In this prequel novella to New York Times bestselling author Wendy Corsi Staub’s psychological suspense novel THE PERFECT STRANGER (Harpercollins, on sale now), readers are introduced to the enigmatic Johanna Hart. Abandoned by her teenaged birth mother and raised by callous grandparents, Johanna is determined to escape her bleak Midwest existence at any cost. But that blind ambition comes back to haunt her years later, after she’s reinvented herself as glamorous golden girl Jenna Coeur. Now her secret past has caught up with her, embodied in a calculating young woman who will stop at nothing to destroy her—a woman with a strangely familiar face...
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Wendy Corsi Staub is the New York Times bestselling author of eighty published books, best known for the psychological suspense novels she writes under her own name. Two of her recent thrillers, LIVE TO TELL (HarperCollins 2010) and SLEEPWALKER (HarperCollins 2012), were finalists for the prestigious Simon and Schuster Mary Higgins Clark award, four have won the Washington Irving Prize for Fiction, and her latest release, THE GOOD SISTER (HarperCollins 2013) was one of a dozen titles honored as Suspense Magazine’s Best Reads of 2013. Several books have been optioned for film and television and she has won numerous industry awards including the RWA Rita, the Romantic Times Career Achievement in Suspense, and the Golden Apple Award for Lifetime Achievement. Her novella COLD HEARTED is a prequel to her new novel THE PERFECT STRANGER (HarperCollins, on sale now), the second in a trio of social networking thrillers that will conclude with THE BLACK WIDOW (February 2015). She is under contract with HarperCollins to write a new suspense trilogy set in the fictional Hudson Valley village Mundy’s Landing. Writing under her USA Today bestselling pseudonym Wendy Markham, she’ll publish her twentieth romance novel, SANTA ANONYMOUS, this holiday season. Readers can find her online at www.wendycorsistaub.com, www.wendycorsistaubcommunity.com, and www.facebook.com/corsistaub and on twitter @wendycorsistaub.
THE PERFECT STRANGER is the second book in my social networking suspense trilogy for HarperCollins. The three novels are connected not by characters or setting, but by theme: do you ever really know who might be lurking behind a familiar screen name on the Internet? Book 1, THE GOOD SISTER (Harper, October 2013), was about cyber-bullying and a fictionalized version of Facebook; Book 3, THE BLACK WIDOW (Harper, March 2015), is about online dating. This one, THE PERFECT STRANGER (Harper, August, 2014), is about a group of breast cancer bloggers who are scattered all over the country and find kindred support and friendship in each other that they haven’t found in their real lives. Now they meet in person for the first time at the funeral for one of their own who was the victim of a random murder—or so they believed. Now they wonder if she shared too much online and if her killer is a fellow blogger who might go after one of them next. For readers who want a bit more of the story, I’ve published an e-novella prequel, COLD HEARTED, which visits a key character a decade before THE PERFECT STRANGER unfolds.
“In a word: terrifying. The author’s latest thriller combines a main character who quickly wins the reader’s heart with tense drama that propels the story forward. The well-plotted mystery features a particularly malevolent villain whose actions will make readers think twice about relationships that develop in cyberspace. Four Stars.”
-- RT Bookreviews Magazine
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