A Snippet of POED!

I’ve just returned from my Thanksgiving Holiday in Florence — so long Fra Angelico frescos, truffle honey on cheese, chocolate & Galileo. Time to get back to MONSTERS!

Here is a snippet of my new Candy’s Monsters novella — POED:

If your nephew, or mine, killed his wife and child, slicing them up and preserving their bodies in the oversized freezer in his suburban garage next to the cherry vanilla ice cream and hot dogs, his arrest and trial would be known to all and you’d be hounded for your insights and abused for having “missed the signs” of his murderous insanity. It would all be public and the public loves those stories. They get turned into television movies and instant true crime electronic books. But change the family name, replace your perfectly nice name, and the perfectly respectable reputation that goes along with it, slip in one of a small circle of exceptionally influential names and everything changes.

Money blunts the instruments of law — and The Usher houses the evidence. The errant nephew is never seen again. He lives out his days inside this storied mansion, undergoing treatments with our expert staff. There are no records of his institutionalization. There’s no possibility of parole. There is little thought to a cure, as the members of our professional staff are most interested in the study of, and not the treatment of, these hopeless cases of criminal psychopathology. In exchange for the opportunity to study these extraordinary criminal minds, we are trusted to keep their families’ darkest secrets — the very existence of these violent deviants — out of the public record. We are trusted and we return that trust with our complete silence.

I hope you enjoyed it! Get POED on Amazon.