Free Fall

Fox River Valley Series, #3

Best-selling author Leslie Anne Galloway has it all. Professional acclaim. Happy marriage. Secure future. Until . . . without warning, her life falls apart. Her husband Jared dies under supposedly accidental circumstances that generate more questions than answers. Who was he with that fateful night? Why was money missing from his investment account? And how do these events relate to a terrible mistake from his alcoholic past?

Meanwhile Leslie suffers more misfortune. Her healthy pregnancy terminates for no apparent reason. A menacing stranger with uncanny knowledge of her life’s minutia begins stalking her. Someone breaks into her house and sabotages her car. Then comes the final blow, a writer’s worst nightmare—an arson fire destroys all traces of her latest manuscript.

Is she the victim of a fickle fate? Or is an unknown enemy plotting her ruin from behind the scenes.

Before it is too late, Leslie must decide who is her friend, who the foe. There’s Jared’s foster brother Charlie, whose ruthless pursuit of his own self-interest makes him a dangerous man to cross. And Caroline, the ex-wife who hates Leslie for succeeding where she failed. What of the two people who have suddenly surfaced from her past—her old nemesis Marianne, who made Leslie’s teen years a living hell, and Steve, the man whom both women once loved? Can Leslie trust Steve’s current romantic overtures? Or do his mysterious ties to Marianne point to a conspiracy that binds the two in a macabre dance of mutual destruction?

The stakes grow larger when Leslie is attacked by a brutal rapist, then by a vicious predator. In a race against time, she struggles to uncover the truth. At last, betrayed and cornered, she must summon every reserve of ingenuity and courage to thwart an opponent determined not only to engineer her downfall, but to rob her of life itself.