Midnight Side , livre ebook

Portable Magic Ltd. - Mostert Natasha

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156 pages

English

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The MIDNIGHT SIDE is Natasha Mostert's critically acclaimed debut novel, which tells the story of an incredibly seductive woman, who even from the grave is able to direct events to her satisfaction.Isa is not surprised by a late night telephone call from her cousin Alette, until she discovers the next morning that Alette has been dead for two days...Then Isa receives three sealed envelopes and a final request from Alette. The envelopes contain instructions on how to bring about the financial ruin of handsome, successful Justin Temple: the man who made Alette's life a misery while she was still alive.But as Isa travels to London to set Alette's elaborate plan of revenge in motion, she is in peril. Unbeknownst to her, Alette was murdered and now it is Isa's turn to be drawn into the killer's world of dark fantasy and lethal obsession.

Sujets

Thriller

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Publié par	Portable Magic Ltd.
Date de parution	02 septembre 2014
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781909965027
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0100€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Lyrics from Brilliant Disguise by Bruce Springsteen. Copyright 1987 Bruce Springsteen (ASCAP). Reprinted by permission.
THE MIDNIGHT SIDE. Copyright Natasha Mostert. First published in the United Kingdom by Hodder Stoughton in 2000. First published in the United States by Harper Collins in 2001. Portable Magic Edition, 2013.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical without permission in writing from the author or publisher.
Photographer / Denis Cohadon / Trevillion Images Author photograph by Mark Andreani. Natasha Mostert
ISBN 978-1-909965-02-7
www.natashamostert.com www.portablemagic.com

PRAISE FOR THE MIDNIGHT SIDE
In THE MIDNIGHT SIDE Mostert eschews the usual murder-mystery clich s in favour of murky, gloomily-lit suspense, painting a Dickensian picture of foggy London that is as compelling as the unfolding drama. Bedtime reading for the brave.
The Times (London)
Classy, psychic thriller, full of frights and forebodings an original, unsettling book, which kicks the usual preconceptions into shape and preserves its chill to the final line.
The Literary Review
An unusual debut thriller The plotline is an original one and Mostert seasons it with absorbing psychological detail the novel holds our attention throughout, and its climactic surprise is a humdinger.
Kirkus
African mysticism, paranormal experiences and terrifying dreams set the tone for this eloquently written novel Mostert s solid prose and chilling premise should make this a crossover success, satisfying fans of ghost stories as well as readers of main-stream suspense thrillers.
Publishers Weekly
A taut and disturbing story.
The Newcastle Evening Chronicle
A wonderful debut. Part ghost story, part mystery, part literary thriller, THE MIDNIGHT SIDE delights on several levels: gorgeous writing, vivid characters, nail-biting suspense, and a truly scary story of love gone wrong.
Romantic Times
A clever and engrossing chiller of a novel.
Manchester Evening News
This is a thoroughly chilling debut from a talented South African writer. The setting is contemporary London in winter, endowed with an air of supernatural menace, but without any of that dreary Victoriana beloved of lesser writers.
Bradford Telegraph and Argus
THE MIDNIGHT SIDE grabs your attention in the first chapter and makes you page feverishly through a paranormal mystery that keeps you intrigued until the last page.
South African Times
A clever debut ghost story that starts with a phone call from a dead woman and keeps you guessing until the end. This South African author is one to watch .
Daily Express (London)
To Frederick and to Joan Mostert, with love

