Glimpse, The Tender Killer

To wind up this week’s feature, Stephen B King and Patricia Holmes return to celebrate the release of The Tender Killer, Book 3 in the Glimpse trilogy.

     

     Criminal psychologist Patricia Holmes is now a detective paired with Detective Sergeant Rick McCoy. Together they hunt The Biblical Killer, so named for the quotes left on walls written in the victim's blood.

     To lure the murderer out they join the Tender Nights internet dating site, openly making themselves targets. Rick and Pat have fought their desire for each other for months. Can they now survive their lust and an insane murderer intent on vengeance?

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And now we come to the finale, what’s the motivation for this story?

SBK: While I knew which direction this book would go in terms of the relationships between the four central characters, and that PPP would escape to wreak havoc on Rick and Pat for revenge, I did not have the killer. For me, as the word Glimpse in each title suggests, giving the reader an insight into why and how the murderer evolved into what they had was vital to me. I didn’t want a trope or anything remotely predictable. Then one day I overheard a conversation and two words jumped out at me; situational schizophrenic. It was like a bolt of lightning hit me; a situation that caused someone to become psychotic? What could that be?

I mentioned before a good friend, Peter Giannis, is a psychologist and I sought him out to ask him about it. He told me some facts such as: there would be a history in the family of such a complaint, that it didn’t come out of nowhere. That it could be brought on by severe guilt over the loss of a loved one where the patient felt responsible and that he or she believed they could have stopped it if only they had acted.

I recalled a quote I’d read somewhere by Astrid Alauda: There is no love like the love of a brother, there is no love like the love from a brother.” I thought about a brother and sister growing up with only each other for company on a remote farm and the tragic story of Bobby and Martine Cornhill slowly came to me out of the mist. In particular, that Martine used to say to him, “catch me Bobby,” when they played on a swing under a Jacaranda Tree.

Pat, after The Beautiful Deaths case, you went to detective school and joined the police as a full-time cop, tell us about that.

PH: I had always maintained that the Major Crime Unit should have on staff a good psychologist. After working as a consultant twice, I was invited to undergo a thirteen-week course and gain my detectives badge. I jumped at the chance to follow my dream.

This came at some considerable cost to you thought didn’t it?

PH: Yes, it cost me my marriage. Tom gave me an ultimatum it was him or the job. I believe, though he never told me, that he had become insanely jealous of my relationship with Rick, as had Juliet. Rick and I hadn’t done anything to warrant that angst, yet it was there, and I suppose Blind Freddy could see we were insanely attracted to each other. I think they both felt it was a matter of time until we jumped into bed, though I assure you that wouldn’t have happened had they in their own way not pushed us into it. One thing is for sure, I would not, and could not give up my dream because of Tom’s ultimatum.

And The Biblical Killer, tell us about your profile for him.

PH: Nothing could have prepared me for my first real case as a fully-fledged detective. Not only was that because of the sheer unbelievable brutality of the murders, but the insane biblical quotations left on the walls of the victims houses in blood. The quotes inferred that the victims were liars and that someone was urging the writer to commit the crimes, and that shouted schizophrenia. Once we found the victims were using a sex dating internet website, there seemed only one way to catch the killer. He was spiralling out of control and the deaths were becoming gorier and the time between each murder was accelerating, so Rick and I went undercover. We posed on the website and told blatant lies on our profiles in a bid to attract the murderer’s attention.

Looking at the indicators we had, it seemed to me the killer had suffered some catastrophic guilt over a loved one’s death, causing a situational schizophrenic state where he felt compelled by his alter ego to avenge that loved one’s death.

And what about your relationship with Rick, how did this case impact on that?

PH: Well, once we put ourselves out there as bait, we needed protection in case the killer came calling, so he moved into my spare bedroom so we could watch each other’s back. But Juliet saw red and left Rick, so we were both suddenly separated. We were talking in sex chat rooms abut extramarital affairs, organising meetings with dates pretending to have casual sex to find our killer, and the temptation we had been fighting for so long reached bursting point.

The body count was rising, the attraction between us was growing being under the same roof, and then, when it seemed like we couldn’t take any more, PPP escaped with one intention in mind, to take his revenge.

Without giving the story away, what can you tell us about what happened?

PH. Everything went wrong, it was a disaster.

Glimpse, The Tender Killer was released on September 11, 2019 as an eBook, paperback and audio. For the month of September Glimpse 1, Glimpse Memoir of a Serial Killer is on Sale for 99c

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