by Leslie Wolfe
The locket seems strangely familiar. Digging into cold cases, Kay discovers that three-year-old Rose Harrelson was wearing it when she vanished fourteen years ago. In the middle of the night, the little girl’s bedroom—with Mickey Mouse on the wall and a hanging baby mobile—was suddenly empty. The unsolved case still haunts the town.
But the teenager they have found has been dead for only a few hours. If the girl in the river is Rose, where has she been? Who has been hiding her all these years? Kay knows she must solve the kidnapping in order to untangle the mystery of the dead body.
Then Kay receives a shocking call. The dead girl has been identified—and she’s not Rose. So why is she wearing the locket, and what happened to the missing child from all those years ago? As Kay unearths a web of lies and deceit spun for decades, the close-knit community will never be the same. And Kay will find herself facing a truly terrifying killer…
A totally gripping page-turner that should come with a health warning! Be warned: you’ll lose sleep and your heart will race like crazy as you read twist after twist. Perfect for fans of Lisa Regan, Robert Dugoni, and Kendra Elliot.
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The Girl from Silent Lake
Her daughter, with emerald eyes and the sweetest smile, is everything to her. Her whole world. “Mommy,” the little girl says, touching her mother’s face with trembling fingers before she’s torn away. “Don’t cry.” Will she ever see her again?
When single mother Alison Nolan sets off with her six-year-old daughter, Hazel, she can’t wait to spend precious time with her girl. A vacation in Silent Lake, where snow-topped mountains are surrounded by the colors of fall, is just what they need. But hours later, Alison and Hazel vanish into thin air.
Detective Kay Sharp rushes to the scene. The only evidence that they were ever there is an abandoned rental car with a suitcase in the back, gummy bears in the open glove compartment and a teddy bear on the floor.
Kay’s mind spins. A week before, the body of another woman from out of town was found wrapped in a blanket, her hair braided and tied with feathers. Instinct tells her that the cases are connected––and it won’t be long until more innocent lives are lost.
As Kay leads a frenzied search, time is against her, but she vows that Alison and little Hazel will be found alive. She works around the clock, even though the small town is up in arms, saying she’s asking too many questions. Then she uncovers a vital clue – a photograph of the blanket that the first victim was buried in.
Just when Kay thinks she’s found the missing piece, she realises she’s being watched. Is she getting too close, or is her own past catching up with her?
With a little girl’s life on the line, Kay will stop at nothing. But will it be enough to get inside the mind of the most twisted killer she has ever encountered, or will another blameless child be taken?
A totally gripping and utterly pulse-pounding crime thriller series for readers who love Lisa Regan, Robert Dugoni, and Kendra Elliot. This twist-packed page-turner gives “unputdownable” a whole new meaning!
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A Letter from Leslie
A big, heartfelt thank you for choosing to read The Angel Creek Girls. If you enjoyed it and want to keep up to date with all my latest releases, just sign up at the following link. Your email address will never be shared, and you can unsubscribe at any time.
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When I write a new book I think of you, the reader: what you’d like to read next, how you’d like to spend your leisure time, and what you most appreciate from the time spent in the company of the characters I create, vicariously experiencing the challenges I lay in front of them. That’s why I’d love to hear from you! Did you enjoy The Angel Creek Girls? Would you like to see Detective Kay Sharp and her partner, Elliot Young, return in another story? Your feedback is incredibly valuable to me, and I appreciate hearing your thoughts. Please contact me directly through one of the channels listed below. Email works best: [email protected]. I will never share your email with anyone, and I promise you’ll receive an answer from me!
If you enjoyed my book, and if it’s not too much to ask, please take a moment and leave me a review, and maybe recommend The Angel Creek Girls to other readers. Reviews and personal recommendations help readers discover new titles or new authors for the first time; it makes a huge difference, and it means the world to me. Thank you for your support, and I hope to keep you entertained with my next story. See you soon!
Thank you,
Leslie
www.WolfeNovels.com
From the Author
The Enduring Myth of the Walled-Up Wife
The first time I heard this folksong, “The Walled-Up Wife,” I was traveling through Europe with my parents, and I was about ten years old. It stuck with me; dark and compelling and gripping, the way a good story should be, although it lacked a happy ending. There was something deeply disturbing about it—about the thought of masons walling in their spouses to appease dark, evil spirits that would ruin their work during the night hours.
Who would do that, right? Who would sacrifice a loved one for their work? Figuratively, almost every successful professional does, these days; a sad mark of our modern times. As for literally, back then, I didn’t know the answer. Now, I still don’t know for sure, but I have a few theories of my own.