AUTHOR S NOTE
T HE M IDNIGHT S IDE was my debut novel and I wrote it in 1999. It was published the year after by Hodder Stoughton in the UK and by William Morrow in the US.
It is now difficult to remember, but in those days very few people used mobile phones or email. We still wrote paper letters and relied on landline telephones for our long distance communication needs. When I wrote The Midnight Side it therefore never even occurred to me to give my heroine a mobile phone.
After twelve years the rights to The Midnight Side reverted to me and I was free to re-release the story in whatever shape I wished. As I re-edited the manuscript, trimming flabby prose and correcting a few small errors that have bugged me ever since the book was first published, I had to make the decision on whether I wanted my heroine to whip out an iPhone whenever she receives those mysterious phone calls from the dead. After giving the problem a great deal of thought, I decided to stick to the original version. A chirping mobile with a catchy ring tune simply isn t as spooky as the sound of an old-fashioned phone pealing hollowly, monotonously and seemingly without end.
I first became fascinated by the phenomenon of phone calls from the dead when I was only thirteen years old. I was reading a magazine in a dentist s waiting room when I came upon an article about Thomas Edison who had worked on-but never completed-a telephone he hoped would connect the living with the dead. The article also discussed reports of people receiving phone calls from relatives no longer alive. Whereas I am not altogether certain that a ghostly apparition will have the power to terrify me, I am pretty sure that a phone call from someone I know to be deceased would just about scare me witless. Years later, when I started thinking about an idea for a ghost story, I thought it might be a good way to start a book: a phone call in the early morning hours from a beautiful woman who had died mysteriously
The Midnight Side also reflects my interest in mysticism, which has its roots in early childhood when I was growing up in South Africa. My aia (nanny) was a Zulu woman who introduced me to African mysticism and legends and the world of the isangoma (witch doctors). I thought she was the coolest person on the planet and tried to emulate her in every way. I remember exasperating my mother by insisting on stacking bricks below each corner of the bed to keep out of reach of the tokoloshe -an evil gnome with an enormous head but very short legs. When I created the character of Siena in The Midnight Side , I drew on many of my childhood memories for inspiration.
I am often asked if I believe in magic. I believe there is luminosity hiding in the shadow of the mundane and things that move at the periphery of our vision. If that s magic, then I believe in it.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Cover Page
Title page
Copyright
Praise for T HE M IDNIGHT S IDE
Dedication
Author s Note
Prologue
F IRST E NVELOPE Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 Chapter 5 - Chapter 6 - Chapter 7 - Chapter 8
S ECOND E NVELOPE Chapter 9 - Chapter 10 - Chapter 11 Chapter 12 - Chapter 13
T HIRD E NVELOPE Chapter 14 - Chapter 15 - Chapter 16 - Chapter 17 Chapter 18 - Chapter 19 - Chapter 20 - Chapter 21 Chapter 22 - Chapter 23
Epilogue
Acknowledgements About the Author Also by Natasha Mostert
Preview of Natasha Mostert s D ARK P RAYER
Contact Natasha

PROLOGUE
And here the precious dust is layd;
Whose purely temper d Clay was made
So fine, that it the guest betray d.
Elegy on Maria Wentworth Thomas Carew (1594-1640)
T HEY HAD SHAVED her scalp. All that beautiful red hair was gone. Alette s face seemed mottled and bruised in the cool, green dusk of the hospital room.
Four o clock in the morning. The time when death s angel is walking, as his mother would say.
Mmmgh.
The sound was tiny-a soft rattle of phlegm in her throat. He leaned over until his face almost touched hers. He gently placed his finger in the soft hollow beneath her eye.
She would be dead soon. Worm s meat, as the good Dr Donne wrote so elegantly. But no, she would be cremated she had stipulated it so in her will. No maggots and slow decay for his red-haired love. Fire and cleansing and brittle ashes. Precious dust, said Thomas Carew. Another seventeenth-century poet with an ear for a clever conceit.
He sniffed gently at the scent of her skin. His lips barely touched the lovely high ridge of her cheekbone.
He pulled back. Alette was jerking her head and rolling it slightly from side to side on the pillow. Her eyeballs moved underneath the curved, veined lids.
He wondered if she sensed that she was in danger. Maybe fear was able to breach even the soft, implacable hold of the coma that was shuttering her brain. She had been conscious of danger yesterday just before she drove back to London; of that he was certain. He had watched as she lingered for a moment beside the open car door, slapping her gloves against the palm of her hand: back and forth, back and forth. She had hesitated, he knew, because she sensed a rage in the air.
He always marvelled at her psychic abilities. Although she sometimes prostituted herself doing readings for stupid, bored, rich women just like any other common fortune-teller-pandering to their wishes, telling them what they wanted to hear-she was the real thing. She had the gift. He was awed by it and enchanted. Catching a glimpse of this gift was like catching sight of a furtive flame through the closed fingers of a cupped hand.
Back and forth went her gloves. Back and forth. He watched her. He held his breath and his mind silently screamed at her to get into the car.
Get into the car.
To reach this point had taken months. He had engaged in extensive research on how to sabotage the car. Detective novels aside, it s a tricky business: tampering with brakes. It s not easy to get it just right. To inflict just enough damage so that the brakes would keep functioning normally and only give way once she steered the car through those hairpin bends down the cliff. Of course, he had also ensured that her seat belt wasn t working.
Get into the car.
With a slight shrug of her shoulders she turned her body sideways, pulling both her legs into the car with one feminine, graceful motion; her skirt riding up slightly against her thigh.
What was it Alette had said during their last conversation? My life is obsession. At times I m obsessed with keeping my own freedom. At other times I m obsessed with robbing someone else of theirs.
She had spoken slowly, sounding almost puzzled. The light streaming in through the window had blanked out the expression in her eyes. Her face had the flawless, un-human look of a face caught in the cold shock of a flashlight.
Obsession.
Obsession is an open wound; a trickle of rotting pus. Only a clean cut can stop the green poison from spreading. Amputation. Severance. Brutal, uncompromising