KILLER MAY CRY

Twelve ordinary lives. Twelve real crimes. Twelve different ways an ordinary day became the last day someone saw the person they loved.

A nightclub hostess believes she has finally found love with a man twelve years her junior — until she takes a quieter job to please him and vanishes. A husband doubles over with midnight stomach pain and rushes to hospital; the same night, his pregnant wife dies in a house fire, and a reporter takes the alibi apart line by line. A mother and her daughter disappear six months apart, both drawn to the same soft-spoken widower. Dismembered remains surface in a canal beside a prestigious school, and lime, dog hair, and national pressure send the police after four innocent men.

What turns a neighbor, a spouse, a trusted friend into someone who kills? In Killer May Cry, A.M. Raven — who holds a masters degree in psychology and has spent years studying criminal minds — retells twelve real cases as fiction: the names changed, the facts kept, and the fear left exactly where it belongs.

A model follows a foreign sailor off a cruise ship; an executed mans "victim" writes home to her mother three years later; a lonely valet becomes a wealthy dentists confidant, then her hired killer; a husband is convicted of murder, and ten years later the woman he supposedly killed returns with a new partner. These twelve stories were headlines once. Now they are fiction — and they read like the truth.

Roots that reach toward hell; leaves that touch the sky.