the drone on the ground and retrieves the
controller from its carrying case. It’s the size and weight of an overgrown
cell phone. It opens into two parts to reveal a couple of fold-down joysticks
on either side of a text screen, and a video screen that comprises the entire
upper half. Danny presses and holds down a button on the lower half and both
screens flicker, then flash to life.
Wow! You can program this thing’s flight
path and time, maximum height, and it will automatically return to its launch
point when the flight is over or the battery starts to weaken. It will fly for
one hour before you have to replace the battery. Danny remembers the
radio-controlled, gasoline powered airplane his dad got him when he was about
Eduardo’s age. It took him about ten minutes to crash it into the house,
earning him a terrific beating from the old man. The plane never flew again
afterwards. That’s not going to happen with this drone—it’s even got sensors to
warn it when it gets too close to an obstacle, and it will take control from a
user flying it manually to avoid a wreck.
Danny looks at Eduardo’s handsome Latin
features, the joyful smile the boy can’t help but wear, his dark eyes brimming
with wonder. Even if Eddie was his own son, he could never lay hands on him
like his dad did to him. Danny doesn’t even know if the drunken old b*** is
still alive, and he cares less. On his eighteenth birthday, he walked out of
the house and went straight to the Marines recruiting office, never to return.
“We’ll do one flight on automatic, just
to be sure everything works,” says Danny. “Next, I’ll try a manual flight, then
I’ll show you how to run it? Copy that?”
“Aye-aye, sir!” Danny has taught Eduardo
well.
Danny sets the parameters on the screen,
then hovers his finger over the start button. “Ready?” Eduardo nods
enthusiastically. “In three. Two. One.”
“Go!” shouts the boy.
Danny hits the button and the propellors
begin to spin, first vaporizing into an amorphous grey mass, then vanishing
entirely. Holy s***! The thing is absolutely silent as it soars straight up
into the powder-blue sky. Danny has set the height for 100 meters—by the time
it reaches that altitude, it’s nearly impossible to see. It hovers a moment,
then takes off in the direction that Danny set, away from the house. Too late,
he realizes that it’s flying towards the sun, so now he can’t see it at all,
then he remembers the video screen and presses the button on the controller to
activate it. He and Eduardo are treated to a view of the green lawn rolling by
below. Danny presses an arrow on the keyboard to change the direction of the
camera, and the scene shifts to show the nearby woods rushing up under the
craft. Reaching the trees, the drone changes direction by forty-five degrees
and flies along the perimeter for a while, before executing a ninety-degree
turn. Now it’s heading straight for the house, but it’s still high enough so
there’s no danger of hitting it. Finally, when it’s above the circular drive in
front, the little drone spins to complete the quadrilateral before returning to
where it started. It’s suddenly back on the ground like it popped in through a
wormhole—Danny and Eduardo never even saw it descend.
Danny kneels down in front of Eduardo,
holding his arms above his head and his hands open. The boy enthusiastically
slaps him ten.
“Ohmigod! Was that great or what?” Danny
says.
Eduardo is so excited he can’t even get
out the words to answer.
Danny flies the same route one more
time, manually controlling the drone with the joysticks. It almost gets away
from him over the woods, but when it comes too close to the trees, it immediately
overrides his control and returns to a safe height. When he’s landing it, it
again controls itself when it’s near the ground, touching down like a feather.
Danny is going over the programming
procedure with Eduardo when the warm breeze brings a sweet spicy aroma to his
nose. Both boys turn to see a short, raven-haired woman approaching from the
direction of the house—it’s Lupe, Eduardo’s mom.
“Time to come inside,” she says. “We
have to leave for Nattie’s graduation soon.”
Two voices ring out. “Awww, Mom!”
“Just one more flight! Please?” Eduardo
whines.
“No. Eduardo, I want you in your room,
doing your homework.” Her nose wrinkles and her eyes travel to Danny. “And
Danny, you said you were going to take a shower before we go. I will not ride in
that truck with you if you do not.”
Danny inspects his sodden t-shirt. “I am
pretty ripe,” he agrees. “Look, Eddie, we’ll be home in time for a few more
flights after supper. It is daylight savings, you know.”
Looking at the ground, Eduardo answers
in a low voice, “Okay…” He casts a sidewise glare at his Mom, which Danny picks
up on.
“Don’t be that way, Chief. We got all
weekend to fly.” Eduardo manages a feeble grin. “You know I love you, right?”
The grin becomes a smile again. “Go do what your mom says.”
About the Author
Thomas A. Burns Jr. writes the Natalie McMasters Mysteries from the small town of Wendell, North Carolina, where he lives with his wife and son, four cats and a Cardigan Welsh Corgi. He was born and grew up in New Jersey, attended Xavier High School in Manhattan, earned B.S degrees in Zoology and Microbiology at Michigan State University and a M.S. in Microbiology at North Carolina State University. As a kid, Tom started reading boys’ mystery series with the Hardy Boys, Ken Holt and Rick Brant, then graduated to the classic stories by authors such as A. Conan Doyle, Dorothy Sayers, John Dickson Carr, Erle Stanley Gardner and Rex Stout, to name a few. Tom has written fiction as a hobby all of his life, beginning with Man from U.N.C.L.E. stories in marble-backed copybooks in grade school. He built a career as technical, science and medical writer and editor for nearly thirty years in industry and government. Now that he’s a full-time novelist, he’s excited to publish his own mystery series, as well as writing stories about his second most favorite detective, Sherlock Holmes. Tom’s Holmes story, The Camberwell Poisoner, appeared in the March–June issue of The Strand Magazine in 2021. The sixth book in the Natalie McMasters Mysteries, Killers!, was released in September, 2021, and won the Silver Falchion award for best action/adventure book of 2021 at the Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference. Tom has also written a Lovecraftian horror novel, The Legacy of the Unborn, under the pen name of Silas K. Henderson‒a sequel to H.P. Lovecraft’s masterpiece At the Mountains of Madness. In addition to publishing the seventh Natalie McMasters Mystery, Sister!, he is currently working on a book of Sherlock Holmes stories.
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Sounds like a great book
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