The Four Weeks of Halloween - Week 4

Today begins the last week of the Scott Shields Book Writer Four Weeks of Halloween celebration. To commemorate the occasion, everyone is encouraged to buy the last of my four books and read it between now and Halloween night, October 31.

Week 4: “Double Play” – This unique, two-for-one mystery continues the exploits of journalist-sleuths Rob and Jennie Covington in two complete novels contained in one bargain-priced volume.

In the first book, “Blue Light Night,” the Covingtons are at home on a sunny Sunday morning when a strange little girl shows up next door, asking for her mommy. While Jennie searches for the girl’s mother, Rob is drawn into the world of a serial killer whose bizarre methods leave female victims all around the greater Boston area.

In book two, “Out of the Darkness,” a well-known journalist goes missing, and the Covingtons follow a cleverly-disguised set of clues to track his whereabouts. Meanwhile, a man in a coma has a shocking revelation and an unexpected danger threatens both Rob and Jennie, bringing Detective Sammie Ellsworth into the case.

Double Play:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1735448494

I hope you enjoyed these mysteries in the run-up to All Hallows Eve. Thanks for reading, and have a frightfully freaky and fun-filled Halloween.

The Four Weeks of Halloween

Today continues the first official Scott Shields Book Writer Four Weeks of Halloween celebration. To commemorate the occasion, everyone is encouraged to buy my four books and read one each week leading up to Halloween night, October 31.

Week 3: “The Last Case” -- Stanford Bell is a private detective known to the world as "Taco." He is also very dead. His friend, police Lieutenant Hanrahan, finds his body in Taco's office and sets out to discover how Taco became dead, who killed him and why. Through his own narrative, Taco introduces a tall, beautiful former athlete with amber eyes who hires him to find a missing object stolen from her apartment. Taco and his client follow a seemingly random string of numbers and letters they believe will lead them to the stolen property.

The Last Case:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1735448451

Excerpt #3: Out of the Darkness (from Double Play)

In late April, David Flynn had entered Emil Rosenberg’s office just before lunch and helped himself to a chair in front of his editor’s desk. Rosenberg had his back turned and spun around when he heard the creak of the leather chair. “Make yourself at home, why don’t you?” he said to Flynn. “Is there something I can do for you? Coffee? Coke? How about a sandwich?” He shot a rubber band at Flynn’s chest.

“I have a story,” Flynn said, somewhat breathlessly. “It could be a blockbuster, Emil. Maybe another Pulitzer, I don’t know. But it’s big, man. It’s really big.”

Never one to hold back, this was the way Flynn approached every story he pursued, but Rosenberg thought something seemed different this time. He’d never seen Flynn quite this excited before. He sat back in his chair, clasped his hands behind his head and looked Flynn up and down before he spoke. “Another Pulitzer, you say,” he said to Flynn. “You really think you’ve got the kind of story that will win us another prize?”

“I do,” Flynn said. And then he unfolded the story to his boss.

Excerpt #2: Out of the Darkness (from Double Play)

After finishing with the newspaper, Rob lay back in his chair and closed his eyes while Jennie thumbed through the pages. She wasn’t really reading anything, just scanning a few headlines and checking out the ads for fall clothes, but stopped abruptly when she got to page 7 and saw something odd in the lower right-hand corner of the page.

“Look at this ad, Rob,” Jennie said. “This is very strange.”

The two-column boxed advertisement included a small photo of a rocky coastline beach and the words, “Happy birthday, Anthanella. Thinking of those nights on Flintucket Sound.”

“So what’s so weird about that?” Rob asked.

“Well, two things,” Jennie said. “First, remember last year when I went to Boston for that television interview with Selina Alvarez? About our second book? That same day, the TV station was taping a panel discussion on government corruption in the Boston area and one of the panelists was David Flynn. I told you he was there that day, didn’t I? Well, he and the others were standing around awaiting their turn on set when my interview finished, and he walked over and introduced himself. He said he had read both of our books and liked them very much. He told me he was planning a book of his own and was influenced by our journalistic writing style. He also said his wife especially liked the book about the girl on the ferry because she had been a bit shy and restrained growing up, like Mellie Swinson in our book, and could identify with some of the issues the girl had faced.” 

“OK, so what’s the point?”

“The point is, he said his wife’s name was Anthanella,” Jennie said. “It’s pretty hard to forget a name like that. He said it was a family name that went back to medieval Ireland or Scotland or some such thing and that other women in her family had had that name in the past.”

“OK, so there’s another Anthanella in the world,” Rob said, “or maybe somebody knows Flynn’s wife and is wishing her a happy birthday … like maybe a relative or something.”

“Seriously, Rob, I said there were two weird things about the ad. The second one is, it talks about ‘those nights on Flintucket Sound.’”

“So?”

