The Kill Club
Wendy Heard
On Sale Date: December 17, 2019
9780778309031, 0778309037
Trade Paperback
$15.99 USD, $19.99 CAD
Fiction / Thrillers / Psychological
368 pages
Summary:
A haunting thriller about a woman
who attempts to save her brother's life by making a dangerous pact
with a network of vigilantes who've been hunting down the predators
of Los Angeles.
Jazz can’t let her younger brother
die.
Their foster mother Carol has always
been fanatical, but with Jazz grown up and out of the house, Carol
takes a dangerous turn that threatens thirteen-year-old Joaquin’s
life. Over and over, child services fails to intervene, and Joaquin
is running out of time.
Then Jazz gets a blocked call from
someone offering a solution. There are others like her, people the
law has failed. They’ve formed an underground network of “helpers,”
each agreeing to murder the abuser of another. They're taking back
their power and leaving a trail of bodies throughout Los
Angeles—dubbed the Blackbird Killings. If Jazz joins them, they’ll
take care of Carol for good.
All she has to do is kill a stranger.
Jazz soon learns there's more to fear
than getting caught carrying out her assignment. The leader of the
club has a zero tolerance policy for mistakes.
And the punishment for disobeying
orders is death.
Author Bio: Wendy Heard, author
of Hunting Annabelle, was born in San Francisco and has lived
most of her life in Los Angeles. When not writing, she can be found
hiking the Griffith Park trails, taking the Metro and then
questioning this decision, and haunting local bookstores.
Buy Links:
Social Links:
Twitter: @wendydheard
Instagram: @wendydheard
Facebook: @wendydheard
Excerpt: Chapter4
THE CEILING ABOVE the crowd sparkles
with strings of golden lights. They twinkle just bright enough to
illuminate the faces. I adjust a microscopic issue with my toms and
run my fingers through my bangs, straightening them over my eyes. The
guys are tuning up, creating a clatter of discordant notes in the
monitors. When they’re done, they approach my kit for our usual
last-minute debate about the set list. Dao humps his bass in his
ready-to-play dance, black hair swishing around his shoulders. “Dude,
stop,” Matt groans and readjusts the cable that connects his
Telecaster to his pedal board.
“Your mom loves my dancing,” Dao
says.
“You dance like
Napoleon Dynamite,” Matt retorts.
“Your mom dances
like Napoleon Dynamite.”
Andre raises his
hands. “Y’all both dance like Napoleon Dynamite, and so do both
your moms, so let’s just—”
I wave a stick at
them. “Guys. Focus. The sound guy is watching. We’re three
minutes behind.” I have no patience for this shit tonight. This all
feels extra and stupid. I should be doing something to help Joaquin.
His dwindling supply of insulin sits at the front of my brain like a
ticking clock.
The guys get into
their spots, the distance between them set by muscle memory. Andre
leans forward into the mic and drawls, “Arright DTLA, lez get a
little dirty in here.” His New Orleans accent trickles off his
tongue like honey.
The room inhales,
anticipates, a sphere of silence.
“Two three four,”
I yell. I clack my sticks together and we let loose, four on the
floor and loud as hell. I’m hitting hard tonight. It feels great. I
need to hit things. My heart beats in tempo. My arms fly through the
air, the impact of the drums sharp in my joints, in my muscles, the
kick drum a pulse keeping the audience alive. This is what I love
about drumming, this forcing of myself into the crowd, making their
hearts pound in time to my beat.
Dao fucks up the
bridge of “Down With Me” and Andre gives him some vicious
side-eye. The crowd is pressed tight up against the stage. A pair of
hipsters in cowboy hats grabs a corresponding pair of girls and
starts dancing with them. I cast Dao an eye-rolling look referring to
the cowboy hats and he wiggles his eyebrows at me. I stomp my kick
drum harder, pretending it’s Carol’s face.
The crowd surges
back. Arms fly. A guy in the front staggers, falls. A pair of hands
grips the stage, and a girl tries to pull herself up onto it.
