'Death on the D-List' by Nancy Grace
Read an excerpt from Nancy Grace's latest thriller "Death on the D-List."
Aug. 11, 2010— -- Author, attorney and TV personality Nancy Grace pens her second thriller featuring heroine Hailey Dean with this month's release of "Death on the D-List." Former district attorney Hailey Dean, after taking a year off following the horrific slayings of her patients and an attempt on her own life, returns to New York to resume her career as a therapist. Before long, she finds herself once again fighting crime, this time in front of a camera where she learns that the TV industry is just as dangerous.
Read an excerpt of the book below, and then head to the "Good Morning America" Library to find more good reads or check out this link to see more titles in this genre.
CHAPTER ONE
The flight up from Atlanta to Manhattan had been pretty painless. Of course, the security lines and hassle of traveling through the Atlanta Airport were hell on earth, but that was a given.
Once Hailey Dean stepped off the Delta 757 and onto the jetport connecting the plane to the terminal, suddenly so much came rushing back. It had been a little over a year, but walking through LaGuardia past Nathan's Hot Dogs, the magazine and newspaper stands, down the escalator and to the taxi stand outdoors, it felt like she'd never left. It felt the same as before.
Before two of her favorite clients were murdered at the hands of a man who was once her courtroom adversary, a man who not only passed as an upstanding and highly successful member of the Georgia State Bar, but before that, as an Atlanta beat cop. For just a moment, Hailey felt Matt Leonard's hands around her neck again.
Hailey shook the sensation off and moved forward a couple of steps in the taxi line. After a few moments, the next cabbie approached and she hopped in the back seat. Although brusque as expected, he hoisted her only bag into the car trunk, slammed it shut and slid into the driver's seat in front of her.
"Where to?" The cabbie didn't turn around, just directed the question towards the rearview mirror.
She'd learned long ago not to speak too many words to New York cab drivers. With what was left of her Southern accent after living in Manhattan, they could hardly understand a word she said.
"Fifty-fourth Street. Manhattan." She clipped it out short and firm. Less words to misunderstand. It all came back to her without even thinking. The cabbie said nothing, just gunned the motor as dirty-gray snow churned up from the tires and out to the sides of the car.
Hailey buckled her seat belt and leaned back against the seat of the cab, looking out as Queens raced by outside her window. The row houses jammed together along short streets visible from the Long Island Expressway, diners, apartment buildings, billboards ... it all blended together ... not particularly beautiful, but strangely familiar and somehow reassuring despite the fact that it wasn't really her home. The Southland was home and always would be. But New York was part of her now, and she didn't realize she'd missed it until she saw it and smelled it and breathed it again. In that very moment, there in the back of the cab, she was glad to be back.
They exited the FDR just before the UN rose into view, turned right, and careened around the corner and lurched to a stop. Hailey gave the driver cash, declined a receipt and pulled her own bag out of the taxi's deep trunk. Hailey always traveled light, so it wasn't tough to yank it out and let it drop to the curb. She turned and looked all the way up to the top of her apartment building to where its roof met the sky. Way up there, thirty-one flights above, was Hailey's cottage in the sky.
Taking the steps up as quickly as she could while pulling the bag behind her, she wondered briefly if the flowers would start up again now that she was back in Manhattan. Ever since two of her patients were brutally strangled, followed by her own false arrest for the murders, the arresting officer, Lieutenant Ethan Kolker, had tried to make amends. As best he could, anyway.
Related Stories
ABC News Live