POINT
LAST SEEN
Author:
Christina Dodd
ISBN:
9781335623973
Publication
Date: June 21, 2022
Publisher:
HQN Books
Book
Summary:
From New
York Times bestselling author Christina Dodd comes a brand new, standalone
suspense about a reclusive artist who retrieves a seemingly dead woman from the
Pacific Ocean...only to have her come back to life with no memory of what
happened to her. With a strong female protagonist, a chilling villain, and
twisty secrets that will keep you turning the pages. Perfect for fans of Lisa Jewell, Karin
Slaughter and Sandra Brown, POINT LAST SEEN, will have readers keeping the
lights on all night.
LIFE LAST SEEN
When you’ve already died, there should be nothing left to fear…
When Adam Ramsdell pulls Elle’s half-frozen body from the surf on a lonely
California beach, she has no memory of what her full name is and how she got
those bruises ringing her throat.
GIRL LAST SEEN
Elle finds refuge in Adam’s home on the edge of Gothic, a remote
village located between the steep lonely mountains and the raging Pacific
Ocean. As flashes of her memory return, Elle faces a terrible truth—buried in
her mind lurks a secret so dark it could get her killed.
POINT LAST SEEN
Everyone in Gothic seems to hide a dark past. Even Adam knows more
than he will admit. Until Elle can unravel the truth, she doesn’t know who to
trust, when to run and who else might be hurt when the killer who stalks her
nightmares appears to finish what he started…
Excerpt:
two
A Morning in February
Gothic, California
The storm off the Pacific had been brutal, a relentless
night of cold rain and shrieking wind. Adam Ramsdell had spent the hours
working, welding and polishing a tall, heavy, massive piece of sculpture, not
hearing the wailing voices that lamented their own passing, not shuddering when
he caught sight of his own face in the polished stainless steel. He sweated as
he moved swiftly to capture the image he saw in his mind, a clawed monster
rising from the deep: beautiful, deadly, dangerous.
And as always, when dawn broke, the storm moved on and he
stepped away, he realized he had failed.
Impatient, he shoved the trolley that held the sculpture
toward the wall. One of claws swiped his bare chest and proved to him he’d done
one thing right: razor-sharp, it opened a long, thin gash in his skin. Blood
oozed to the surface. He used his toe to lock the wheels on the trolley,
securing the sculpture in case of the occasional California earth tremor.
Then with the swift efficiency of someone who had dealt with
minor wounds, his own and others’, he found a clean towel and stanched the
flow. Going into the tiny bathroom, he washed the site and used superglue to
close the gash. The cut wasn’t deep; it would hold.
He tied on his running shoes and stepped outside into the
short, bent, wet grass that covered his acreage. The rosemary hedge that grew
at the edge of his front porch released its woody scent. The newly washed
sunlight had burned away the fog, and Adam started running uphill toward town,
determined to get breakfast, then come home to bed. Now that the sculpture was
done and the storm had passed, he needed the bliss of oblivion, the moments of
peace sleep could give him.
Yet every year as the Ides of March and the anniversary of
his failure approached, nightmares tracked through his sleep and followed him
into the light. They were never the same but always a variation on a theme: he
had failed, and in two separate incidents, people had died…
The route was all uphill; nevertheless, each step was swift
and precise. The sodden grasses bent beneath his running shoes. He never
slipped; a man could die from a single slip. He’d always known that, but now,
five years later, he knew it in ways he could never forget.
As he ran, he shed the weariness of a long night of cutting,
grinding, hammering, polishing. He reached the asphalt and he lengthened his
stride, increased his pace.
He ran past the cemetery where a woman knelt to take a chalk
etching of a crumbling headstone, past the Gothic Museum run by local historian
Freya Goodnight.
The Gothic General Store stood on the outside of the lowest
curve of the road. Today the parking lot was empty, the rockers were
unoccupied, and the store’s sixteen-year-old clerk lounged in the open door.
“How you doing, Mr. Ramsdell?” she called.
He lifted his hand. “Hi, Tamalyn.”
She giggled.
Somehow, on the basis of him waving and remembering her
name, she had fallen in love with him. He reminded himself that the dearth of
male teens in the area left him little competition, but he could feel her watching
him as he ran past the tiny hair salon where Daphne was cutting a local
rancher’s hair in the outdoor barber chair.
His body urged him to slow to a walk, but he deliberately
pushed himself.
Every time he took a turn, he looked up at Widow’s Peak, the
rocky ridge that overshadowed the town, and the Tower, the edifice built by the
Swedish silent-film star who in the early 1930s had bought land and created the
town to her specifications.
At last he saw his destination, the Live Oak, a four-star
restaurant in a one-star town. The three-story building stood at the corner of
the highest hairpin turn and housed the eatery and three exclusive suites
available for rent.
When Adam arrived he was gasping, sweating, holding his
side. Since his return from the Amazon basin, he had never completely recovered
his stamina.
Irksome.
At the corner of the building, he turned to look out at the
view.
The vista was magnificent: spring-green slopes,
wave-battered sea stacks, the ocean’s endless surges, and the horizon that stretched
to eternity. During the Gothic jeep tour, Freya always told the tourists that
from this point, if a person tripped and fell, that person could tumble all the
way to the beach. Which was an exaggeration. Mostly.
Adam used the small towel hooked into his waistband to wipe
the sweat off his face. Then disquiet began its slow crawl up his spine.
Someone had him under observation.
He glanced up the grassy hill toward the olive grove and
stared. A glint, like someone stood in the trees’ shadows watching with
binoculars. Watching him.