Matt and Dao stop
playing. The music screeches to a halt.
“What’s going
on?” I yell.
“Something in the
pit,” Dao calls back.
Andre drops his mic
and hops down into the crowd. Dao and Matt cast their instruments
aside and close the distance to the edge of the stage. I get up and
join them. Together, we look down into the pit.
A clearing has
formed around a brown-haired guy lying on the floor. Andre and the
bouncer squat by him as he squirms and thrashes, his arms and legs a
tangle of movement. Andre’s got his phone pressed to his ear and is
talking into it urgently. The bouncer is trying to hold the flailing
man still, but the man’s body is rigid, shuddering out of the
bouncer’s grip. He flops onto his back, and I get a good look at
his face.
Oh, shit, I know
this guy. He’s a regular at our shows. He whines and pants, muffled
words gargling from his throat. Some of the bystanders have their
phones out and are recording this. Assholes.
The man shrieks
like a bird of prey. The crowd sucks its whispers back into itself,
and the air hangs heavy and hushed under the ceiling twinkle lights.
Andre is still
talking into his phone. The bouncer lifts helpless hands over the
seizing man, obviously not sure what to do.
I should see if
Andre wants help. I hop down off the stage and push through the
crowd. “Excuse me. Can you let me through? Can you stop recording
this and let me through?”
I’m suddenly
face-to-face with a man who is trying to get out of the crowd as hard
as I’m trying to get into it. His face is red and sweaty, his eyes
wild. “Move,” he orders me.
Dick. “You
fucking move.”
“Bitch, move.”
He slams me with his shoulder, knocking me into a pair of girls who
cry out in protest. I spin, full of rage, and reverse direction to
follow him.
“Hey, fucker,”
I scream. He casts a glance over his shoulder. “Yeah, you! Get the
fuck back here!”
He escalates his
mission to get out of the crowd, elbowing people out of his way twice
as fast. I’m smaller and faster, and I slip through the opening he
leaves in his wake. Just before he makes it to the side exit, I grab
his flannel shirt and give him a hard yank backward. “Get the fuck
back here!” I’m loose, all the rage and pain from earlier
channeling into my hatred for this entitled, pompous asshole.
I know I should
rein it in, but he spins to face me and says, “What is your
problem, bitch?” And that’s it. I haul back and punch him full in
the jaw.
He stumbles, trips
over someone’s foot and lands on his ass on the cement floor. His
phone goes clattering out of his hand, skidding to a stop by
someone’s foot. “The hell!”
“Oh, shit,”
cries a nearby guy in a delighted voice.
“Fucking bitch,”
the guy says, and this is the last time he’s calling me a bitch. I
go down on top of him, a knee in his chest. I swing wild, hit him in
the jaw, the forehead, the neck. He throws an elbow; it catches me in
the boob and I flop back off him with a grunt of pain. He sits up, a
hand on his face, and opens his mouth to say something, but I launch
myself off the ground again, half-conscious of a chorus of whoops and
howls around us. I throw a solid punch. His nose cracks.
Satisfaction. I almost smile. Blood streams down his face.
“That’s what
you get,” I pant. He crab-shuffles back, pushes off the ground and
sprints for the exit. I let him go.
My chest is
heaving, and I have the guy’s blood on my hand, which is already
starting to ache and swell. I wipe my knuckles on my jeans.
His phone lights up
and starts buzzing on the floor. I pick it up and turn it over in my
hand. It’s an old flip phone, the kind I haven’t seen in years.
The bright green display says Blocked.
Back in the pit,
the man having a seizure shrieks again, and then his screams gurgle
to a stop. I put the phone in my pocket and push through the
onlookers. I watch as his back convulses like he’s going to throw
up, and then he goes limp. A thin river of blood snakes out of his
open mouth and trails along the cement floor.
The room echoes
with silence where the screams had been. A trio of girls stands
motionless, eyes huge, hands pressed to mouths.
