Tooth and Claw Hardcover - 2010 - 1st Edition

Excerpt

PROLOGUE
 
‘Tip your head back and open your mouth.’
 
The voice was cultured, smooth, devoid of any obvious emotion. No anger, no hatred, no lust. Just the faintest tinge of academic curiosity; nothing else.
 
He shook his head. ‘Please,’ he begged, his voice cracking, ‘I don’t—’
 
‘I said, tip your head back and open your mouth.’
 
He could smell alcohol on his captor’s breath. The blindfold around his eyes meant he couldn’t see what was happening, so when fingers entwined themselves in his hair and pulled his head back until his face was pointed up towards the ceiling, he gasped in shock at the pain. His hair felt as if it was being pulled out by the roots. While that hand was still entangling his hair, another one took his chin and forced his mouth open. It let go, but before he could close his mouth something was pushed past his teeth: something that felt like a dental dam of some kind, a plastic plate with a hole in the centre, too rigid for him to crush between the roof of his mouth and his tongue. It kept his mouth gaping open in a silent, frozen scream. He wanted to fight against it, to push his captor away and rip the thing from his mouth, but his arms were tied to the chair and he couldn’t move.
 
His breath came in ragged gasps past the obstruction in his mouth. He wanted to gag. The insides of his cheeks and tongue were drying out as his saliva evaporated. Tears squeezed their way out of his closed eyelids and prickled their way down past his temples and into his hair. He felt a hot flush of shame across his skin. He wanted to be strong but helplessness made him feel faint.
 
‘I’m going to put something into your mouth,’ the voice said, as calm and as measured as if his captor was reading a set of instructions for some new beauty treatment. ‘It’s important that you don’t swallow. Close your throat up and breathe through your nose.’
 
He tried to shake his head but the grip on his hair intensified. Something smooth and warm touched his lower lip. He tried to pull away but the hand on the back of his head pushed him suddenly forward.
 
A tube pushed past his teeth and into his mouth through the hole in the dental dam. He nearly gagged on the plastic as it scraped his tongue. Before he could even take a breath, a warm, thick liquid invaded his mouth, trickling around between, his teeth and his cheeks, infiltrating its way beneath his tongue, sending questing fingers down his throat until he blocked it. He felt his stomach rising up in protest. He had to breathe through his nose, but he was hyperventilating and his nostrils were closing and his breath wasn’t coming fast enough. He began to feel light-headed.
 
‘Don’t worry, my dear,’ the voice said as a hand stroked his hair. ‘It’ll all be over soon.’
 
And then, nothing. Nothing but the solidifying waxy mass in his mouth, and the increasingly difficult whistle of breath through his nostrils, and the red static that invaded the darkness of his blindfolded eyes, creeping in from the outside until everything was red and he knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that he was going to die . . .

Media reviews

Praise for Still Waters
 
“Creepy, menacing, and downright frightening . . . A page-turner teeming with tension.”
—Baltimore Sun
 
“McCrery’s stellar thriller starts with a gruesome bang.”
—Entertainment Weekly
 
“Chilling . . . Violet Chambers is the dark side of Miss Marple.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
 
“This exquisitely macabre mystery will keep you firmly planted until the last page is turned.”
—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
 
“First-rate entertainment . . . Still Waters is no garden-variety mystery. From its breathtakingly brutal prologue to its horrifying revelation of responsibility, it will leave you marveling at McCrery’s storytelling skills.”
—Richmond Times-Dispatch