Exclusive Excerpt: HUNTED by Maggie Shayne
Nighttime was different up here, she thought, gazing outside. Star-spangled and natural. Alive and real. Nothing like night had been downstate. The night up here spoke in whispers, but at least it spoke.
The house tended to creak in response to the wind outside. It was as if the night moaned a question and then the house creaked an answer.
She paced away from the window, bending to stroke Jax's head when he twisted around her calves. There was nothing out there. Just forests and lakes and the speck-on-the-map town of Pine Lake a few miles down the mountain, where old men still sat around a checkerboard in the general store.
She ought to go back to bed, try to sleep, she supposed. She turned toward the curving staircase and started up it.
Then she stopped dead in her tracks and listened to what sounded absurdly like an upstairs window scraping open.
A heartbeat later, the doorbell chimed, and she almost jumped out of her skin. No one visited her up here. Especially not in the middle of the night.
Her stomach turned queasy as she tried to decide which to investigate first. She turned toward the door, because a doorbell was certainly real, while a weird noise her brain interpreted as an upstairs window scraping open, was probably not.
Maybe it was a hunter who'd got himself lost. Or maybe one of the locals needed something. Still, there was a tingling along her nape, and her hand on the doorknob trembled a little as she turned it and pulled the door open.
The man who stood on the other side of it looked... desolate. A face of harsh angles, and eyes that held no light, dark hair that had gone too long without a trim, and a face in need of a shave. Thick, expressive brows. Black jacket, jeans, boots.
He was looking her over just as carefully, and she shivered a little in her white flannel nightgown and bare feet.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
“I hope so.” There was something about his deep, rough voice that made her nerve endings go alert and tense. “I’m looking for Dr. Elliot Stoltz.”
“No one here by that name. You must have the wrong address.” She had no idea what made her blurt the denial. Maybe the ghost of her father’s delusional warnings before his death, that if anyone called or came by asking about him, she should deny knowing him or his whereabouts. Yes, that was part of an old man’s paranoia, but the denial spilled from her lips before she had time to think better of it.
"You'll find," the dark stranger said slowly, "that it's not a real good idea to lie to me, Lexia.” She blinked rapidly, drew in a shallow gasp. “That is who you are, isn’t it? Dr. Lexia Stoltz?”
"Lexi Stoltz,” she said. “Now it’s your turn. Who are you? How do you know my name? And what are you doing at my door in the middle of the night?"
“I told you, I’m here to see your father.”
Another sound came from upstairs, and it shouldn’t have. A tingle of ice crept up her spine and she glanced over her shoulder toward the stairs. There was definitely something going on up there. Maybe a raccoon had got in, like in the fall.
"My father isn't here," she said. “I’m sorry you came all the way up here for nothing.” She started to close the door, but he stuck a foot in the way, and her heart gave a warning flutter. “What do you think you’re–”
“Sorry. I'm not buying it." He shouldered his way past her into the house. Then he took a long, slow look around as Lexi stood there watching him and trying to decide what the hell to do. She was alone. There were no landline phones and cell service was spotty at best. But he wouldn’t know that.
His soulless gaze swept the room, from the flickering scented candles burning here and there, to the fireplace, to the giant spruce tree standing in the window.
"Where is he?" As he said it, he took a deliberate step toward her.
She shook her head and took an equal step away from him. "I'm calling the police. And then I'm going to turn my dogs loose, and—"
"You're not calling anyone, because there's no phone up here. And if you had dogs, they’d be barking at me by now. Listen, Lexi, I'll be a lot easier to deal with than whoever comes through that door next."
When he said that, it scared her, and the noises upstairs came back to her mind. Involuntarily, she glanced toward the wide staircase. Each step was a half log, flat side up, and the railings were birch branches and limbs still dressed in their white, knotty bark, preserved under layers of shellac. Her heart tripped over itself again and then launched into a full gallop.
"Someone's upstairs, then. Who, Lexia? Your father?"
“Stop calling me that.” She averted her eyes, tried to focus on getting her heartbeat under control, but it was too late. The tachycardia was off and running.
She felt as if she wasn’t getting enough air, which made her breathe more quickly, which made her dizzy. This was not an unfamiliar event, and not a dangerous one, but its timing sucked. Another sound came from upstairs then and her expression probably gave away that it shouldn't have.
The stranger— whose eyes were the darkest imaginable blue, she saw now that the firelight reached them— reached inside his coat and pulled out a handgun. When she saw it, her heart sped even faster. It felt like a jackhammer trying to break out from inside. She pressed her hands to her chest, an automatic reaction to the thundering of her heart, then spun around and ran out of the great room. She didn’t even know whether she was running away from the gun or toward her stash of meds. She needed to take a pill and take it fast, before this episode got out of hand.
Copyright © 2025 by Maggie Shayne
Shattered Sisters #5
Lexi Stoltz's break from life is interrupted one snowy December night when her isolated Adirondack cabin is invaded by killers, a group who try to take her captive, and one lone wolf with storm cloud eyes who takes a bullet to liberate her from the thugs, then forces her to leave with him.
He claims to work for the government, says her father invented a biological weapon and he has to find it first before they do.
It's a dirty lie, so she doesn't feel guilty leading him on a wild goose chase while awaiting a chance to escape.
But he wasn't lying when he said there would be others after them with deadly intent. And she soon learns that he has secret motives born of an unthinkable loss, that might just have been a lie.
Thriller Crime | Thriller Serial Killer [Oliver-Heber Books, On Sale: July 8, 2025, e-Book , / ]
New York Times and USA Today bestselling, RITA® Award winning Author Maggie Shayne published 62 novels and 22 novellas for five major publishers over the course of 22 years. She also spent a year writing top story arcs for CBS’s Guiding Light and As the World Turns and was offered the position of co-head writer of the former. An offer she tearfully (it was lots) turned down. It was scary, turning down an offer that big.
But in March 2014, she did something even scarier. She went indie. And it went so well that by July 2015 she incorporated her business, Thunderfoot Publishing Inc. She’s never enjoyed her job more. This new frontier of publishing is bringing Maggie success like she’s never seen before in two distinct areas of her work.
First, her contemporary western romances, The Texas Brands series and the Oklahoma All-Girl Brands. And secondly her beloved paranormals, including the Wings in the Night series, which has the distinction of being the second vampire romance novel series ever, launching just a year after Lori Herter’s Obsession series created a new genre.
Maggie is also an acclaimed thriller writer with her award winning Brown and de Luca novels, and many more. Maggie Shayne is extremely accessible to her readers, interacting with them daily, via her Facebook pages and twitter accounts.
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