Thicker Than Water

It was called a haven for runaway teens. In truth, it was a nightmare, one that ended in fiery violence sixteen years ago. Or so its survivors believed...

Syracuse news anchor Julie Jones is afraid. Her long-dead past was resurrected when a blackmailer threatened to expose secrets that could destroy her. Then the man was found dead--his throat cut with a knife from Julie's own kitchen. Now a new, faceless enemy wants more than money. This time Julie stands to lose the most precious thing of all--her teenage daughter, Dawn.

Julie finds herself with one unlikely ally, Sean MacKenzie. A journalist with a flair for the sensational, Sean covers the worst humanity has to offer. Julie Jones is hiding something that terrifies her, and he's determined to find out what. He just can't decide whether his goal is to expose her or save her.

Julie will do anything to protect her daughter. But someone else is watching, willing to do whatever it takes to avenge a past that cannot be forgotten.

Publishers Weekly

Straight-laced upstate New York news anchor Julie Jones has a deadly secret: 16 years earlier, as a teen runaway named Jewel, she fled the besieged burning compound of fanatic cult leader/drug dealer Mordecai Young, with his hidden fortune and her dying best friend's newborn child. Self-proclaimed "Reverend" Young and the rest of his cult, save two other "favorite" girls, perished in the attack by federal agents-or so Julie always thought. But when a blackmailer threatening to expose Julie is murdered and two former "favorite" girls turn up dead as well, it appears the messianic madman may be after the daughter Julie has raised as her own. Her only ally is sensationalist shock-jock radio reporter Sean MacKenzie, Julie's worst professional rival. Suspense thrums throughout due to Shane's (Twilight Hunger, etc.) seemingly effortless skill at teasing readers with surprising but believable plot turns. Just as suspenseful-in a different, delicious way-is the snappy sparring between the reluctantly paired co-anchors; romantic sparks fly between them as fast as witty insults, making this a tasty, tension-packed read. (Nov.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Maggie Shayne began her writing career in kindergarten, when she painstakingly copied The Brementown Musicians onto construction paper in full Crayola color, complete with illustrations of her own design, and presented it proudly to her teacher. Of course this was not an exact copy. She had tweaked the story a bit, improving it greatly, in her five-year-old opinion.

By third grade her tastes had matured. At story hour, when it was her turn to choose the book from which the teacher would read, Maggie picked Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart, which she proceeded to recite from memory as the teacher began reading. Far from being suitably impressed, Maggie recalls her teacher seemed to pale a bit, and looked at her oddly from then on.

Her fondness for the macabre stayed with her, as did her penchant for rewriting her favorite stories. As a teen, while watching her beloved Universal Pictures Monster Classics over and over, she became more and more certain someone had to fix the endings.

It was so obvious that Dracula, the Wolfman, and the dusty Mummy had been cheated! These were not horror flicks, in her teenage opinion. They were romances. They portrayed a love that went beyond life itself. But the endings were all wrong. Anyone could see the monster was supposed to get the girl!

Well, one marriage and five daughters later, Maggie has made it her mission in life to see to it that old wrongs are set right.

Her stories range from down-home Westerns (Texas Brand miniseries, Silhouette Books) to glitz (Million Dollar Marriage, 8/99) to modern-day fairy tales (her Avon contemporary titles).

But her best love is the genre known asparanormal romance. And Maggie writes these like no other author. No one else writing today manages to combine the hearts of two such diverse genres as romance and horror, while still thrilling both segments of the readership with the stunning results.

Shamelessly romantic, breathtakingly emotional, chilling in their suspense, with edge-of-the-seat tension, her stories capture the classic allure that makes beauty-and-the-beast tales so beloved the key, is the redemption of the monster by the sheer power of love.