by Mark Edwards
Part of The Magpies
First published 2018
Jamie Knight rebuilt himself from nothing. Five years ago, Lucy Newton stripped him of his home, his wife, and the child they never got to meet. The woman the press called Dark Angel went to prison, and Jamie went about the slow work of starting over. Then Lucy wins her appeal and walks free. Not long after, a stranger contacts Jamie in a panic. Lucy is at it again, targeting someone new, dismantling a life the way she dismantled his. Jamie knows exactly what she is capable of. He says yes. That decision puts him back in familiar territory: chasing a woman who is smarter than she looks, more patient than she seems, and completely indifferent to the damage she leaves behind. Jamie tells himself he understands the game now. He survived it once. He knows the rules. He is wrong. A Murder of Magpies is a short story set in the world of Mark Edwards's thriller The Magpies, returning to a protagonist who carries real scars and faces a threat that never fully went away.
Genres: mystery, crime, adult, adult-fiction, thriller
Vibes: dark, gripping, intense, psychological, suspenseful
Tropes: cat-and-mouse, past-trauma, unreliable-antagonist
93 pages · Kindle Edition · Amazon Publishing
Content warnings: abuse, murder, violence