Book Extract: The Last Girl to Die by Helen Fields

Please join me in welcoming Helen Fields to Novel Kicks. She’s here with the blog tour for her book, The Last Girl to Die. 

In search of a new life, seventeen-year-old Adriana Clark’s family moves to the ancient, ocean-battered Isle of Mull, far off the coast of Scotland. Then she goes missing. Faced with hostile locals and indifferent police, her desperate parents turn to private investigator Sadie Levesque.

Sadie is the best at what she does. But when she finds Adriana’s body in a cliffside cave, a seaweed crown carefully arranged on her head, she knows she’s dealing with something she’s never encountered before.

The deeper she digs into the island’s secrets, the closer danger creeps – and the more urgent her quest to find the killer grows. Because what if Adriana is not the last girl to die?

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Helen has shared an extract with us today so grab that coffee and the comfy chair and enjoy!

*****beginning of extract*****

Addie. First with two ds then just one. With a y on the end, then with ie. Then I checked out Brandon Clark. I didn’t feel good about it, but now I had two jobs to do. The first was to figure out who killed Adriana.

The second was to make absolutely sure the police didn’t reach the conclusion that her twin brother was responsible for her death. School was in session in California. I had three piles of paper in front of me that I’d been avoiding looking at all day, no email from Rob Clark regarding Adriana’s cell phone data, and there were too many loose ends. Like the printer. As a general rule, I sit on my concerns about my clients the way you learn to sit on your hand when you’re trying to give up biting your nails. That was why I hadn’t taken the blank medical records form I’d printed off at Tackle & Trade up to the Clarks’ house yet. It was also why I hadn’t yet crossreferenced the form they’d filled in for Nate Carlisle with the one they’d filled in for me. I guess I knew it was going to be a rabbit hole, and that I’d end up doing something stupid like phoning all the high schools in Carlsbad and asking their librarian to go through the yearbooks to locate the Clark twins. But I never could let a thing go. My mother always swore it’d be the death of me.

I tackled the forms first. The blank ones, ready to be delivered for signature and emailed back to Nate, had a standard release on them to any healthcare provider in the US.

All that was required was the name of the company, the patient’s full name, date of birth, healthcare plan number, last address as a patient and the parent or guardian’s details. Simple, quick. That saying, when you’d just lost your child, especially in dreadful circumstances, just boiling a kettle became a Herculean feat.

The form the Clarks had filled in for Nate Carlisle had an address in Carlsbad that looked like 7109 Jefferson Street, with the ZIP code 92008. The numbers were a mess and ran into one another, but it was just about legible. That meant there were three public high schools the Clark kids might have gone to. I hated to do it, but my fingers were dialling numbers before I could stop them. I gave different excuses to each high school administrator, and each was as helpful as could be, but the long and the short of it was that the Clark twins hadn’t attended those schools.

That didn’t rule out several private schools in the area, but there was no way staff at those institutions were going to share information. That part of California was home to billionaires, oligarchs, politicians and playboys. The schools their kids attended were information fortresses. All of which still left me with this: why had Rob lied about his printer not working? I wished I’d exited their house sixty seconds earlier. I wish I hadn’t heard the whirr of the inkjet and the paper’s soft whoosh into the plastic tray. Because the truth was that Sergeant Harris Eggo had left an insect bite inside my brain and it was becoming increasingly hard not to scratch it: there was something unsettling about Brandon Clark. I breathed out hard. It was a relief to let myself think that freely.

That didn’t mean he’d killed his twin sister. It did explain why the police had flagged him as a person of interest though, and my concern was that Rob now appeared to be avoiding giving me any information that might lead me to find out more.

*****end of extract*****

About Helen Fields: 

Helen Fields spent thirteen years working as a criminal barrister before making the move to become a writer / producer for a film production company. 

Influenced by TV shows such as The Fall and Dexter, and authors such as James Patterson and Michael Connelly, she was inspired to write crime fiction where the reader follows the mind of the killer as well as the investigator.

The popularity of this kind of drama has proved that readers are interested in the killer’s motivation and enjoy the excitement of watching the cat and mouse game unfold.

Helen lives in Hampshire with her husband and three children.

Her latest novel, The Last Girl to Die is due to be released by Avon on 1st September 2022. Click to pre-order/buy on Amazon UK and Waterstones. 

Say hello to Helen on Twitter. 

by

Laura

I’m Laura. I started Novel Kicks in 2009. I wanted a place to post my writing as well as give other writers like me the opportunity to do the same. There is also a monthly book club, a writing room which features writing prompts, book reviews, competitions, author interviews and guest posts.

I grew up by the sea (my favourite place in the world) and I currently live in Hampshire. I am married to Chris, have a cat named Buddy and I would love to be a writer. I’m trying to write the novel I’ve talked so much about writing if only I could stop pressing delete. I’ve loved writing since creative writing classes in primary school. I have always wanted to see my teacher Miss Sayers again and thank her for the encouragement. When not trying to write the novel or writing snippets of stories on anything I can get my hands on, I love reading, dancing like a loon and singing to myself very badly. My current obsession is Once Upon a Time and I would be happy to live with magic in the enchanted forest surrounded by all those wonderful stories provided that world also included Harry Potter. I love reading chick lit. contemporary fiction and novels with mystery.