Today we have Janis Lane and let me tell you I am getting this book right now! I LOVE the cover!! I know, I know you’re not supposed to judge a book by it’s cover but look at it!! LOVE!!

A killer is attacking respectable citizens in picturesque Hubbard, NY, and leaving corpses on their front steps in the middle of the day. Detective Fowler isn’t certain who causes him to lose the most sleep, a certain sexy reporter with bouncing curls and sparkling black eyes, or the elusive psychopath creating panic in his small-town community. Together, the detective and the reporter race to find the monster in their midst and return the town to the desirable place where people come to raise their families in peace and contentment. Can they sort through their differences to find romance even as they search for a determined stalker with murder on his mind? The clock ticks down on a man in a rage with a deadly mission.

 

https://www.amazon.com/Murder-Neighborhood-Janis-Lane-ebook/dp/B00GAOTNLC

 

MURDER IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD

Chapter One

Fowler supposed it was as good a day as any to die. He had seen bodies frozen in the snow, rotting in the rain and in sun so hot the flesh cooked on the bones before the vultures could find them. This death was almost dignified in contrast. The woman looked as if she had decided to take a rest on her front steps and someone had come along and taped her face. There was no sign of a struggle. The body was still stiff with rigor mortis.

The detective bent down and studied the corpse closely and carefully, imprinting it on his brain.

One brown eye bugged out, staring sightlessly up at the blue sky. Wide gray duct tape crisscrossed the lower half of her face, covering her nose, mouth, and one eye. Dyed blond hair, roots showing an inch of gray, stood thinly away from her scalp. Pudgy hands with candy pink fingernails curled into claws. Her face, what was showing of it, a vivid purple, so swollen her ears jutted out from a head on fat-padded shoulders.

Wide jeans were rolled up at the ankles and a pair of scruffy bedroom slippers stuck out at right angles. A sweatshirt reading, ‘Gentlemen prefer blondes,’ undulated across the mounds of her breasts. Sitting to one side on the top step with dried grass sticking out of its head, a plastic jack-o-lantern grinned grotesquely, signaling the season.

Behind him, Eddie, the rookie cop, pinned yellow crime scene tape to the nearby shrub causing small, golden leaves to rain down on the lawn. Overhead a canopy of ancient sugar maples radiated fall and dropped blood-red leaves. A vagrant breeze picked up and swirled them gently over and around the corpse where they collected in a pile underneath her outstretched arm.

It was a near perfect, early October day, the third on a Wednesday; temperatures in the mid 60’s, sun shining with a mild zephyr puffing by now and then. An expectant hush had fallen over one of the residential neighborhoods of the Town of Hubbard located in Western New York. The neighbors had to be peeking out their windows—two black and whites parked in the front yard—but were respectfully remaining inside for now.

*****

Janis Lane writes Cozy Mysteries set in small town America, Hubbard, NY, with Detective Kevin Fowler on duty. With pen name, Emma Lane, she frolics with heroes and heroines, dukes and ladies, in the Regency era of history. In her spare time, she works in her son’s plant nursery playing with flowers.