Meet Quentin Black: Private Investigator. Psychic. Possible murderer.
Gifted with an uncanny sense about people, psychologist Miri Fox works as a profiler for the San Francisco police. When her best friend, homicide detective Nick Tanaka, thinks he’s finally nailed the serial murderer known as the “Wedding Killer,” she agrees to check him out, using her gift to discover the truth.
But the suspect, Quentin Black, isn’t anything like Miri expects.
He claims to be hunting the killer too, and the longer Miri talks to him, the more determined she becomes to uncover his secrets.
When he confronts her about the nature of her peculiar “insight,” Miri gets pulled into Black’s bizarre world, and embroiled in a game of cat and mouse with a deadly killer–who might just be Black himself.
Worse, she finds herself irresistibly drawn to Black, a complication she doesn’t need with a best friend who’s a homicide cop and a boyfriend in intelligence.
Can Miriam see a way out or is her future covered in Black?
BLACK IN WHITE
Quentin Black Mystery Book One
© 2015 JC Andrijeski
I tilted my head, still smiling, but letting my puzzlement show.
“Why are you talking to me at all?” I asked finally.
“Why shouldn’t I talk to you?” he said. “I’ve already told you that you’re the first person to walk in here that I thought might be worth my attempting to communicate.”
“Because I’m female?” I said.
“Because you seem to be less of a fool than the rest of them,” he corrected me at once.
“But you said Nick had a mind?”
“I said he had a mind of sorts. Not the same thing at all. Although, given the nature of his intellect, he has undoubtedly chosen the right profession for himself.”
I smiled again. “I’m sure that will be quite a relief for him.”
I heard laughter in the earpiece that time, right before Nick spoke up.
“See if he’ll tell you his name,” he said to me.
“Certainly, if you really want to know,” the suspect said, before I could voice the question aloud.
“My name is Black. Quentin Black. Middle initial, R.”
I stared at him, still recovering from the fact that he’d seemingly heard Nick give me an instruction through the earpiece.
Clearly, he wanted me to know he’d heard it, too.
“You heard that?” I said to him.
“Good ear, yes?” he said. Smiling, he gave me a more cryptic, yet borderline predatory look.
“Less good with you, however. Significantly less good.”
He paused, studying my face with eyes full of meaning.
I almost got the sense he was waiting for me to reply—or maybe just to react.
When I didn’t, he leaned back in the chair, making another of those graceful, flowing gestures with his hand.
“I find that… fascinating, doc. Quite intriguing. Perhaps that is crossing a boundary with you again, however? To mention that?”
I paused on his words, then decided to dismiss them.
“Is that a real name?” I said. “Quentin Black. That doesn’t sound real. It sounds fake.”
“Real is all subjective, is it not?”
“So it’s not real, then?”
“Depends on what you mean.”
“Is it your legal name?”
“Again, depends on what you mean.”
“I mean, could you look it up in a database and actually get a hit somewhere?”
“How would I know that?” he said, making an innocent gesture with his hands, again within the limits of the metal cuffs.
Realizing I wasn’t going to get any more from him on that line of questioning, I changed direction. “What does the ‘R’ stand for?” I said.
“Rayne.”
“Quentin Rayne Black?” I repeated back to him, still not hiding my disbelief.
“Would you believe me if I said my parents had a sense of whimsy?” he asked me.
“No,” I said.
“Would you believe that I do, then?”
I snorted a laugh, in spite of myself. I heard it echoed through the earpiece, although I heard a few curses coming from that direction, too.
I shook my head at the suspect himself, but less in a “no” that time.
“Yes,” I conceded finally. “So it is a made-up name, then?”
The man calling himself Quentin Black only returned my smile. His eyes once again looked shrewd, less thoughtful and more openly calculating.
Even so, his weird comment about “listening” came back to me.
Truthfully, he was looking at me as if he were listening very hard.
The thought made me slightly nervous.
CONTINUE READING…
JC ANDRIJESKI is a USA Today and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of gritty, character-driven, “real”-feeling paranormal mysteries and apocalyptic fiction. Her books have strong romance subplots, found families, and often a metaphysical bent. JC has a background in journalism, history and politics, and loves hiking, people watching, yoga, meditation, weird tourist destinations, the beach, coffee, birds, snails, and tacos. She grew up in the Bay Area of California, but travels extensively and has lived abroad in Europe, Australia, and Asia, and from coast to coast in the continental United States. She’s now living and writing full-time in Hollister, California.
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