The flip phone in
my pocket buzzes. I pull it out, snap it open and press it to my ear.
“Hello?”
A pause.
“Hello?” I
repeat.
A click. The line
goes dead.
A set of paramedics
slams the stage door open, stretcher between them. “Coming
through!” They kneel down and start prodding at the man curled up
on the concrete. His head flops back. His eyes are stretched wide and
unseeing, focused on some point far beyond the twinkling ceiling
lights.
Next to him on the
concrete lies something… What is it? It’s rectangular and has red
and—
It’s a playing
card.
Excerpted
from The
Kill Club
by Wendy Heard, Copyright ©
2019 by Wendy Heard. Published by MIRA Books.
Q&A
with Wendy Heard
• Do you
plan your books in advance or let them develop as you write?
I plan them for
a long time before I start writing them, and I’m constantly
revising my outline, but the plot and characters do develop quite a
bit along the way.
• What does
the act of writing mean to you?
It means
everything to me! I have been writing for a really long time, since
childhood. Words and story have always been the way I’ve made sense
of things. I’m constantly making up narratives for people and
events around me.
• Have you
ever had a character take over a story, and if so, who was it and
why?
Jazz held THE
KILL CLUB hostage for months because I couldn’t get her to talk to
me! She just kept crossing her arms across her chest and glaring at
me. She did NOT want a book written about her, and I really needed
her inner monologue for that first person POV! Eventually I started
mentally arguing with her, and then in fighting with her and hearing
her side, I started to get ALL of her IM. It was an interesting
experience, trying to engage with a character in different ways until
they cracked open.
• Which one
of The Kill Club characters was the hardest to
write and why?
Sofia. Her story
is so much like so many others I’ve known. It’s quietly and
invisibly tragic, her pain at the loss of her child so sharp.
• Which
character in any of your books (The Kill Club or
otherwise) is dearest to you and why?
Jazz! By far,
Jazz is my favorite character. In my mind, she’s kind of the spirit
of Los Angeles. She’s been through so much, and her sense of humor
and lack of entitlement gets her through it all. She just
continuously makes the best of every hand she’s dealt, moves
forward, and doesn’t engage in self-pity.
• Do you
have stories on the back burner that are just waiting to be written?
Let me get out
my banjo. YES. I have so many. I have a YA that’s waiting to be
written after I finish this current work in progress, which I’ve
stopped and started a bunch of times, really honing the concept to
get it just where I want it. But I’m constantly coming up with book
ideas and having to tell them “not right now, darlings!”
• What has
been the hardest thing about publishing? What has been the most fun?
Publishing is
not for the faint of heart. For me, the beast is always self-doubt,
and in a business that is full of rejection, that can really eat at
you. It’s so easy to get out of balance and give our creative
projects the power to define us. It’s important for anyone selling
their art to remember to nurture a healthy life away from it, because
art is a fickle master. It will come and go over your lifetime, and
it won’t always be kind. You have to accept the rules of the game,
but you don’t have to let the game play you.
• What
advice would you give budding authors about publishing?
You’ll hear
this a thousand times, and you won’t believe it, but: the most
important thing is writing a good book, and more than that, the right
book. If you let the market and external forces tell you what to
create, you’ll resent and blame them when it doesn’t go well.
That said, keep an eye on the market, find a way to love something
you think can sell, and then put your personal spin on it. No one can
tell your story but you. Prerequisite skills for publishing: The
ability to revise without having a tantrum; an interest in book
marketing and publicity; professional written communication; the
ability to hold your freakout moments and vent them far away from a
public or professional setting; an addiction to caffeine. And for
God’s sake, if you’ve been working on something for years and it
hasn’t sold and you’ve revised it forty times, write a new book.
• What was
the last thing you read?
All Your
Twisted Secrets by Diana Urban. It’s a 2020 book and has a
fascinating timeline craft thing that you’re going to love.
• Your top
five authors?
