Random Road

Last night Hieronymus Bosch met the rich and famous.

That was the lead sentence of the story I filed later that night with The Sheffield Post. My editor spiked it, saying, “Nobody who reads this newspaper knows who Hieronymus Bosch is.”

Instead, the story began, “Six people were found brutally murdered, their nude bodies mutilated, in the exclusive, gated Sheffield community of Connor’s Landing.”

In RANDOM ROAD, six, naked bodies, hacked to pieces, are found in an exclusive, gated Connecticut community. For Geneva Chase, a journalist on the edge of alcoholism, this story is the last chance to redeem herself. She’s lost every other major news job she’s had and, for Genie, working at her hometown newspaper is the end of the line. There’s nowhere else to go.

But she has to work through the distractions of the married man she’s seeing and the love affair she starts with an old high school sweetheart, a single father facing a life and death challenge.

Genie’s journey races along a course that includes a gang of professional thieves, a blind artist, a ghost hunt and a sex club. She’s in a desperate race to get the story ahead of her competition. But can she keep her drinking under control and do her job well enough to keep from getting fired, finish the story and not get killed in the process?

RANDOM ROAD is not only an adult murder mystery, but it’s also a love story with a shocking twist at the end that asks— Do things happen for a reason or is it all random?

“Kies’s debut mystery introduces a reporter with a compelling voice, a damaged woman who recounts her own bittersweet story as she hunts down clues. This suspenseful story will appeal to readers who enjoy hard-nosed investigative reporters such as Brad Parks’s Carter Ross.”

— Library Journal (Starred Review)

“Kies’ fiction debut lays the groundwork for an entertaining series.”

— Kirkus Reviews