“So there is no such place as Flintucket Sound,” Jennie said. “It’s a fictional place in a novel by Charlotte Mains called Summers With My Lovers. I just finished reading it last week.”

Excerpt #1: Out of the Darkness (from Double Play)

Mordecai Williams lay in his bed at the Montrose Sanitarium, still as the night and quiet as the dead. Except he wasn’t dead. He was just asleep in the darkness of a five-year coma, brought on by a gunshot wound to the head. His vital signs were otherwise stable and doctors determined he was not in imminent danger of dying. They were hopeful, if not confident, that he would somehow awaken one day, look around the room and ask, “Where the hell am I?”

Until that day arrived, Williams was receiving the best medical care that Montrose could provide, the goal being to prevent further physical and neurological damage. Once he was stabilized, doctors took steps necessary to keep him as healthy as possible.

Doctors watched him carefully, waiting and hoping for the day he would awaken from the coma and rejoin the living, but knowing full well that on any given day he could lapse into a vegetative state where recovery would become impossible and decisions would have to be made—painful decisions about whether to keep Williams alive or allow him to pass peacefully into death.

On the fifth anniversary of his treatment, a nurse’s aide giving Williams a sponge bath thought she saw his eyes open, look around the room and close again, but when she summoned a doctor, he could find no sign that Williams was waking up. “Sometimes there’s a flutter,” Dr. Stanley Rockwell told the young woman. “It’s not all that uncommon in coma patients. You may even see him move his head a little from time to time. You can always come and get me when that happens, but like today, it may not mean a thing.”

A few weeks later, when he was in his room alone, Mordecai Williams opened his eyes again and looked around the room ….

Excerpt #3: Blue Light Night (from Double Play)

Jennie was becoming totally immersed in the whole “alien thing” and couldn’t stop reading internet accounts of extraterrestrial beings and otherworldly phenomena. Her research had led her from Sightings.net to History.com, the official website for the History television channel. The network had broadcast an entire series about true-life alien encounters from the 1940s and ’50s, which made it seem considerably more credible than the click-bait websites she had been following. She was home alone on Saturday with nothing much to do while Rob was visiting Alvin at the hospital and Annie was visiting Mrs. Galloway, so she opened her laptop one more time and discovered yet another bizarre report….

And just like that, Jennie was hooked all over again.

She kept clicking links on the History website, reading weirder and weirder stories and washing them down with glasses of wine. After way too much time at the computer, she had read way too many tales of alien abduction and consumed way too much “Chateau de Covington” Cabernet. She was tired, bleary-eyed and legally intoxicated. She hadn’t eaten anything all day and that had served to intensify the effect of the wine. In her condition, she couldn’t have passed a standard breathalyzer test. Her neck ached from staring down at a computer screen and her butt was numb from sitting at her desk so long. It wasn’t like Jennie to get blotto in the middle of the afternoon, and she was embarrassed to be this tipsy so early in the day. She figured that Rob would be home soon and she didn’t want him to see her in this condition, especially after the way she had spent the afternoon, so she stripped off her clothes, threw them into a pile on the floor and headed to the bathroom for a shower.

***

Over the past six days, Rob and Jennie had seen little of each other and even less of their daughter Annie, who had practically moved in with old Mrs. Galloway up the street. On Saturday evening, the Covingtons were more than happy to leave Annie with her babysitter for the night while they discussed their individual investigations and spent some time reacquainting themselves with various parts of the human anatomy. They did the reacquainting part first, for a good, long time, then lay naked in bed to compare notes. Jennie was still wearing a decent buzz from earlier in the day but Rob didn’t seem to notice … or at least he didn’t seem to care. Drunk wife. King size bed. An hour of uninterrupted sex. Does anyone see a problem here? Besides, he was more interested in regaling Jennie with stories about his busy week as a working journalist again.

Reader comments on 'The Last Case'

"I just finished 'The Last Case.' Interesting story, humorous and felt like I was in a conversation with Taco the whole book. I really enjoyed it." 

Excerpt #2: Blue Light Night (from Double Play)

Now that he was out in the open, Rob figured he might as well approach the police and see what, if anything, they would tell him. He walked over to the man in the suit who he had seen talking with the crime scene tech. He was tall and barrel chested with reddish hair and a face that resembled the actor David Caruso. He even cocked his head a little to one side when he talked, the way Caruso did in that Miami cop show he was on. The man looked at Rob with an evil glare and Rob responded with his best “nice guy” smile.

“Hello, detective,” he said, “I’m Rob Covington from the Vineyard Packet. What can you tell me about the victim? I don’t suppose you have a name?”

“Are you nuts?” the cop said. “We’ve only been here an hour. Do you think the victim was conveniently carrying three forms of identification? This must be your first assignment.”

