A psychological thriller for readers who like their suspense plated beautifully and served cold.
Manhattan worships her: glamorous, merciless, and exquisitely unstable. Her restaurants are temples. Her dinners are theater. Her knives are sharpened before the guests arrive. Espagnole keeps her ruthless. Velouté wants sex, applause, preferably both before dessert. Hollandaise is terrified of everything, including calories and abandonment. Roux catalogs every insult, glance, stain, and possible felony in compulsive detail. Béarnaise has the emotional maturity of a three-year-old with access to matches. The sixth voice rarely speaks.
Tonight, the Committee is starving.
Clara's therapist has refused to give her what she wants: attention, adoration, and a medically inadvisable addiction to her body. By midnight, he is dead — arranged in the exact position Clara once imagined him in, surrounded by several intimate little artifacts she would rather not explain to the police. But Clara didn't kill him. At least, she's almost certain she didn't.
Then Detective Nathan Cole walks into the room, and the temperature rises without anyone touching the stove. He doesn't accuse her. He simply lowers his voice, lets his eyes travel over her, and reminds everyone present that Clara Hastings knows precisely how much poison it takes to ruin a man without spoiling the sauce. Across Manhattan, a psychopath named Orchid is keeping time, planning another final afternoon course by course, minute by minute. Someone is framing Clara. Unless the quietest woman in her head has finally developed a taste for murder.
"If I'm going to lose my mind, I'd rather it happen somewhere edible."
A mythic, slow-burn romance for readers who believe some love stories are older than the people living them.
Anath is the living seal against Apophis, the ancient hunger waiting beneath creation. At her side stands Bastet, the Fang of Ra, divine guardian and warrior, sworn to keep the serpent-god from unraveling the fragile order of the world.
Yet gods rarely bleed for the wars they begin.
Mortals do.
Across centuries, lives become pieces on an immortal board. Kingdoms rise. Temples fall. Names are buried beneath dust. Still, wherever Anath is reborn, Apophis reaches for her, sending death to find the one soul he could never break.
And always, somewhere behind the darkness, Khem follows.
He loved her once.
Then Apophis broke him, remade him into the Shadow, a weapon that took the life of the only woman he ever loved. Redeemed too late to save her, he has vowed to protect her soul. He will chase her through an eternity of reincarnations, desperate to reach her before his ancient master does.
Now their souls return beneath unfamiliar skies, both wearing faces neither will remember. Bastet returns too, bound in the eternal struggle between what devours the human spirit and what lifts it beyond darkness.
The bodies change.
The centuries turn to dust.
The war endures.
The gods move mortals like pieces across eternity's board, but love has always been the one move neither light nor chaos could command.
Eight characters. Eight short films. Click any card once your vignette video is ready — see the note in the page source for exactly where to drop each file in.
First chapters. Character reveals. A note the day both books go live. No spam, ever.
Black Petal Press publishes fiction for readers who want to feel something sharp — the slow dread of a locked-room thriller, the ache of a love that survives death itself. Every book is built to be devoured in one sitting and remembered long after.
Founded by author RGB Gray, Black Petal Press is home to the Poison Chef series and the Eternal Pursuit series, with more stories on the way.
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