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The Art of Deception [Secure eReader (recommended)/Mobipocket/Microsoft Reader/Adobe Reader 7]
eBook by Ridley Pearson
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eBook Category: Suspense/Thriller
eBook Description:  Friendship comes at a cost. For beautiful Mary-Ann Walker, who struggled with the challenges of a difficult family history, that cost proves to be her life. With Mary-Ann's past as its only guideline, the Seattle homicide unit must delve into the relationships between a misguided young woman and her family, friends, and lover. Let the psychological games begin. Seattle Police forensic psychologist Daphne Matthews, who volunteers as a teenage runaway counselor, is haunted by the loss of a suicide, a "jumper", a year earlier. When a woman's body is found beneath the Aurora Bridge, Matthews is one of the first at the scene--and begins a puzzling investigation that becomes entangled with her own past, that of the victim, and even that of Seattle itself. Mary-Ann's boyfriend has a record of physical abuse, and an attitude that Matthews finds difficult to crack. When the victim's grieving brother surfaces, throwing blame onto the boyfriend and craving revenge, Matthews gains an unstable ally she does not want. Then the stalking begins: the eerie phone calls, the noises outside the house, the shadows that move in the night. Someone has his eye on Matthews--but to stop her, to kill her, or to help solve the crime? While her colleagues Lieutenant Lou Boldt and Sergeant John LaMoia pursue a hotel room peeper in hopes of solving a series of disappearances, the police and Matthews herself are led into the "Underground"--a perfectly preserved city-under-a-city, hidden beneath present-day Seattle. Matthews engages in a mental game of cat-and-mouse, never knowing whom she can trust. Crisscrossing Seattle, diving below the streets to ancient tunnels, running for her life, Matthews must unlock the psychological secrets behind Mary-Ann's death before she herself is buried alongside her. Matthews' very survival will depend on her skills at the art of deception. The pace is always racing, the detail always exacting, the characters fascinating. This is classic Ridley Pearson, keeping tension and excitement up until the climactic ending, which of course involves a life in jeopardy, a fantastic chase scene, and a plot twist. [eBook Special Feature: Includes a preview of Ridley Pearson's book, The Body of Peter Hayes]
eBook Publisher: Hachette Book Group
Fictionwise Release Date: August 2003
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Available eBook Formats [Secure eReader (recommended)/Mobipocket/Microsoft Reader/Adobe Reader 7 - What's this?]: SECURE MOBIPOCKET FORMAT (617 KB], SECURE MICROSOFT READER FORMAT (433 KB] - Requires Microsoft Reader 2.1.1 for PCs, or Microsoft Reader 2.2.2 on Pocket PC 2002 handheld devices. Some older Pocket PCs can be upgraded. Learn More., SECURE EREADER (RECOMMENDED) FORMAT (403 KB], SECURE ADOBE READER 7 FORMAT (3.8 MB]
Secure Adobe Reader 7: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED
Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED
MobiPocket Reader ISBN: 1401398375
eReader (recommended) ISBN: 1401398405
Adobe Acrobat Reader ISBN: 1401398391
Microsoft Reader ISBN: 1401398413
 
"A killer combination of Patricia D. Cornwell and John D. MacDonald with a soupcon of Thomas Harris."--Stephen King
"Realistic police work, real people, real suspense. Ridley Pearson always delivers."--Tami Hoag "Pearson has established himself a reputation as a master of this genre."--Washington Times "Pearson tells an irresistible tale."--The Los Angeles Times Book Review "Pearson excels at writing novels that grip the imagination."--People
1 The Ride of a Lifetime Mary-Ann Walker She lay on her side, her head ringing, her hair damp and sticky. She understood that she should feel pain -- one didn't fall onto blacktop from a three-story fire escape without experiencing pain -- and yet she felt nothing. She saw the Space Needle in the distance, regretting that she had gone up it only once, at the age of seven. Perhaps that had been the start of her fear of heights. Images from her childhood played before her eyes like a hurried slide show until she heard a car start and the first trickle of sensation sparked up her broken legs; she knew undeniably that this was only the beginning. When the floodgates opened, when nerve impulses reached their mainline capabilities, the pain would prove too great, and she would surrender to it. For this reason, and a desire to glimpse the glimmering black mirror surface of Lake Union, she pushed herself off the pavement with her shaky right arm, its elbow finally propping her up. She could feel her father's locked elbows on either side of her, smell his boozed-up breath, although he'd been dead in his grave for two years now. She shrank from the contact of sweaty skin, nauseated by his sour smell and the repetition of his needs, and sought sight again of the body of water that had been a kind of bedtime prayer for her. She clawed herself high enough to catch a moonlike curve of shoreline, just to the left of a bent Dumpster, pitched toward its missing wheel, that loomed over her and made her think of a coffin. The two white eyes that winked and quickly narrowed before her were not headlights, as she first had believed, but taillights meant to keep drivers from striking objects in their rear path. "Stop!" But her faint voice was not to be heard. Her head led the way to the pavement this time, and she answered the call of the pain. Below her she saw the waters she had come to think of as her own, flat black like wet marble. Darkness punctuated by pinpricks of light swirled as he carried her away from the humming car to the bridge's railing. She had no strength to fight, no will. Not even her acrophobia could power her to kick and claw for her life. Tears brimmed in her eyes, blurring any image of him, blurring the lights, blurring the boundary between the living and the dead. In the next few moments she would be both. When he threw her over, it felt like the act of someone distancing himself from something undesirable, like hearing a rat in the garbage bag on the way out to the cans. But as she dropped, she thought of a ballerina's majestic beauty; she saw herself as elegant and refined; she found a balance, a weightlessness that was surprisingly pleasant. And she wondered why she had feared heights all these years. This was the ride of a lifetime. Copyright © 2002 by Page One, Inc.
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