But first, about the myth itself. Per Professor Alan Dundes of the University of California, Berkeley, it transcends centuries, the oldest documented version of it going back more than a thousand years. It is said to have originated in India, and spread via the Balkans into Europe, reaching as far as Germany and England. There are many documented cases of immurement in old English churches.
Regardless of the local flavor, the folksong tells the same story, with small variations. The buildings can be wells, bridges, churches, or entire cities. Regardless of setting, the legend shows a group of masons tasked to build an edifice, whose work is demolished overnight by supernatural forces. Invariably, said forces demand a sacrifice, usually the chief mason’s wife, although in some versions, the spirits demand the sacrificed woman be the first to arrive on site, and that happens to be the lead mason’s wife, a symbolic example of what a good wife should be, the one who’s first to bring nourishment and joy to her husband at work.
I loved this particular version of the folksong best, because it supports the theory that this myth is, in fact, a metaphor—illustrating in powerful imagery the many sacrifices a wife makes after marriage. She gives up her freedom, her mobility, her life, for the personal and professional success of her husband, ending up as the unseen force that supports the edifice he builds. Quoting from Professor Dundes’s book, The Walled-Up Wife: A Casebook, “By entering marriage, the woman is ‘figuratively immured.’ Kept behind walls to protect her virtue, she is treated as a second-class citizen.” In the same book, another scholar, Paul G. Brewster, wrote about women that were ritually killed as a form of foundation sacrifice.
With respect to these, the most surprising finding of our modern times is the forensic validation of the myths. In several such locations, where local folklore spoke of women being walled-in alive, demolished buildings have revealed corpses that supported the words of the old songs, adding an unexpected weight to the tales. Several English churches were found to hide skeletons of age-old sacrifices. According to Paul G. Brewster, the Bridge Gate at Bremen, Germany, revealed the body of a child; the castle of Niederburg in Manderscheid, Germany, revealed the body of a young woman when, in 1844, the wall was broken open at the point indicated by the legend.
I have a couple of theories myself, in stark contrast with the rather romantic mainstream that speaks of sacrifice and metaphor.
What if serial killers existed far longer ago than we are used to believe? In the United States, H.H. Holmes was the first documented serial killer; he died in 1896, after ending more than a hundred lives. But before him, throughout history, there have been several notable serial killers, going
back as far as 331 CE, when an association of 170 matrons in ancient Rome, known as the Poison Ring, was found guilty of killing over ninety men. Let this sink in for a moment: the first serial killer documented in history was a woman; better even, a group of them!
Then, from nobleman Gilles de Rais, who killed over 140 children in fifteenth-century France, to Elizabeth Báthory, a countess credited with the torture and murder of hundreds of servant girls in Hungary in the late sixteenth century and early seventeenth century, history is not short on serial killers. Then—what if—during the times when one didn’t have many options to hide their proclivities in small, tight-knit communities, and lacked modern-day means of transportation and body disposal, serial killers were able to deceive the masses by telling stories about sacrifices that were requested by supernatural forces, hence killing in plain sight? It’s not that farfetched, is it? Not when knowing what we know now about the Dark Ages and the various forms of blood-lusting deviance we’ve learned to associate with names such as the French author Marquis de Sade or Spanish inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada.
Here’s another theory. What if what brought the mythical buildings down at night wasn’t some supernatural force, but… gravity? Rebar was invented in the 1800s and then largely used as structural reinforcement beginning in the early 1900s. Did you know that bone has an elasticity that is comparable to concrete, but it’s ten times stronger in compression? As for steel (the component of rebar), bone has a similar compressive strength, but is three times lighter. Combining the two—human bone and concrete—maintains the compressive strength of concrete but lends the bone-reinforced material more elasticity, more tensile strength. Then, I’m asking, is it too farfetched to imagine that back in the olden days, when rebar wasn’t invented yet and construction engineering was in its infancy, some poorly designed buildings fell apart, and only a maiden’s bones would stabilize them? Just like Avery, who couldn’t bring himself to stop building on top of hills, risking landslide after landslide, those masons must’ve known their foundations needed reinforcements. Some of them, thankfully only some, decided their work was worth the sacrifice of human lives, revealing their true nature as serial killers, while others probably found different, less challenging lines of work.
Published by Bookouture in 2021
An imprint of Storyfire Ltd.
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Copyright © Leslie Wolfe, 2021
Leslie Wolfe has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work.
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eBook ISBN: 978-1-80019-755-8
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events, other than those clearly in the public domain, are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.