Pretty as a Picture (Part 1)

By Holly Glass

Detective Rozek Smith might have a strange name, but she’s also the sharpest homicide expert in the Southeast. The pursuit of justice leads her to the tiny town of Carthage, Georgia, where a collection of squeaky-clean crime scenes and bizarre corpses have the local police at a loss. As the culprit breaks out of his routine and the body count jumps, Rozek has to chase her instincts and her desires in order to crack the case.

Whip-smart and world-weary, Detective Rozek Smith is a rolling stone who catches the most elusive killers and breaks the toughest cases. When a fresh wave of slayings takes her deep into rural Georgia, Rozek discovers just how chilling her line of work can be, and how hot her love life can get.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bryant Street Shorts
• Release date: Jan 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9781094405209

Holly Glass

Holly Glass uses romance to explore the complexities of gender identity, the joys of sexual fluidity, and the possibility of personal liberation in a highly gendered world. Her goal is to cultivate intimacy and health by telling stories that are authentic to life and love outside of the hetero-norm.

Book preview

Pretty as a Picture

I always wake up in someone else’s home, a fact that has long since ceased to bother me or even give me pause. Two months in one crumbling town, a month in another, the types of places that surrendered to some anonymous recession that happened decades earlier. A factory closure or an industry hiccup changed an entire community, but hardly registered on the national scale. I wonder if it’s painful, knowing that whatever catastrophe upended your home was barely noticed by the rest of the world. You might have been a famous pit stop on the way to a big city, a tucked-away gem, a secret spot. Now you are known for your slaughterhouses, your pet food factories, your lonesome detention center.

It’s all the same to me. Cities, the real ones, gave me a welcome respite and a jolt of life way back when, but I didn’t grow up in one, never cared much for them. I belong to the big gray skies and shiny belt buckles and fight-ready fists. I learned to ride a bike on those dusty roads, learned to throw a punch in desolate lots that were just beyond a parent’s field of vision, learned how to make a good escape behind honky-tonk bars and gas stations