Thriller Thursday - Decked by Carol Higgins Clark {A Regan Reilly Mystery Series, Book 1}

The daughter of a successful mystery writer and a P.I. with pizzazz, Regan Reilly is attending her class reunion at St. Polycarp’s England, when the long-dead body of her former roommate turns up under the bushes. It’s a case Regan would love to solve, but a prior commitment puts her on a transatlantic cruise.

She shouldn’t have fretted. The clues to the crime are following her on the Queen Guinevere. Here, on a ship awash with secret lovers, a fortune hunter, a jewel thief and an assassin, Regan is sailing home—and into the hands of a young girl’s killer.

Genre: Mystery/Thriller

Print Length: 230 pages

Published By: Grand Central Publishing

Release Date: May 1, 2008

♦The Book Excerpt♦

From Chapter One

Friday, June 19, 1992

At Sea

Gavin Gray hurried down the hallway, crashing into one handrail and then the other as he struggled to keep his balance. "If I weren't on a ship, I'd think I was drunk," he mumbled. But he didn't care. His adrenaline was pumping so much he felt light-headed. Another reason to bounce off the walls.

The ocean liner he was sailing on, a magnificent floating city, had hit rocky seas tonight. It would be another day and a half before they docked in Southampton, England. Not soon enough, he thought as he lunged his way to the safety of his cabin. He couldn't wait to see land again, and the weather they'd experienced during this crossing had nothing to do with it.

He had already spent enough time on this mammoth vessel playing host to a bunch of old broads. "Let them find someone else to make an idiot out of himself doing the cha-cha. No more black and blue marks for me," he cackled under his breath.

On these long transatlantic crossings, there was always an abundance of unescorted females. Hoping to help even the odds, the cruise line had hired him as a sixty-two-year-old host--a roving companion who would be only too willing to whisk them off onto the dance floor and suffer the brutality of their aimless kicks.

Just this morning he had been teaching the polka to an enthusiastic octogenarian wearing black bulky shoes. They were like gunboats hinged on her thick ankles, targeted for his luckless feet. Gavin winced when he thought of it. Stomping on someone's foot was supposed to be a form of self-defense, not a recreational activity.

♦About Carol Higgins Clark♦

New York Times bestselling author Carol Higgins Clark has written fourteen previous Regan Reilly mysteries. She is also co-author, with her mother, Mary Higgins Clark, of a bestselling holiday suspense series. Carol’s first mystery, Decked, was published in 1992 and was nominated for both the Anthony and the Agatha Awards.

Also an actress, Carol studied at the Beverly Hills Playhouse after receiving her B.A, from Mount Holyoke College. She appeared in Wendy Wasserstein’s “Uncommon Women and Others” at Carnegie Hall, a play set at Mount Holyoke. Recently she played twins who own a bar together in the TNT production of Deck The Halls, the first book Carol wrote with her mother. It’s also the book in which Regan meets Jack.

Using one word titles ending in “ED” came about by accident. After Decked, Carol wrote a book about a murder at a pantyhose convention. She joked that it should be called Snagged. Snagged it was! The rest is history! Carol has a long list of titles to come.