Excerpt from
A Tainted Mind by Tamsen Schultz
The irony of her situation did not escape her. Whatever was compelling her to stay and find answers on the side of this country road was the same thing that had gotten her here in the first place. She didn’t like to let things go, and because she couldn’t let things go, she had almost destroyed herself with her last case. She’d taken to the road to escape, to maybe find some balance. If she were to hazard a guess, though, she’d say that whatever balance she’d found in the past few weeks was about to be tipped.
And, as if to give weight to the direction of her thoughts, about fifteen feet away from her position and about halfway down the embankment, her light landed on a small collection of rocks. No, not rocks, pieces of road that had broken away from the winter-weakened, rain-pummeled lane and tumbled down to rest a few feet away.
Vivi kept her beam trained on the pile as she walked closer. Tracing a line up the embankment, she could see an approximately two-foot by one-foot section of the road cracked and starting to cave in, the edge beginning to break away.
As she contemplated the small sinkhole illuminated by her flashlight, a gust of wind picked up. Her wet jeans pressed against her legs, her ponytail lifted, and her skin broke out in bumps from the sudden chill. Another piece of the road cracked and tumbled down the slope.
And there, at that crumbling edge, barely visible in the dark and shadows, was the
unmistakable form of a human hand.
A Tainted Mind
by Tamsen Schultz
Romantic Suspense
Date Published: TBD
OBSESSED with her job as a medical examiner and lead consultant with the
FBI, Dr. Vivienne ‘Vivi’ DeMarco is a woman running from her own demons. And
finding the remains of a body on the side of a road in rural upstate New York wasn’t part
of her plan.
FRUSTRATED that the ghosts from his past won’t leave him alone, Ian MacAllister
makes for a reluctant Deputy Chief of Police of Windsor, New York. But as more victims
are discovered, all women that bear a shocking resemblance to Dr. DeMarco, he knows
he’ll need to call on all the skills he learned as an Army Ranger if he wants to keep her
safe.
DENIED over and over again of the one thing he desires most, a killer may have finally
reached his breaking point. The only question that remains is, will he take Vivi and Ian
with him?
Tamsen Schultz is the author of The Puppeteer and “American Kin” (a short story published in Line Zero Magazine) and is a three-time finalist in the Pacific Northwest Writers Association annual competition. She worked in the field of international conflict resolution and co-founded a non-profit prior to attending law school. Since graduating, she has worked as a corporate attorney and, like most real lawyers, she spends a disproportionate amount of time thinking about what it might be like to do something else. She lives in Northern California in a house full of males including her husband, two sons, a cat, a dog, and a gender-neutral, but well-stocked, wine rack. A Tainted Mind is her second novel and her third, These Sorrows We See, is tentatively scheduled for release in late 2013.
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