Meet your new best friend (who also just happens to be a serial killer). For readers of Finlay Donovan is Killing It and The Bandit Queens comes a bright and biting thriller following Cordelia Black, a best friend, a businesswoman, and, in her spare time, a killer of bad men.
THIS GIRL’S A KILLER
by Emma C. Wells
Poisoned Pen Press/Sourcebooks, October 2024
Ask Cordelia Black why she did it. The answer will always be: He had it coming.
Cordelia Black loves exactly three things: Her chosen family, her hairdresser (worth every penny plus tip), and killing bad men.
By day she’s an ambitious pharma rep with a flawless reputation and designer wardrobe. By night, she culls South Louisiana of unscrupulous men—monsters who think they’ve evaded justice, until they meet her. Sure, the evening news may have started throwing around phrases like « serial killer, » but Cordelia knows that’s absurd. She’s not a killer, she is simply karma. And being karma requires complete and utter control.
But when Cordelia discovers a flaw in her perfectly designed system for eliminating monsters, pressure heightens. And it only intensifies when her best friend starts dating a man Cordelia isn’t sure is a good person. Someone who might just unravel everything she has worked for.
Soon enough Cordelia has to come face to face with the choices she’s made. The good, the bad, and the murderous. Both her family, and her freedom, depend on it.
Emma C. Wells loves anti-heroes, dark humor, witty banter, and ride-or-die friendships. Twisty relationships are her kryptonite (or catnip—depending on how you look at it) and her favorite characters are often called unlikable (but at least they’re never boring). Emma enjoys camping, yoga, researching spooky folklore, and collecting copies of Wuthering Heights from used bookstores.
Middle child Aaron Gimmelman watches as his family goes from a mildmannered reform Jewish clan to having over a million dollars of stolen money stuffed in their RV’s cabinets while being pursued by the FBI and loan sharks. But it wasn’t always like that. His father Barry made a killing as a stockbroker, his mother Judith loved her collection of expensive hats, his older sister Steph was obsessed with pop stars, and little sister Jenny loved her stuffed possum, Seymour.
Grace is good at theft. She was taught by experts and she’s been practising since she was a kid. She specialises in small, high value items—stamps, watches—and she knows her Jaeger- LeCoultres from her Patek Philippes. But it’s not the life she wants.
When Kate Summerlin was eleven years old, she climbed out her bedroom window on a spring night, looking for a taste of freedom in the small college town where she was living with her parents. But what she found as she wandered in the woods near her house was something else: the body of a beautiful young woman, the first of Merkury’s victims. And before she could come to grips with what she was seeing, she heard a voice behind her—the killer’s voice—saying: “Don’t turn around.”