He wants her body and heart, but a killer wants her soul.
After her erotic romance novels become international bestsellers, writer Gillian Tate cannot enjoy her long-sought success once her husband files for divorce and she becomes the target of threats from a religious fringe hate group; but when she tries to find peace in the solitude of a remote lakeside cabin to complete the third novel in the trilogy, not only does she meet the man who can fulfill her secret desires, she also finds she hasn’t escaped danger by leaving the city.
When the Adirondack town's police chief Sam Taylor learns of the threats and checks in on the notorious author, he is surprised to find she is nothing like he would have expected from her erotic novels but everything he has imagined in his own fantasies.
Can he and the woman of his dreams escape her waking nightmare?
*Adult Content: This erotic romantic suspense includes scenes of bondage between consenting adults.*
How I Wrote the Villain in Deadline
by Scarlet Hawthorne
Devolution – The process by which an UNSUB begins to lose control, falling in a downward spiral, unable to control their urge to perform a particular offense brought about by the trauma of their offenses. The rapid movement from “Organized” to “Disorganized.” -- From the Criminal Minds glossary, criminalmindsfanwiki.com.
I primarily wrote Deadline in a panoramic point of view, as if the reader is watching a film, with no inner monologue of the hero or heroine. We learn their thoughts and feelings by what they say and how they behave – just as we do with people in our own lives. No one ever knows what anyone is thinking. I digress from this narrative technique with the villain in the story by allowing the reader into his head and “hear” the delusions of this mad man.
Clearly mentally ill, he may have developed schizophrenia in his twenties, which went unnoticed because of his ability to function “normally” and rationalize any paranoia to others. His delusions have been focused on religion, but now he believes God is speaking to him and has chosen him for a mission.
On the television program Criminal Minds, the BAU would probably identify him as a highly-organized “UNSUB” (unknown subject) who has had recent stressors in his life, which caused his break with reality; but the circumstances of his third killing indicate that he is devolving rapidly.
We see his devolution accelerating while we are in his head, finding that he believes God is actually assisting him in his pursuit of the target of his delusions. At first he takes lines from the Bible out of context and applies them to himself as an Angel of God, as well as to his victims as sinners deserving of their punishment. By the end, he is grasping at anything, from Biblical passages to Jewish mythology and even Greek lyrical poets.
He is now in the middle of a full psychotic break. And the focus of his psychosis is Gillian Tate.
You Jezebel—
What peace, so long as your whoredoms and witchcrafts are so many?
By her teaching she misleads my servants into sexual immorality and the eating of food sacrificed to idols. I have given her time to repent of her immorality, but she is unwilling. Rev 2:20-21
The Sword of Michael the Archangel
Scarlet Hawthorne began writing short stories at the age of eight, poems at ten, and wrote her first novella – a romantic tragedy – at twelve. Today she enjoys creating characters who discover integrity and their authentic selves through their sexuality. She has been a speaker at national conferences discussing how power exchange can enhance relationships and refuting the negative stereotypes of BDSM promulgation in the media.
An award-winning and bestselling author in a variety of genres under other pen names, Scarlet was a featured author at the 2014 BDSM Writers Conference in New York City and contributed an excerpt from her upcoming romantic suspense Retrograde to the first BDSM Writers Con Anthology. Always eager to challenge herself as a writer, Scarlet utilized a “panoramic point of view” narrative style, rarely found in fiction today, in her latest novel Deadline.
Scarlet lives with her two dogs and their Master in a lakeside community in the New Orleans area. Her next release is the contemporary male/male romance Between the Notes, expected in spring, 2015.
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