No. Not him. A peregrine falcon glided through the shredded
clouds, and seagulls cawed and circled. Birders came from all over the word to
view the richness of the Big Sur aviary life. As he watched, the glint
disappeared. Perhaps the birder had spotted a tufted puffin. Adam felt an
uncomfortable amount of relief in that: it showed a level of paranoia to
imagine someone was watching him, but…
But. He had learned never to ignore his instincts. The hard
way, of course.
He stepped into the restaurant doorway, and from across the
restaurant he heard the loud snap of the continental waiter’s fingers and saw
the properly suited Ludwig point at a small, isolated table in the back corner.
Adam’s usual table.
Before Adam took a second step, he made an inventory of all
possible entrances and exits, counted the number of occupants and assessed them
as possible threats, and evaluated any available weapons. An old habit, it gave
him peace of mind.
Three exits: front door, door to kitchen, door to the upper
suites.
Mr. Kulshan sat by the windows, as was his wont. He liked
the sun, and he lived to people-watch. Why not? He was in his midnineties. What
else had he to do?
In the conference room, behind an open door, reserved for a
business breakfast, was a long table with places set for twenty people.
A young couple, tourists by the look of them, held hands on
the table and smiled into each other’s eyes.
Nice. Really nice to know young love still existed.
There, her back against the opposite wall, was an actress.
Obviously an actress. She had possibly arrived for breakfast, or to stay in one
of the suites. Celebrities visits happened often enough that most of the town
was blasé, although the occasional scuffle with the paparazzi did lend interest
to the village’s tranquil days.
She wasn’t pretty. Her face was too angular, her mouth too
wide, her chin too determined. She was reading through a stack of papers and
using a marker to highlight and a ballpoint to make notes… And she wore
glasses. Not casual I need a little visual assistance glasses. These were
Coke-bottle bottoms set in lime-green frames.
Interesting: Why had an actress not had laser surgery? Not
that it mattered. Behind those glasses her brown eyes sparked with life,
interest and humor, although he didn’t understand how someone could convey all
that while never looking up. She had shampoo-commercial hair—long, dark, wavy,
shining—and when she caught it in her hand and shoved it over one shoulder, he
felt his breath catch.
A gravelly voice interrupted a moment that had gone on too
long and revealed too clearly how Adam’s isolation had affected him. “Hey, you.
Boy! Come here.” Mr. Kulshan beckoned. Mr. Kulshan, who had once been tall,
sturdy and handsome. Then the jaws of old age had seized him, gnawed him down
to a bent-shouldered, skinny old man.
Adam lifted a finger to Ludwig, indicating breakfast would
have to wait.
Ludwig glowered. Maybe his name was suggestive, but the man
looked like Ludwig van Beethoven: rough, wild, wavy hair, dark brooding eyes
under bushy eyebrows, pouty lips, cleft in the chin. He seldom talked and never
smiled. Most people were afraid of him.
Adam was not. He walked to Mr. Kulshan’s table and took a
seat opposite the old man. “What can I do for you, sir?”
“Don’t call me sir. I told you, call me K.H.”
Adam didn’t call people by their first names. That
encouraged friendliness.
“If you can’t do that, call me Kulshan.” With his fork, the
old guy stabbed a lump of breaded something and handed it to Adam. “What do you
think this is?”
Adam had traveled the world, learned to eat what was
offered, so he took the fork, sniffed the lump and nibbled a corner. “I believe
it’s fried sweetbread.”
Mr. Kulshan made a gagging noise. “My grandmother made us
eat sweetbread.” He bit it off the end of the fork. “This isn’t as awful as
hers.” With loathing, he said, “This is Frenchie food.”
“Señor Alfonso is Spanish.”
Mr. Kulshan ignored Adam for all he was worth. “Next thing
you know, this Alfonso will be scraping snails off the sidewalk and calling it
escargots.”
“Actually…” Adam caught the twinkle in Mr. Kulshan’s eyes
and stood. “Fine. Pull my chain. I’m going to have breakfast.”
Mr. Kulshan caught his wrist. “Have you heard what Caltrans
is doing about the washout?” He referred to the California Department of
Transportation and their attempts to repair the Pacific Coast Highway and open
it to traffic.
“No. What?”
“Nothing!” Mr. Kulshan cackled wildly, then nodded at the
actress. “The girl. Isn’t she something? Built like a brick shithouse.”
Interested, Adam settled back into the chair. “Who is she?”
“Don’t you ever read People magazine? That’s Clarice
Burbage. She’s set to star in the modern adaptation of Shakespeare’s…um…one of
Shakespeare’s plays. Who cares? She’ll play a king. Or something. That’s the
script she’s reading.”
Clarice looked up as if she’d heard them—which she had,
because Mr. Kulshan wore hearing aids that didn’t work well enough to
compensate for his hearing loss—and smiled and nodded genially.
Mr. Kulshan grinned at her. “Hi, Clarice. Loved you in
Inferno!”
“Thank you, K.H.” She projected her voice so he could hear
her.
Mr. Kulshan shot Adam a triumphant look that clearly said
See? Clarice Burbage calls me by my first name.
The actress-distraction was why the two men were surprised
when the door opened and a middle-aged, handsome, casually dressed woman with
cropped red hair walked in.
Mr. Kulshan made a sound of disgust. “Her.”
Excerpted from Point Last Seen by Christina Dodd. Copyright
© 2022 by Christina Dodd. Published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
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Author
Bio:
New York Times bestselling author Christina Dodd writes
"edge-of-the-seat suspense" (Iris Johansen) with "brilliantly
etched characters, polished writing, and unexpected flashes of sharp humor that
are pure Dodd" (ALA Booklist). Her fifty-eight books have been called
"scary, sexy, and smartly written" by Booklist and, much to her
mother's delight, Dodd was once a clue in the Los Angeles Times crossword
puzzle. Enter Christina's worlds and join her mailing list at
www.christinadodd.com.
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Dodd
Instagram: @christinadoddbooks
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