Red Tempest

By Niz Thomas

Disgraced FBI criminal profiler Cameron Ashe finds himself in mourning after a bombshell series of murders rocks his department. Cam's friends, colleagues, mentors. All dead.

Unable to find the killer responsible, Cam is thrown off the case, sequestered away under security detail with his wife, a brilliant high-powered attorney, and forced to face his failure head on.

All he can do to keep from going crazy is reluctantly revisit the clues of the case with the help of his wife. Clues that seem not just painful, but personal.

But clues can lie. Sometimes within us. Sometimes right in front of us. Sometimes in the most innocuous details.

A crime story set in the darkest night of the soul, Red Tempest mixes the mayhem of Silence of the Lambs and the witty dialogue of a Quentin Tarantino movie, complete with a shocking ending you won't see coming!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Throughplace Publishing
• Release date: Feb 21, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224398461

Book preview

A distressed wine label reading with two overlapping wine stains that form an infinity symbol, with a smudged fingerprint on the label. The cover reads: Writers of the Future Award Finalist Niz Thomas presents Red Tempest, an original crime story. Tagline: Inside every investigation lies a storm.

RED TEMPEST

NIZ THOMAS

Throughplace Publishing

COPYRIGHT

Red Tempest

Made in the USA

Published by Throughplace Publishing

throughplace.com

Text copyright © 2023 by Michael Nisivoccia

All rights reserved.

Cover and Layout copyright © 2023 by Throughplace Publishing

Cover design by Michael Nisivoccia / Throughplace Publishing

Cover art copyright © lenkaserbina / red wine stains / Depositphotos

Cover art copyright © roxanabalint / foot finger and handprints / Depositphotos

Cover art copyright © sozon / aged paper sheet / Depositphotos

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

COPYRIGHT

Family Tree

Made in the USA

Published by Throughplace Publishing

throughplace.com

Text excerpt copyright © 2023 by Michael Nisivoccia

All rights reserved.

Cover and Layout copyright © 2023 by Throughplace Publishing

Cover design by Michael Nisivoccia / Throughplace Publishing

Cover art copyright © Robert Adrian Hillman / Shutterstock

This text excerpt is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

CONTENTS

Also By Niz Thomas

Part One

Part Two

Exclusive Sneak Peek

Family Tree

Chapter 1

Also By Niz Thomas

About the Author

PART ONE

The unopened bottle of wine sat alone between us out on the moonlit patio like all the tension that'd bubbled up over the past few months. My fault, I admit—no sense pretending otherwise.

I sat in the typically comfortable high-backed patio chairs (that cost some ungodly amount of money, I imagine) of our secret seven-bedroom beach house along the Jersey Shore. Bayhead, NJ. One of the towns without public beaches to keep the riffraff away. Certainly a far cry from my own experiences growing up and coming to the shore, where a free soda from Jenks on the boardwalk made not just my day but my whole year. Bayhead was a stone's throw from an ocean that too often made me shake my head in amazement, the fact I owned property so close to it. Owned in theory, at least.

House fully dark. To keep up appearances. We weren't really here, after all.

I stared at the bottle, as if doing so would make all my problems go away. But I couldn't get myself comfortable out here, under the moonlit clear sky with the soothing lullaby of the Atlantic Ocean. Not even a little bit.

And that, for me, should have been a sign of how bad things were.

The ocean always calmed me.

The wine bottle was sweating atop our massive acacia wood patio table.

My current predicament had me doing just the same. Except I also had the pleasure of being screwed to go along with it.

So I guess once we opened it, the wine and I would be in a similar place.

Beyond the eerie blue glow of our forty-foot pool and the patio within which it was nestled—which stretched ninety-five feet from the bottom floor of the house, an almost unheard-of length for a backyard in this area—the ocean waves crashed along an unseen beach. Only the fresh, salty spray visible, its scent surfing on the wind's back and toward us. In front, the tops of the dunes glowed white beneath the moonlight. The dunes being a surprise treat levied onto us by the town after Hurricane Sandy hit.

Not that I minded. We weren't here that often, anyway.

Two dim candles on either side of my wife, Nancy, sent angular shadows scrambling to grab hold of something, anything, on her perfectly smooth face. And they made the combination of dark green bottle and blood red wine flicker with mystery. It was a fourteen-year-old Artisan. Not exactly vintage, though it was getting there.

When I first purchased it, it was only about two years old. As much as I could have afforded back then.

The label turned away from me, I only saw the bottle’s ghostly glow. Like dark kryptonite. This varietal was called Tempest. A Napa Valley pinot noir that I’d been looking forward to since before we even bought it. The mystery building and building over the years.

Once a symbol of personal accomplishment—on my salary, expensive wines had never really been possible. Now, given the strange impulse when I'd gone down to the wine cellar to drink it tonight, its original meaning felt much different. More ominous.

Definitely a downer, compared to when I bought the damn thing.

Having removed it from the wine fridge downstairs twenty minutes earlier to adjust up, slightly south of room temperature, I'd made the mistake of bringing it out onto the candlelit back stone patio and never wrapped it up in a napkin or a towel to catch the condensation. Despite the cool temperature, made even cooler by the light breeze off the ocean, the air was just humid enough to make the bottle sweat.

I resisted the urge to get up and fix my mistake, something I knew Nancy would have rolled her eyes at. She was always saying how I worried too much about the little details, the things that most people were able to ignore or sweep under the rug. Things that in the grand scheme, probably didn't matter. It was true, of course. Not so much about the details not mattering—in my line of work, they mattered. Mattered more than anybody on the outside could ever know.

But I sweated