Kill A Stranger

 

 

 

About the Book

 

 To save a life, could you take another?

 

Matt comes home to find his fiancée missing ...and the body of a woman he's never seen in their bed. To clear his name and save her, he will have to make an impossible choice.

Kate has been snatched in the night, by terrifying men who threaten to kill her. To save herself, she will have to do something unthinkable.

How far would you go for the one you love - and just how well do you really know them?

This twisting and gripping thriller is a masterclass in page-turning suspense - where nothing is what it seems and no-one can be trusted. 

Excerpt

prologue

DCI Cameron Doyle

Justice. I’ve spent a thirty-year career being paid to uphold  it. I’ve had successes, sure. I’ve put no fewer than twen ty-six killers behind bars, as well as numerous other lowlifes  who’ve committed serious crimes. But almost to a man and  woman, the people I sent down were either poor, desperate  or, in some cases, just downright stupid.

The truly successful criminals, the ones with the money  and the power, they’ve always been a far harder proposition.  They’ve got the resources to fend you off time and time  again. Eventually your bosses tire of the fight and decide  to leave them in search of easier targets. That’s how it  works, especially when success in police work is all based  on performance targets.

But that’s not how I work. Call me old-fashioned, but I  never give up. I’m patient. I’m methodical. And in the end,  I get there. However long it takes.

And I’m here now. Ready to close the curtain on a case  that’s been troubling me for a long, long time. I’ve got three  murder suspects in this police station, and a trail of dead bodies. I need to hear from them what happened in the  twenty-four hours leading up to their arrests. I want to let  them tell it their way, with as little interruption as possible.  Give them the rope to hang themselves.

Because right now, I think they’re all lying. 

 

What others are saying about the book

 

‘Great plots, great characters, great action’ LEE CHILD 

‘Simon Kernick writes with his foot pressed hard on the pedal’ HARLAN COBEN 

'An absolute master of the adrenaline-fuelled ride’ PETER JAMES

 

About the Author

Well where do I start? I wanted to be a writer ever since I was old enough to pick up a pen. I started with one page stories that I illustrated myself (badly) and, as I grew older, the stories got longer. For a long time I just wrote for myself, enjoying the process of disappearing off to new, imaginative worlds, but eventually, while working as a salesman in London I experienced this desperate desire to get published.

I've always been a huge crime fiction and thriller fan so I wrote a crime novel that, unfortunately, pretty much every literary agent and publisher in the land rejected. So I wrote another one with exactly the same result. I have enough rejection letters to decorate a whole house- three hundred in all-but finally I struck gold with my first novel, The Business of Dying, about a cop who moonlights as a hit man named Dennis Milne. It was released in 2002 (seven years after I first tried to get published!) and was described as 'the crime debut of the year' by The Independent, which was a very nice compliment.

Since then I've written a book a year (fifteen in all now) as well as a total of three novellas. I specialise in very fast-paced thrillers set over a short space of time which I like to think grab the reader from the very first page and don't let go. My fifth novel, Relentless, was a Richard and Judy summer read, and the ninth and tenth, The Last Ten Seconds and The Payback, both reached number 1 in the UK book charts, so they're good, I promise!

I don't have a series as such and most of the books can be read as standalones, but I do have recurring characters. Dennis Milne, my vigilante cop, returns in A Good Day to Die and The Payback, and my female detective, Tina Boyd- a woman who finds herself in dangerous situations seemingly at every turn- appears in the vast majority of the recent books.

Anyway, I hope you get a chance to take a look at one or more of them and please feel free to let me know your thoughts.

Simon Kernick is a number one bestseller and one of the UK’s most  popular thriller writers, with huge hits including RELENTLESS, THE  LAST 10 SECONDS, SIEGE and THE BONE FIELD series.