Cheater, the second book in The San Deigo Case Files series by Karen Rose is now available. This mystery is a page-turner with a great who-done-it happening. Time to head back into the lives of Sam and Kit! I'm also sharing an excerpt from the book so be sure to check it out below.
Death is not an unfamiliar visitor to Shady Oaks Retirement Village, which provides San Diego with premier elderly support from independent retiree housing to full-time hospice care. But when a resident’s body is found brutally stabbed and his apartment ransacked, it’s clear there’s someone deadly in their community. Detective Katherine “Kit” McKittrick quickly discovers that Shady Oaks is full of skeleton-riddled closets, and most tenants prefer to keep their doors firmly closed to the SDPD.
A longtime volunteer at the retirement facility, Dr. Sam Reeves honors his late grandfather’s memory by playing the piano for the residents regularly. So it shouldn’t be such a surprise when Kit crosses paths with him during her investigation, after she’d avoided the criminal psychologist—and the emotions he evokes—for the last six months.
Sam’s rapport within the retirement village proves vital to the case, and the pair find themselves working together once again—much to Kit’s dismay. But she is determined to apprehend the shadow of death lurking around Shady Oaks...and equally determined to ignore the feelings she’s developing for a certain psychologist.
Shady Oaks Retirement Village
Scripps Ranch, San Diego, California
Monday, November 7, 11:20 a.m.
Kit McKittrick allowed herself a moment to feel
pity as she stood over the body of the elderly man lying dead on his apartment
floor in the Shady Oaks Retirement Village. Then she squared her shoulders and
proceeded to do her job.
The mood in the dead man's living room was
subdued. The ME was examining the body while CSU took photos and Latent dusted
for prints, but there was little of the normal scene-of-the-crime chatter to
which Kit had become accustomed in the four and a half years she'd been in
Homicide.
Everyone spoke in hushed whispers, like they
were in church. Because it kind of felt like they were. Haunting melancholy
music from a single piano was coming from the speaker mounted on the victim's
living room wall. The music wasn't loud, but it was overwhelming nonetheless.
Kit wanted to turn it off, because the music was so sad that it made her chest
hurt and her eyes burn.
But neither the speaker nor its volume controls
had been dusted for prints, so she couldn't touch it yet. Until then, she could
only square her shoulders, ignore the music, and focus on getting justice for
Mr. Franklin Delano Flynn.
The cause of death of the eighty-five-year-old
white male was most likely the butcher knife still embedded in his chest. But
she'd learned long ago not to assume. Still, a butcher knife to the chest was
never good. It was a long wound, the gash in the man's white button-up shirt
extending from his sternum to his navel. Whoever had killed him had to have had
a lot of strength to create such a wound.
The victim had been dead long enough for his
blood to dry, both the blood that had soaked the front of his shirt and the
blood that had pooled on the floor around his torso.
His eyes, filmy in death, stared sightlessly up
at the ceiling. His arms lay at his sides, his hands slightly curved. Not quite
flat, but not quite fists, either. It wasn't a natural pose for the victim of a
homicide who'd fallen after being stabbed. She wondered if his killer had
repositioned his arms.
Mr. Flynn had been a hardy man,
broad-shouldered, tall, and still muscular. Not in bad shape for eighty-five,
she thought. He wore dark trousers, the pockets turned out, as if he'd been
searched.
His shoes were black oxfords, buffed to such a
shine that she could nearly see her own reflection. She wondered if he'd come
home, surprising his attacker, or if he'd welcomed his killer into his home.
His living room had been ransacked, books
knocked off shelves, knickknacks strewn on the floor. The sofa cushions had
been slashed open, foam stuffing on the floor as well. The man's bedroom was in
a similar state. The drawers in the kitchen had been opened and emptied, their
contents dumped on the counters. Flour and sugar containers had been dumped on
the kitchen's tiled floor. Someone had been looking for something and had left
a terrible mess.
Kit wondered if they'd found what they'd been
looking for. She wondered if Mr. Flynn had fought back.
Kit crouched on the victim's right side, leaning
in so that she could better examine his hands. The knuckles of his right hand
were scraped and bruised, but his fingernails were what caught her attention.
They were mostly gone, clipped way past the quick, down into the nail bed.
That he'd fought back was a decent assumption,
then. His killer hadn't wanted any evidence to be found under the man's nails.
Excerpted from Cheater by Karen Rose Copyright © 2024 by Karen Rose. Excerpted by permission of Berkley. All rights reserved.
