Selected

by Wayne DePriest

A janitor, a former junkie, a cab driver, a waitress, a high school senior. Strangers in life, they each receive a blue card in the mail. Now they are connected in death by blue cards found on their bodies. The enigmatic letters on the cards mean something to the killer, something Homicide Detective Jayson Weis has to decipher before he can rid the city of this madman. Confronted with the bodies of the present, haunted by the bodies of the past, Weis knows there will be more bodies in his future unless he can stop the Card Killer. When the few witnesses can’t agree about the killer, not even the race and sex, Weis begins to dread the possibility of a second killer. His relationship with long time girlfriend Lois Fremont is deteriorating. The pressure from City Hall mounts. His own uncertainty about his future dulls the edge of his investigation. Help comes from an unexpected direction, a paraplegic teenager who has also received one of the cards.

212 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 27, 2011

About the author

A tall, mustached and rarely serious man, Wayne flies in the face of convention. After convention brushes him away, Wayne flies in the face of adversity. When he isn’t flitting around annoying time honored concepts, he writes a poem or a hundred or shoots pool or kills someone in a book....like "Selected” or the forthcoming “The Button Man”.

Wayne lives and writes in a suburb of Minneapolis, MN, with two cats and one wife. He is older than the picture might suggest.

Reviews

[Ed Drury · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good thriller with lots of puzzles for the reader to ponder between page turns. It is, in every sense of the word, an adult novel. Graphic descriptions of sex and violence are frequent. It is not gratuitous, but nonetheless strong stuff. But if you're not squeamish it adds a healthy dose of realism to the story. Interesting twists and turns of discovery which remind me a bit of stories like Seven, Silence of the Lambs, etc ... You get the idea, extreme psychopathology on display. In that tradition, the book works well and doesn't disappoint. The final few chapters barely allow the reader to come up for air, so savor the story and set aside as much time as it takes. Might mute your phone too ;)