Sex, Murder And A Double Latte

Sex, Murder And A Double Latte
Kyra Davis

Mills & Boon Silhouette
When a mystery writer cries bloody murder, everyone blames her overactive imagination…Thriller scribe Sophie Katz is as hard-boiled as a woman who drinks Grande Caramel Brownie Frappuccinos can be. So Sophie knows it's not paranoia or post-divorce, living-alone-again jitters, when she becomes convinced that a crazed reader is sneaking into her apartment to reenact scenes from her books. The police, however, can't tell a good plot from an unmarked grave.When a filmmaker friend is brutally murdered in the manner of a death scene in one of his movies, Sophie becomes convinced that a copycat killer is on the loose –and that she's the next target. If she doesn't solve the mystery, her own bestseller will spell out her doom. Cursing her grisly imagination (why, oh, why did she have to pick the ax?), Sophie engages in some real-life gumshoe tactics. The man who swoops in to save her in dark alleys is mysterious new love interest Anatoly Darinsky. Of course, if this were fiction, Anatoly would be her prime suspect.…

Sex, Murder

and a Double Latte

Kyra Davis

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)

For my grandmother Sophia “Sylvia” Davis,

a woman whose greatest dream

was to help those she loved realize theirs.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank my agent, Ashley Kraas,

my editor, Margaret O’Neill Marbury,

and everyone at Red Dress Ink.

I also want to thank my friend Brenda Gilcrest,

and my mother, Gail Davis, for catching all my grievous spelling mistakes, and Shawn Cavlin,

along with everyone in Dock Murdock’s Writer’s Group,

for all their input.

Finally, I want to thank Alina Adams and

Danielle Girard for being such wonderful mentors.

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

CHAPTER 1

“If Alicia Bright had learned one lesson in life it was that the more settled things seemed to be, the more likely they were to get messed up.”

—Sex, Drugs, and Murder

The downside of writing sex scenes is that my mother reads my books.

Until I die I will be haunted by the memory of my mother confronting me after reading my first novel. She stood in the living room of my San Francisco apartment with one slightly arthritic hand resting on her robust hip and the other waving my book in front of my face. “I ask you,” she said, “how can a nice Jewish girl write such a thing? It’s not bad enough you should give me ulcers with all this talk of killing, but now you have to write about naked people too? I thought only shiksas wrote such things.”

I somehow resisted the impulse to run and made the stupid mistake of trying to reason with her. “No, Mama,” I said, “smut is nondenominational.” But my mother wasn’t satisfied with that, so she highlighted the scenes, took the book to her rabbi and asked him for his opinion of her daughter, the sex fiend. The rabbi, who in all likelihood was just slightly less mortified than I was, assured her that writing about sex between two consenting adults within a loving, albeit edgy relationship was in no way a violation of the Torah. After that my mother approached almost every member of the congregation, proudly showed them my book and said things like, “Can you believe this? My daughter the author. And you should read the sex scenes. Now if she would just do some of the things she writes about, I could be a grandmother already.”