This is not fair
because I have at least seven thousand favorite authors! How about
this--here are some crime fiction authors doing some innovative
things in the genre. Kellye Garrett, who’s doing sharp-witted,
LA-based mysteries and winning a ton of awards. John Vercher, who
talks about social issues while keeping it gritty and plotty. Rachel
Howzell Hall, an LA native who does these rad investigative
mysteries. Tori Eldridge has a recent and very feminist take on the
action thriller with her recent The Ninja Daughter, which I
highly recommend. Gabino Iglesias’ award-winning Coyote Songs
is this incredible genre mashup, part folklore, part horror, all
commentary, and I can’t recommend it enough. One more one more.
Carmen Machado’s recent In the Dream House. It’s memoir
told in all different genres, it’s chilling, engrossing, dense, and
fascinating. Did you read Her Body and Other Parties? Just
wow.
• Book
you've bought just for the cover?
Wilder Girls.
Because holy crap.
• What did
you want to be as a child? Was it an author?
I was torn
between the visual arts and writing, and I always vacillated between
them. I have a degree in art, and I wrote a book, then did my
painting degree, then wrote some nonfiction, then got my art teaching
credential. I was trying things on for size. I do wish I still had
time for painting. I never intended to abandon it completely in favor
of writing books, but there are only so many hours in the day. I hope
to come back to it in a future existence in which I have some spare
time. In the meantime, I try to write about artists and art as a
means of hanging onto it.
• What does
a day in the life of Wendy Heard look like?
Sex, drugs, and
rock and roll. Just kidding. I wake up at five, do publishing stuff,
go to work at my day job, get my kid, come home, arm-wrestle her into
doing homework, go to the gym, etc. On the weekends I wake up at five
(yes I’m serious), write for a few hours, maybe record or edit an
episode of the Unlikeable Female Characters Podcast, and then, you
know, parenting and life stuff. Whenever my daughter is on a playdate
or doing something away from me, I’m writing.
• What do
you use to inspire you when you get Writer’s Block?
I dive into the
DMs and torture some writing friends, make them brainstorm with me
until I feel better and I have a plan. Or I just step away for
awhile. I actually have come to trust writer’s block. If I can’t
move forward, I need to stop and consider. There’s something wrong,
and my brain is trying to get me to stop and gather up the threads.
We’re so obsessed with productivity and daily word count, but I
actually find I finish books faster when I don’t force myself to
write things I know are wrong and waste weeks undoing things.
• What book
would you take with you to a desert island?
I have a massive
volume that contains all the Sherlock Holmes stories in one. I’d
take one of those collection type of books. See, it’s technically
ONE book.
• Favorite
quote?
“If you work
hard enough, you don’t need luck.” Hell yeah.
• Coffee or
tea?
COFFEE.
• Best TV
or Movie adaptation of a book?
The
Neverending Story.
• Tell us
about what you’re working on now.
I’m doing a
final round of revisions on my 2021 YA thriller, She’s Too
Pretty to Burn. It’s loosely based off Dorian Gray and is about
a teen photographer who takes a life-altering picture of her
introverted girlfriend, sending them into a spiral of fame and danger
in an underground San Diego art scene. It has a character who’s
basically a fine art Banksy and lots of art crimes.
5 Stars
A remarkably twisted and deceptively multilayered puzzle, THE KILL CLUB enraptured me on two aspects. First, the puzzle. I know the concept of "kill a stranger and another stranger will kill the one you want dead" has been done before (Strangers On A Train), but still, I was engrossed, and in fact, I still want to know more of the backstory. This mystery could have a sequel; the possibility is definitely there at its end, and I hope so. The second aspect enthralling me is that our protagonist (such a well-developed character) is Lesbian, so right here we have Diversity. She also is Mother Bear to her much younger brother, who is Type 1 Juvenile Diabetic plus in the control of a horrid individual (adoptive mother). I will not spoil the story with revelations--just read it!
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