Winter Solstice
By Nicola Solvinic
The sun god is gone
He stripped the leaves when he went
Trampled the grasses
And swept into the bronze sunset
The winter god is here
The stag-horned watcher
Known only by cloven tracks in the snow
And the weight of his gaze under snow-spangled lashes
Heavy twitching branches of green
Once obscured the moon in summer
That seething night
Of cicadas, crickets, bullfrogs singing
Night’s perfectly still now
Except for the crunch of snow
And the moon burns through skeletons of bare trees
With the thousand flickers of dead stars
Underground, curled in thick earth
Prey dreams of summer days,
He will dig it up, drag it, bellowing and twitching
To the surface
In the red and white field
Prey races across the snows
He will overtake it, felling it
In a tangle of broken legs and sinew
He is the hunter in both seasons, king of these woods
Seething and silent
Searching out his precious sacrifices
Sunless, in shadow, he reigns.
by Nicola Solvinic
Release Date: May 14th 2024
Genre: Supernatural Mystery, Serial Killer Thriller
Publisher: Berkley
Hardcover: 384 pages
ISBN-10: 0593639723
ISBN-13: 978-0593639726
BLURB
A hypnotic, sinister debut mystery about a seemingly good cop who is secretly the daughter of a notorious serial killer.
Anna Koray escaped her father’s darkness long ago. When she was a girl, her childhood memories were sealed away from her conscious mind by a controversial hypnosis treatment. She’s now a decorated sheriff’s lieutenant serving a rural county, conducting an ordinary life far from her father’s shadow.
When Anna kills a man in the line of duty, her suppressed memories return. She dreams of her beloved father, his hands red with blood, surrounded by flower-decked corpses he had sacrificed to the god of the forest.
To Anna’s horror, a serial killer emerges who is copying her father – and who knows who she really is. Is her father still alive, or is this the work of another? Will the killer expose her, destroying everything she has built for herself? Does she want him to?
But as she haunts the forest, using her father’s tricks to the hunt the killer, will she find what she needs most…or lose herself in the gathering darkness?
“I didn’t mean for you to find out like this, Elena.”
A soft voice echoed from the other side of the house. I turned my gaze to a pile of rotted fallen beams. My dad sat there quietly in the dark, perched as he would in a tree stand in the forest. His hat was low over his head, and his rifle was slung over his shoulder.
“I didn’t mean for you to find out at all.”
I whimpered.
He sighed.
“Are you a monster?” I demanded. The word didn’t seem adequate. “Monster” sounded like a word for fairy tales. Not my beloved dad.
He looked at the bodies arranged around the room. “Maybe.”
He stretched his legs and slid down the pile. I backed up against the rusted stove. Liquid sloshed, and something cold and wet splashed down my side. I recognized the smell immediately: curdled blood. A metal bucket turned over and crashed on the floor, spilling the rest of the blood over my sneakers.
I was frozen. I saw the outline of the door, and I should’ve run. But I was rooted in place, as motionless and helpless as any of these women.
My dad loomed over me. His face was strange, his eyes too dark and still. This man who stood over me was not my dad. He was some changeling who had come to take him, leaving an evil shell in his place. A monster.
“What have you done with my dad?” I croaked.
He reached out to touch my cheek. I flinched.
“Your dad is gone.” His voice was a low hiss, like rain in a gutter.
And I knew then what I saw. It was my dad’s Forest God, the one he called Veles, dark and terrible and devouring everything under this roof. He wanted me. I didn’t know if he meant to consume me like those other women or if the Forest God was wanting to do to me as he was doing to my dad, wearing my skin like his own . . .
The door crashed open. The Forest God spun, reaching for his rifle, but he was tackled by a snarling dog. Percival.
An armed shadow stood in the doorway. Agent Parkes. “Freeze,” he ordered.
The Forest God had no intention of obeying anyone’s orders. He wrestled with the dog, and the rifle went off. A new hole was blown in the roof, and I was partially blinded by muzzle flash and deafened by a gunshot in a closed space.
“Drop it!” Parkes commanded. His voice was faint and tinny over the ringing in my ears.
The Forest God scrambled away from the dog, kicking Percival in the chest. He sighted his rifle on the dog.
I screamed.
The Forest God hesitated for an instant—only an instant.
It was enough.
More gunfire, muzzle flashes. The Forest God tumbled across the floor. Parkes advanced on him, shouting, his shoes slipping in the blood. Percival was growling, clamping my dad’s right hand in his jaws. The rifle spun out on the floor, the barrel skidding up against my sneakers. It was hot, and it singed the rubber of my shoe.
“Put it down!” Parkes yelled. The man who had once been my father had gotten his hunting knife loose from his belt and was slashing at Percival. He’d pulled himself up into a half crouch, dripping on the floor, snarling like a cornered animal.
“Put it down now!”
I knew Parkes was going to kill my dad.
Trembling, I reached down for the gun at my feet.
Nicola Solvinic has a master’s degree in criminology and has worked in and around criminal justice for more than a decade. She lives in the Midwest with her husband and cats, where she is surrounded by a secret garden full of beehives.
https://www.nicolasolvinic.com/
https://twitter.com/NSolvinic
https://www.facebook.com/NSolvinic
https://www.instagram.com/nicolasolvinic
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/2287094/nicola-solvinic/
Hosted by
Presented by
No comments:
Post a Comment