Acts of Mercy A Mercy Street Novel

by Stewart, Mariah

• ISBN13: 9780345506146
• ISBN10: 0345506146
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780345515100
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-08-25
• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• More Book Details
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Summary

In the third suspenseful novel of the hot new Mercy Street series by a "New York Times"-bestselling author, a profiler-turned-private eye joins an FBI agent to hunt down a serial killer. Original.

Author Biography

Mariah Stewart is the award-winning author of the Last series: Last Look, Last Words, and Last Breath; the Truth series: Cold Truth, Hard Truth, Dark Truth, and Final Truth; and the Dead series: Dead Even, Dead Wrong, Dead Certain, and Dead End; as well as Forgotten, Until Dark, and The President's Daughter. She is the recipient of the Golden Leaf Award and the Award of Excellence presented by the Colorado Romance Writers, and has been a finalist for the Holt Medallion. Her books have been nominated for several awards from Romantic Times magazine, including Best Contemporary Romance and Best Contemporary Novel. Stewart is a native of Hightstown, New Jersey, and lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and their two daughters.

Excerpts

Chapter One


Her high heels clicking across the hardwood floors, Mallory Russo walked through the quiet foyer of the handsome Tudor mansion that served as home to business mogul Robert Magellan, as well as being her place of business. Uncharacteristically silent, the house seemed to reflect the sad spirits of all who’d come under its roof today. Earlier that morning, Mallory and her coworkers had gathered here before filing into the limousines that would take them to Our Lady of Angels Church a few miles away in Conroy, Pennsylvania, where Father Kevin Burch, Robert’s cousin, conducted the memorial service for Robert’s late wife, Beth.

Mallory removed the wide-brimmed black hat she’d bought for the occasion and walked the length of the hall to the wing of the house where the Mercy Street Foundation offices were located. She snapped on the overhead fan as she entered the room and went straight to her desk. She tossed the hat on a nearby chair and tried to remember if she’d ever owned such a thing before. Under the desk, her feet kicked off the heels she seldom wore and her cramped toes wiggled in the hopes of bringing back the circulation.

She wasn’t sure when the others would be back but she hoped to get some work in between now and the time those who’d been invited back for a luncheon began to arrive. No one had seemed in much of a hurry to leave the cemetery after the service, gathered around chatting as they’d been, but she’d been ready to leave even before the priest had begun to speak. There was something unsettling about holding a funeral for a woman who’d been dead but not buried for well over a year, so when Charlie Wanamaker, her fiancé and a detective with the local police force, had whispered in her ear that he’d be taking off, she asked him to drop her off on his way to the police station.

One would expect that, as a former detective herself, Mallory would be beyond the point where death had the power to spook her, but there was something about this death that rattled her right to her soul. Beth Magellan and her infant son had been missing for many months, but the car they’d been in had only recently been found in a deep ravine in the mountains of western Pennsylvania. Beth’s remains still were strapped into the driver’s seat when the car was discovered, but there’d been no trace of the baby other than his car seat. That someone had come upon a dead or dying woman and had walked away without calling for help was beyond Mallory’s comprehension, but the knowledge that this same person had most likely been the one who’d walked away with the woman’s child was haunting her. Had Beth been alive, even conscious, when Ian had been taken? Had her last breath been spent calling for her son? Had Beth been aware that she was dying? The horror of it sent a chill up Mallory’s spine. Robert was a good man, and she’d grown very fond of him. He didn’t deserve to suffer like this. She suspected that the only thing that kept him going now was the knowledge that Ian most likely was still alive. Somewhere.

It was this last part that added an extra layer of sadness to the morning’s service: where was somewhere?

Robert Magellan had founded—and funded—the Mercy Street Foundation to provide private investigative services to those for whom law enforcement agencies were making little or no progress finding missing loved ones. Robert knew the pain of not knowing what had happened to the two people he loved above all others—his wife and his son—but circumstances had blessed him with the means to hire professionals to search for them. That they had failed hadn’t diminished the fact that he could afford to take those steps.

Not that any of the PI’s Robert hired had had any success, Mallory reminded herself. It had bee

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Excerpted from Acts of Mercy: A Mercy Street Novel by Mariah Stewart
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