The theme is winter, and the Thalia Press Authors Co-op rises to the occasion, digging deep into their devious imaginations with short stories of cold, ice, mystery, and of course unexplained homicides.
Eight established crime authors including Taffy Cannon and Brynn Bonner, winner of the Robert L. Fish award bring you eight original chilling stories to send shivers down your spine: The anthology, Dead of Winter, edited by Katy Munger and Lise McClendon is an e-book on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Enjoy this collection of intriguing, surprise-filled stories full of buried secrets, back-stabbing and revenge — all set against the wintry backdrop of the cruelest season.
Feathersmith exited. He was sure. The man who’d made his salad was a cold-blooded killer. He walked briskly back to his car. His boss had asked him to cover an account for one of their other reps, Phil Golvane, out sick. What Feathersmith and his boss knew was Golvane was probably too hung over to make his rounds but he had a sweet book of clients who were loyal to him so canning him was a third rail prospect. In these hard economic times margins of profit were thinner than usual and when your company sells secure electronic storage, the competition was unrelenting. Any break in the routine, and there was no better glad-hander and back slapper than the avuncular Golvane, was an excuse for an account to switch horses.
Feathersmith did his best not to dwell on the man behind the counter – that is until he was done for the day and had a chance to plumb their shared pasts later that afternoon. He was perched on a stool at his usual watering hole, the Greenbriar Tavern, in the Del Amo mall in Torrance, a South Bay city of the greater L.A. area. The bar was on the second floor of the vast structure, next door to the upper tier of the Macy’s department store.
He slowly sipped a beer, oblivious to the replay of one of Sunday’s football games on the big screen hoisted above the racks of bottles of spirits. The volume was low and the din of the gathered, from middle managers to schlubs selling tennis shoes, was not a distraction. He was now in the third year of his second divorce and Greenbriar had long become a kind of activities room, an extension of his nearby apartment.
Yes, he confirmed to himself, it was twenty-three years ago when he’d encountered the deli man. They’d been students of Dr. Biberman, Abner Biberman, clinical psychiatrist in college. He’d conducted an off-campus experiment regarding the limits of authority using the oft used set-up where half of the his student volunteers were the guards, the other half the prisoners.
