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Zusatztext The Orlando Sentinel A thriller...with deftness and charm. Informationen zum Autor Linda S. Howington is a bestselling romance author writing under the pseudonym Linda Howard. She has written many New York Times bestsellers, including Up Close and Dangerous , Drop Dead Gorgeous , Cover of Night , Killing Time , To Die For , Kiss Me While I Sleep , Cry No More , and Dying to Please . She is a charter member of Romance Writers of America and in 2005 was awarded their Career Achievement Award. Linda lives in Gadsden, Alabama, with her husband and two golden retrievers. She has three grown stepchildren and three grandchildren. Klappentext Tired of her boring life as a small-town librarian, Daisy Minor decides to give herself a "life makeover" for her 34th birthday. Transforming herself into a party girl, she's declared open season for manhunting. But her free-spirited fun is shattered when she witnesses something she shouldn't--and becomes the target of a killer. Chapter One "Daisy! Breakfast is ready!" Her mother´s voice yodeled up the stairwell, the intonation exactly the same as it had been since Daisy was in first grade and had to be cajoled into getting out of bed. Instead of getting up, Daisy Ann Minor continued to lie in bed, listening to the sound of steady rain pounding on the roof and dripping from the eaves. It was the morning of her thirty-fourth birthday, and she didn´t want to get up. A gray mood as dreary as the rain pressed down on her. She was thirty-four years old, and there was nothing about this particular day to which she looked forward with anticipation. The rain wasn´t even a thunderstorm, which she enjoyed, with all the drama and sound-effects. Nope, it was just rain, steady and miserable. The dreary day mirrored her mood. As she lay in bed watching the raindrops slide down her bedroom window, the unavoidable reality of her birthday settled on her like a wet quilt, heavy and clammy. She had been good all her life, and what had it gotten her? Nothing. She had to face the facts, and they weren´t pretty. She was thirty-four, never been married, never even been engaged. She had never had a hot love affair -- or even a tepid one. A brief fling in college, done mainly because everyone else was doing it and she hadn´t wanted to be an oddball, didn´t even quality as a relationship. She lived with her mother and aunt, both widowed. The last date she´d had was on September 13, 1993, with Aunt Joella´s best friend´s nephew, Wally -- because he hadn´t had a date since at least 1988. What a hot date that had been, the hopeless going on a mercy date with the pitiful. To her intense relief, he hadn´t even tried to kiss her. It had been the most boring evening of her life. Boring. The word hit home with unexpected force. If anyone had to pick one word to describe her, she had a sinking feeling she knew what that word would be. Her clothes were modest -- and boring. Her hair was boring, her face was boring, her entire life was boring. She was a thirty-four-year-old, small-town, barely-been-kissed spinster librarian, and she might as well be eighty-four for all the action she saw. Daisy switched her gaze from the window to the ceiling, too depressed to get up and go downstairs, where her mother and Aunt Joella would wish her a happy birthday and she would have to smile and pretend to be pleased. She knew she had to get up; she had to be at work at nine. She just couldn´t make herself do it, not yet. Last night, as she did every night, she had laid out the outfit she would wear the next day. She didn´t have to look at the chair to envision the navy skirt, which hovered a couple of inches below her knee, both too long and too short to be either fashionable or flattering, or the white, short-sleeved blouse. She could hardly have picked an outfit les...
