In Plain Sight: A Dawna Shepherd Short Story: FBI Special Agent Dawna Shepherd Mysteries, #2

By Diana Deverell

Fleeing the cops, a wily Ponzi-schemer disguised in a black hat and chin whiskers is hiding among the Plain Folk wintering in a Sarasota suburb nicknamed “the Amish Las Vegas.”

Trying to smoke out the fugitive, FBI Special Agent Dawna Shepherd tangles again with persistent and hunky bounty hunter Tommy O'Brien.

She finds herself suiting up with the Florida Suncoast State University women's basketball coach and players to get her man. But which man?

Bonus story: this ebook also includes “Boot Scoot” in which Dawna first meets Fugitive Team Leader O'Brien. Both short stories first appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. All of Dawna's earlier stories are collected in Run & Gun: 12 Tales of Girls with Guns, an ebook by Diana Deverell.

Dawna’s latest adventure, “Blown,” is also available as an ebook short story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sorrel Press
• Release date: Dec 14, 2015
• ISBN: 9781519933003

Diana Deverell

Diana Deverell has published seven novels, a short fiction collection, and many short stories. Her latest project is a series of legal thrillers set in Spokane and featuring Nora Dockson, a lawyer who specializes in appeal of life imprisonment and death penalty sentences. The first, Help Me Nora, was released in July, 2014. The second, Right the Wrong, was released in March, 2015. The third book will be published in late 2015. For the latest update, visit Diana at www.dianadeverell.com Diana made her debut as a novelist in 1998 with a series of international thrillers featuring State Department counterterrorist analyst Kathryn “Casey” Collins: 12 Drummers Drumming, Night on Fire, and East Past Warsaw. The three novels are also available in a single ebook, The Casey Collins Trilogy. Diana’s short story, "Warm Bodies in a Cold War", originally published in 1996 under a different title, introduced Casey to the readership of the Foreign Service Journal. The prequel No Place for an Honest Woman expanded on Casey’s early career. The story and all four thrillers are now available as individual ebooks. In 2000, Diana’s short fiction starring FBI Special Agent Dawna Shepherd started making regular appearances in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Her mystery collection, Run & Gun: A Dozen Tales of Girls with Guns includes eleven Dawna Shepherd stories first published by Alfred Hitchcock, plus all-new “Latin Groove”. Both the collection and “In Plain Sight,” her 2013 mystery, are available in e-editions. Dawna’s latest adventure, “Blown,” appeared in the Kobo Special Edition of Pulse Pounders, the Januaury 2015 issue of Fiction River anthology. In 2012, Diana released her comic mystery novel, Murder, Ken Kesey, and Me as an ebook. Other digital editions include "Heart Failure", a short story set on the day Jim Morrison died, written to order for a publisher of textbooks for Danish teens learning English. Diana is a member (and past board member) of the International Association of Crime Writers. She belongs to the American Women’s Club in Denmark and her short fiction has appeared in Good Works: Prose and Poetry by Ex-Pat Women in Denmark.

Book preview

IN PLAIN SIGHT

A Dawna Shepherd Short Story

By Diana Deverell

Published by Sorrel Press

www.sorrelpress.com

Table of Contents

IN PLAIN SIGHT: A Dawna Shepherd Short Story by Diana Deverell

IN PLAIN SIGHT by Diana Deverell

AUTHOR NOTE

BONUS! BOOT SCOOT: A Dawna Shepherd Short Story by Diana Deverell

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

OTHER EBOOKS BY DIANA DEVERELL

COPYRIGHT

PRAISE FOR DIANA DEVERELL’S THRILLERS

Bitch Out of Hell, the new political thriller featuring Bella Hinton

Helluva read! I really enjoyed this. I hope there are more books coming. The characters are intriguing, Bella is intelligent and sassy, and the plot is entertaining. (Amazon reader review)

Diana Deverell’s newest book could be a story on the six o’clock news - the outsourcing of America’s military functions, shady corporate dealings, the suspicious death of a whistleblowing board member, and a special prosecutor’s investigation. (iBooks reader review)

. . . a delightfully humorous and suspenseful read with realistic characters . . . and the plot twists and weaves itself into a satisfying conclusion. For a fun thriller read, check this out. (Kings River Life review)

Casey Collins international thrillers

12 Drummers Drumming

Chilling suspense and heated passion—A brilliant debut. (Barbara Parker, Edgar-finalist author of Suspicion of Innocence)

Night on Fire

Deverell’s solid second Casey Collins novel [has] engaging narrative, gripping mystery, and wily plot twists. (Publishers Weekly)

East Past Warsaw

. . . a tale that makes you pray it’s fiction. (S.E. Warwick, mystery reviewer)

China Box

an intricate chess match of espionage, international wheeling-dealing, and love plays out in Washington and Silicon Valley. (Amazon reader review)

Nora Dockson legal thrillers

A great character, a great series—I highly recommend it to people. (Stephen Campbell, CrimeFiction.FM)

Help Me Nora is a compelling gritty novel. I could not put it down and found the legal background fascinating. (Goodreads review)

The series is great; it’s got the theme of the hard scrabble up-from-poverty Nora doing her battle of wits against a scheming, social-climbing assistant attorney general, laced with tons of good detective work. (Amazon reader review)

Deverell has a gift that grabs the reader so one cares about what happens to every character in the story. Once one starts Nora’s clear sighted and brilliant pursuit of justice it’s hard to put the book down! (Amazon reader review)

IN PLAIN SIGHT

by Diana Deverell

1

FBI Special Agent Dawna Shepherd balanced the basketball on her left hip and swiped the back of her right hand across her forehead. A lone palm tree cast meager shade at her end of Pinecraft Park’s outdoor court and heat radiated off the greenish concrete surface.

Dressed in only a sleeveless gray workout top, black Lycra shorts, and an Ace bandage, she was too hot. Two o’clock was the worst time of day in Gulf Coast Florida to be shooting threes under a blazing February sun.

But when you’re the cheese in a trap set to catch a bail-jumping rat, you go for maximum visibility.

For three afternoons in a row, she’d performed in her cover role of benched professional ballplayer getting back in shape after surgery to repair a torn lateral meniscus cartilage in her left knee.

Her audience had grown each day. This Wednesday, thirty bystanders crowded the patch of straggly brown grass separating the basketball court from the adjacent sandy area reserved for volleyball.

The onlookers had turned their backs on the ferocious shuffleboard matches on the other side of the park. Instead, they watched Jacob Zook, a young roofer from Pennsylvania, do his best to stop Dawna scoring.

She cut him no slack, sinking every basket. Essential to attract a crook interested only in winners.

Thanks for letting me try. Jacob snagged his wide-brimmed straw hat from the grass, clamped it over brown hair as curly as the beard edging his jawline. Always wanted to.

You’re a natural.

She grinned up at him from where she sat on the concrete, carefully removing her treasured Air Zooms. Can’t believe you never played before.

She stowed the basketball shoes in her sports bag and slipped on her sandals. As she got to her feet, she dusted sand