Frankly, I haven’t had a typical day lately. Not since I met Jack Renner.

Jack is a homicide detective with an—I hope—unique approach to solving crime. He kills the criminals. He’s a serial killer—an ex-serial killer. I hope. Again.

And for reasons I’d rather not discuss right now, I can’t tell anyone.

At least I’m quite sure he didn’t kill this victim, this formerly beautiful woman eviscerated on the marble floor of her opulent living room. It’s not his quick, painless style at all. This woman was carved open by something very sharp, wielded by someone who had talked their way past the front door and the security system. Joanna Moorehouse, it turns out, is not the type to let just anyone into her private spaces.

She founded and ran a mortgage loan company. That doesn’t sound too exciting in itself, but there must be a lot of money in it to afford this house, as cavernous, as perfectly groomed and as quiet as a mausoleum. Only the blood looks out of place.

And there must be some conflicts going on in her profession, to judge from the protesters holding signs on the sidewalk outside. They complain that the mortgage loans were predatory, that her loan officers talked vulnerable people into higher interest rates, falsified paperwork, and set up balloon payments destined to explode in the homeowner’s face. But I leave that to the detectives, Jack and his partner Riley, to figure out. They will have to interview family—though Joanna doesn’t seem to have any—and friends—ditto—and co-workers to find who might have hated her enough to kill her.

I will turn to the physical evidence.

As with any crime scene, I settle into my comforting routine. Photograph everything, especially the body, from all angles. Draw a little sketch, measuring the inches between the body and the wall, the body and pieces of furniture, trying not to make mistakes that I’ll have to scribble out because this piece of paper may someday be an exhibit of the court, and I can’t draw it over again at the lab and throw out the ink-stained original because every scrap of ‘work product’ from the crime scene must be retained, no matter how painfully bad my artistic ability proves to be.

I note where the blood is, where it comes from, where it goes. Answer: nowhere. The murderer apparently floated away from the victim because there are no shoeprints, smears, or traces of blood left on a doorknob anywhere in the entire house.

But wait! There’s a tiny scrap of a fingerprint in blood nearly underneath the victim’s shoulder. Not likely to be left by her own fingers. . . The Medical Examiner investigator arrives to take the body away, and I make sure they move her without disturbing my little print. I’ll have to use a dye stain, Amido Black, to make the print more visible. With luck it will bring up more ridges, ones framed with such a tiny amount of blood that I can’t even see them until the dye is applied. The problem is that the inky liquid has to be rinsed with water, a difficult maneuver to pull off on a horizontal surface.

While I’m doing the best I can with a disposable pipet and paper towels, Jack appears at my elbow; he startles me so that I wet one knee with diluted dye water. I will never figure out how such a large man can move so silently. I wonder how many of his victims had that same thought, just before—

“Our first suspect has arrived,” he tells me.

I forget about my damp knee.

You can read more about Maggie in Perish, the third book in the “Gardiner and Renner” police procedural series, coming January 30, 2018.

Bestselling author Lisa Black takes readers on a nailbiting journey to the dark side of justice as forensic expert Maggie Gardiner discovers troubling new details about her colleague Jack Renner, a homicide detective with a brutal approach to law and order . . .

The scene of the crime is lavish but gruesome. In a luxurious mansion on the outskirts of Cleveland, a woman’s body lies gutted in a pool of blood on the marble floor. The victim is Joanna Moorehouse, founder of Sterling Financial. The killer could be any one of her associates.

Maggie knows that to crack the case, she and Jack will have to infiltrate the cutthroat world of high-stakes finance. But the offices of Sterling Financial seethe with potential suspects, every employee hellbent on making a killing. When another officer uncovers disturbing evidence in a series of unrelated murders, the investigation takes a surprising detour.

Only Maggie recognizes the blood-soaked handiwork of a killer who has committed the most heinous of crimes—and will continue killing until he is stopped. Burdened with unbearable secrets, Maggie must make an agonizing choice, while her conscience keeps telling her: she’s next.

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Giveaway: Leave a comment below for your chance to win a print copy of Perish. U.S. entries only, please. The giveaway ends January 31, 2018. Good luck everyone!

About the author
Lisa Black has spent over twenty years in forensic science, first at the coroner’s office in Cleveland Ohio and now as a certified latent print examiner and CSI at a Florida police dept. Her books have been translated into six languages, one reached the NYT Bestseller’s list and one has been optioned for film and a possible TV series.

Reach out to Lisa at www.lisa-black.com and on Twitter at @LisaBlackAuthor.

All comments are welcomed.