New Beginnings

By Kristine Kathryn Rusch

New Year's Eve at the hottest party in the city. Until a bomb at midnight shatters everything.

One guest should have known what was coming. Now, she must decide what to do next. Her life depends on it.

"Kristine Kathryn Rusch's crime stories are exceptional, both in plot and in style."

—Mystery Scene Magazine

• Language: English
• Publisher: WMG Publishing
• Release date: Dec 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223275091

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

New York Times bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch writes in almost every genre. Generally, she uses her real name (Rusch) for most of her writing. She publishes bestselling science fiction and fantasy, award-winning mysteries, acclaimed mainstream fiction, controversial nonfiction, and the occasional romance. Her novels have made bestseller lists around the world and her short fiction has appeared in eighteen best of the year collections. She has won more than twenty-five awards for her fiction, including the Hugo, Le Prix Imaginales, the Asimov's Readers Choice award, and the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Readers Choice Award.   

Book preview

New Beginnings

New Beginnings

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

WMG Publishing, Inc.

Contents

New Beginnings

Newsletter sign-up

Also by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

About the Author

New Beginnings

Debris rained around us. Fist-sized chunks of concrete, rebar, some glass, and fused metal. It sounded like heavy rain. Above us, the night sky was pink and white and golden and green and blue with actual fireworks, and I imagined I heard the oohs and aahs from the crowd.

Only the crowd—at least this crowd, on this roof—wasn’t oohing or aahing. All of us were cringing, waiting for the debris to stop falling. Debris and concrete dust and probably some blood and bits of bone.

I was under a table that had been, until an hour or so ago, covered with crudités and tiny gourmet desserts—a feast for mice with tiny hands, one woman had said to her companion as she daintily plucked one of the miniature pecan pies by its toothpick.

There’s bigger food over there, her companion had said with longing, and by then, I had abandoned that conversation.

I’d been looking for Drago, and I hadn’t seen him.

The crowd was well-dressed, even though the event wasn’t black-tie. Women in cocktail dresses too short and too thin for the weather, perfectly balanced in heels that cost more than my car, and carrying tiny purses in one hand, purses that a woman could hang over one thin wrist when she needed to pick a too-small morsel up by its toothpick.

The men all seemed to have broad shoulders perfectly tailored for their suitcoats. A few of them wore heels too, disguised as cowboy boots, because whenever you have money this old in a city this new you got a plethora of custom-made cowboy boots that—you guessed it—cost more than my car.

I was wearing a black tailored suit that my client had paid for in the expenses, because I’d done this enough to know that I didn’t dare look too out of place.

I was already out of place