A Perfect Obsession

Perfect suspense from New York Times bestselling author Heather Graham! The latest book in her New York Confidential series.

Someone is murdering beautiful young women in the New York area and displaying them in mausoleums and underground tombs. The FBI is handling the case, with Special Agent Craig Frasier as lead.

Kieran Finnegan, forensic psychologist and part owner of Finnegan’s, her family’s pub, is consulting on the case. Craig and Kieran are a couple who’ve worked together on more than one occasion. On this occasion, though, Craig fears for the safety of the woman he loves. Because the killer is too close. The body of a young model is found in a catacomb under a two-hundred-year-old church, now deconsecrated and turned into a nightclub. A church directly behind Finnegan’s in lower Manhattan.

As more women are murdered, their bodies discovered in underground locations in New York, it’s clear that the police and the FBI are dealing with a serial killer. Craig and Kieran are desperate to track down the murderer, a man obsessed with female perfection. Obsessed enough to want to “preserve” that beauty by destroying the women who embody it...

Praise for New York Times bestselling author Heather Graham

“Graham is the queen of romantic suspense.”

—RT Book Reviews on Flawless

“With an astonishing ease and facility, this talented and hard-working writer can cast her stories in any genre.”

—Charlaine Harris, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Sookie Stackhouse novels

“An incredible storyteller.”

—Los Angeles Daily News

“Graham stands at the top of the romantic suspense category.”

—Publishers Weekly

“[A] unique story with an equal balance of action, mystery, suspense and romance.”

—Goodreads on Flawless

“This chilling novel has everything: suspense, romance, intrigue and an ending that takes your breath away.”

—Suspense Magazine on The Betrayed

“Dark, dangerous and deadly! Graham has the uncanny ability to bring her books to life, using exceptionally vivid details to add depth to all the people and places.”

—RT Book Reviews, Top Pick, on Waking the Dead

“[Waking the Dead is] not to be missed.”

—BookTalk

New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author HEATHER GRAHAM has written more than a hundred novels, many of which have been featured by the Doubleday Book Club and the Literary Guild. An avid scuba diver, ballroom dancer and mother of five, she still enjoys her South Florida home, but loves to travel as well, from locations such as Cairo, Egypt, to her own backyard, the Florida Keys. Reading, however, is the pastime she loves best, and she is a member of many writing groups. She’s the winner of a Romance Writers of America Lifetime Achievement Award and an International Thriller Writers Silver Bullet Award. She is an active member of International Thriller Writers and Mystery Writers of America, and also the founder of The Slush Pile Players, an author band and theatrical group. Heather hosts the annual Writers for New Orleans conference to benefit both the city, which is near and dear to her heart, and various other causes, and she hosts a ball each year at the RT Booklovers Convention to benefit pediatric AIDS foundations.

For more information, check out her website, www.theoriginalheathergraham.com. You can also find Heather on Facebook.

A Perfect Obsession

Heather Graham

www.mirabooks.co.uk

To Bryee-Annon Pozzessere and Joseph Hunton, with congratulations on their marriage.

And to Ellysse and Zohe Hunton, beautiful additions to our family.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Praise

About the Author

Title Page

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Extract

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

“HORRIBLE! OH, GOD, HORRIBLE! Tragic!” John Shaw said, shaking his head with a dazed look as he sat on his bar stool at Finnegan’s pub.

Kieran nodded sympathetically. Construction crews had found the old graves when they were working on the foundations at the hot new downtown venue, Le Club Vampyre.

Anthropologists found the new body among the old graves the next day.

It wasn’t just any body.

It was the body of supermodel Jeannette Gilbert.

Finding the old graves wasn’t much of a shock—not in New York City, and not in a building that was close to two centuries old. The structure that housed Le Club Vampyre was a deconsecrated Episcopal Church. The church’s congregation had moved to a facility it had purchased from the Catholic Church—whose congregation was now in a sparkling new basilica over on Park Avenue. While many had bemoaned the fact that such a venerable old building had been turned into an establishment for those into sex, drugs, and rock and roll, life—and business—went on.

They were expanding the wine cellar, and so work on the foundations went on, too.

It was while investigators were still being called in following the discovery of the newly deceased body—moments before it hit the news—that Kieran Finnegan learned about it, and that was because she was helping out at their family pub, Finnegan’s on Broadway. Like the old church-nightclub behind it, Finnegan’s dated back to just before the Civil War, and had been a pub for most of those years. Since it was geographically the closest establishment to the church with liquor, it had apparently seemed the right place at that moment for Professor John Shaw. They’d barely opened; it was still morning and it was a Friday, and Kieran was only there at that time because her bosses had decided on a day off following their participation in a lengthy trial. She’d just been down in the basement, fetching a few bottles of a vintage chardonnay for her brother, ordered specifically for a lunch that day, when John Shaw had caught her attention, desperate to talk.