Perfect Prey: The twisty new crime thriller that will keep you up all night
‘Without doubt, this is one of the best detective series I have read.’ Woman’s Way MagazineYour new addiction starts here: get hooked on the #1 bestselling series. Perfect for fans of Karin Slaughter and M.J. Arlidge.Welcome to Edinburgh. Murder capital of Europe.In the middle of a rock festival, a charity worker is sliced across the stomach. He dies minutes later. In a crowd of thousands, no one saw his attacker.The following week, the body of a primary school teacher is found in a dumpster in an Edinburgh alley, strangled with her own woollen scarf.D.I. Ava Turner and D.I. Luc Callanach have no leads and no motive – until around the city, graffitied on buildings, words appear describing each victim.It’s only when they realise the words are being written before rather than after the murders, that they understand the killer is announcing his next victim…and the more innocent the better.
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Published by Avon an imprint of
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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London, SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2017
Copyright © Helen Fields 2017
Cover photographs © Alamy
Cover design © Black Sheep 2017
Helen Fields asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the authorâs imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008181581
Ebook Edition © July 2017 ISBN: 9780008181598
Version: 2018-02-08
For Brian and John - the dads and grandads - reading their newspapers in the great beyond, and wondering what all the noise down here is about. With love from those who will never forget you.
Table of Contents
There were worse places to die. Few more terrifying ways of dying, though. It was an idyllic summer backdrop â the cityscape on one side, the ancient volcano Arthurâs Seat silhouetted in the distance. The music could be felt before it was heard, the bass throbbing through bones and jiggling flesh. Sundown came late in Edinburgh in early July and the sky was awash with shades of rose, gold and burnt orange. Perhaps that was why no one noticed when it happened. Either that, or the cocktail of drink, drugs and natural highs. The festival was well underway. Three days of revellers lounging, partying, loving, eating and drinking their way through band after band, bodies increasingly comfortable with fewer clothes and minimal hygiene. If you could take a snapshot to illustrate a sense of ecstasy, this would have been the definitive scene. Washing through the crowd, jumping as one, as if the multitudes had merged to create a single rapturous beast with a thousand grinning heads.
Through the centre of it all, the killer had drifted like smoke, sinuous and light-footed, bringing a blade to its receptacle like a ribbon through air. The slash was clean. Straight and deep. The extent of the blood loss was apparent on the ground, the wound too gaping for hands to stem the flow. Not that there had been time to get the victim in an ambulance. Not that anyone had even noticed his injury before he had almost completely bled out.
Detective Inspector Luc Callanach stood at the spot where the young man had taken his last breath. His identity had not yet been established. The police had pieced together remarkably little in the hour since the victimâs death. It was amazing, Callanach thought, how in a crowd of thousands they had found not a single useful witness.
The young man had simply ceased his rhythmic jumping, crumpling slowly, falling left and right, forwards and backwards, against his fellow festival-goers, finally collapsing, clutching his stomach. It had annoyed some of them, disrupted their viewing pleasure. Heâd been assumed drunk at first, drug-addled second. Only when a barefooted teenage girl had slipped in the pool of blood did the alarm ring out, and amidst the decibels it had taken an age for the message to get through. Eventually the screams had drowned out the music when the poor boy had been rolled over, his spilled entrails slinking closely in his wake like some alien pet, sparkling with reflected sunshine in the gloss of so much brilliant blood.
