Pierce’s Picks: “The Next One to Fall”

A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.

The Next One to Fall, by Hilary Davidson (Forge):
Drawing on knowledge and interests developed through her other life as a travel journalist, Hilary Davidson offers up this much-twisted new tale about Lily Moore, the trouble-attracting travel writer she introduced in her Anthony Award-winning first novel, last year’s The Damage Done. In The Next One to Fall, we find Lily going with her photographer friend, Jesse Robb, to visit the 15th-century Inca ruins of Machu Picchu, in Peru. But while there, they discover a woman who calls herself Trista, hanging on desperately to the lower end of a stone staircase. Before she dies, Trista tells them that she’s been murdered--and by whom. But Lily’s subsequent efforts to persuade police that Trista was right in this matter come to naught. So she pursues her own investigation, in the course of which she learns Trista wasn’t the only woman to die at the hands of the person she accused of doing her in. Expect plenty of suspense and polished atmospherics in Davidson’s sophomore novel.

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A handful of lucky readers will soon have the opportunity to judge The Next One to Fall for themselves. Davidson’s publisher, Forge, has supplied The Rap Sheet with three copies of this book, which we’re going to give away for free. If you’d like to win one of these copies, all you need do is e-mail your name and postal address to jpwrites@wordcuts.org. And please write “Hilary Davidson Contest” in the subject line. Contest entries will be accepted between now and midnight on Sunday, February 19. The winners will be selected at random and their names announced on this page the next day.

We’re sorry, but this contest is open only to U.S. residents.

Good luck to everybody who enters this drawing! It is our first such giveaway for 2012, so we’re hoping for an abundant response.

READ MORE: “The Ones Who Didn’t Get Away,” by Hilary Davidson (Musings of an All Purpose Monkey).