The Coming of the Storm
by Matt Kruze
Wordcount: 15,000
Genre: Crime Thriller
Synopsis:
“Keeps the reader in a constant state of anticipation…”
In the little Pacific Coast township of Cresta Cove a serial killer is loose.
The killings take a seasonal pattern, and nobody – not the Chief of Police, nor the brace of FBI agents who have taken up residence in the small community – has the first clue of where to start looking.
There is gossip in the media and among the residents of Cresta Cove, but no answers.
Stacey Gunsmith, whose own mother was brutally murdered by the killer, has a conduit, a source of information that the public are not privy to.
Following the latest killing, Stacey discovers the names of three plausible suspects. They are people she knows. None of them capable of such evil. Or are they…?
Can she identify the Cresta Killer before it is too late? And what is the shattering conclusion behind her own mother’s fate?
“A massive cliffhanger of an ending…”
First 500 words:
For the fourth or fifth time I look at the message on my phone: Why did the whale cross the road?
The punchline will be terrible, I know it will, but that’s the funny part. And when I groan and roll my eyes at him later, he’ll tell me, with scantily veiled satisfaction, that if it’s such a stupid joke, how come I couldn’t guess the answer. And when I’m alone tonight in bed, maybe I’ll smile and a brief laugh will escape.
I stroke the screen and scroll down past the joke to his most recent text, which is of far greater significance.
As I sit on the soft sand waiting for him, I look up, as though for inspiration or a clue. There are pale swatches of blue, but otherwise the sky is streaked with smoky clouds; battle-scarred.
My name is Anastasia Gunsmith. To my knowledge there are no such craftsmen in my heritage. In fact beyond my own sparse scattering of relatives, I’ve never come across another Gunsmith. I guess it’s an unusual name because really, how far back can gunsmiths go?
Everyone calls me Stacey, as opposed to the more obvious Anna. Don’t ask me how that came about. Not from my mother, who called me things like sweetheart and darling, and certainly not my grandmother, who always used my full name.
Probably it was a playground thing. I got a valentines card once – really just a folded piece of white paper with a felt tip heart on the front – from a boy who tried to be clever and addressed it Dear Stasi. Poor guy. We could only have been nine, ten years old. I marched right up to his desk, the offering scrunched in my fist, demanding: Did you send me this? Do you even know how to spell? Do you realise that Stasi is the name for the former East German secret police? Blah blah blah.
He’s probably never asked a girl out since and even now I wince at the recollection. I could be a bitch when I was little.
I shake my head, hug my bare legs, and squint at the grey horizon. Beneath the moody canopy of sky, the ocean is surly, as though in defiance of its name; broad humps, white-crested, rear up and roll towards the shore where they froth and burst on the beach. A mile down the coast, where there are black rocks, the surge booms like thunder. I can hear the hiss, carried to me on the gusting wind, as spray rains back into the water.
I have come to think of such unsettled weather as ominous, a portent of ill fortune, because it was like this when the killings started.