“Actually, it’s not,” Rob said while moving closer to the detective. “I’ve been writing police stories for seven or eight years now and I’ve gotten pretty good at it, so here’s a little tip for you, since we’ve only just met. I can write good stories or I can write bad stories. I can write stories that make the police look really good or stories that make them look really bad. Most of the police I’ve worked with prefer the kind of stories that make them look really good.

"Now, that said, I’d like to start over again and maybe you and I can come to a mutual understanding that each of us has a job to do and we both know how to do our jobs the proper way. What do you say? The choice is yours.”

The cop stared at Rob and continued to scowl. He looked even more like David Caruso now and cocked his head a little farther to one side. He reached into a pocket for a cigarette.

“So here goes,” Rob said. “We’re starting over again, right?” He backed up, stood up a little straighter and looked the cop in the eye. “Hello detective,” he said. “My name is Rob Covington and I’m from .…”

“OK, wise ass, I’ll play along,” the detective said, interrupting Rob in mid-sentence, “but if you fuck with me, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.” He broke the unlit cigarette in two and threw it to the ground. He looked as if he was getting ready to fight.

“Whoa,” Rob said, taking another step backward and reaching into his own pocket. “That’s not the spirit of cooperation I was looking for. Hang on there one second while I record that quote on my phone.” He opened the recording app and started to repeat the detective’s words: “OK wise ass. I’ll play along, but if you fuck with me, you’ll regret it ….”

“Stop,” the cop said. “Just stop, okay? If you’ll stop talking for one minute I’ll tell you what I know. It’s going to wind up in the police report anyway, and I suppose you’ll get that from the chief tomorrow morning. He loves to see his name and picture in the paper.”

Excerpt #1: Blue Light Night (from Double Play)

    Hannah Foreman fired up her laptop and logged on to her favorite website, Sightings.net. Hannah considered herself to be a “ufologist,” someone who studies reports, visual records, physical evidence and other phenomena related to unidentified flying objects or UFOs.

      One of the most famous incidents, a reported UFO crash near Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947 gained international momentum until it was supposedly debunked by the military as nothing more than a downed weather balloon. Probably half of the people who have heard the story still believe it was a flying saucer that crashed near Roswell, and that an alien creature that was a passenger on the craft was captured by military personnel and examined by Army doctors.

      Hannah Foreman was one of those people.

      When her computer came to life, she opened the website and clicked on the link called True Stories of Alien Encounters where she began to type a comment. After months of visiting the site and reading other people’s tales of alien abduction, torture, physical examination and worse, she finally had her own story to tell, and she couldn’t type the words fast enough. Using her screen name HanSolo37, she wrote the following:

      Shit’s getting real, people. Last night it finally happened to me. I was almost asleep when I heard a strange whirring sound, like some kind of mechanical device spinning very fast, outside my apartment. Just then, a weird blue light shot through my bedroom window and scared the living crap out of me. Then there was a beeping noise and the light got brighter and then it turned to red and then to green and finally bright white. The whirring noise got louder and then the light disappeared and the sound went away. I was too scared to look outside. I just stayed in bed and covered my head and shook for half an hour. Has this ever happened to anybody else?

      Almost instantly, comments starting flooding in from dozens of other readers around the world who reported having similar experiences. The stories were all somewhat different but most of them shared a common thread that involved whirring and beeping noises and a strange blue light.

The Four Weeks of Halloween

The Four Weeks of Halloween

Today continues the first official Scott Shields Book Writer Four Weeks of Halloween celebration. To commemorate the occasion, everyone is encouraged to buy my four books and read one each week leading up to Halloween night, October 31.

Week 2: “An Empty Seat on the Ferry” -- No one, not even her parents, particularly cared for sad and lonely Mellie Swinson, so when she vanished without a trace from a Cape Cod ferry, the investigation into her disappearance was notably half-hearted. Then there was Agnes Freeman, an overworked mother of three who also disappeared mysteriously some 20 years later. Did Mellie jump? Was Agnes kidnapped? Journalist-sleuths Rob and Jennie Covington aren’t so sure, so they set out to solve the cases in the second installment of the Covington Mystery Series.

An Empty Seat on the Ferry:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0998871885/

The Four Weeks of Halloween

Today begins the first official Scott Shields Book Writer Four Weeks of Halloween celebration. To commemorate the occasion, everyone is encouraged to buy my four books and read one each week in the 28 days between now and Halloween night, October 31.

Week 1: “Time Capsule” -- Newspaper reporter Rob Covington was planting a tree in his own backyard when he dug up something he wasn’t expecting to find—a time capsule buried by middle school students nearly 40 years before. Opening the box unlocks a mystery that Rob and his reporter wife Jennie pursue to a stunning and unexpected conclusion in this, the first book in the Covington Mystery Series.

Time Capsule:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0998871834/