Allen Zadoff was born in Boston, Mass and went on to live in upstate New York, Manhattan, Tokyo, and Los Angeles. A former stage director, he is a graduate of Cornell University and the Harvard University Institute for Advanced Theater Training. His memoir for adults is called Hungry: Lessons Learned on the Journey from Fat(…)
Storming Heaven
Book Number 2 in the Mark Beamon Series.
Jennifer Davis, a bit of a wild card herself, has just finished a grueling bike race. Her parents have cheered her on, and even the neighbors have arrived to support her. She has all the usual teenage problems, including a boyfriend her parents don’t really approve of, while they pressure her to like the neighbors’ doltish, football-playing son. After dinner, Jennifer and her family return to their beautiful home in Flagstaff, Arizona, only to have a night of terror ahead of them. When Jennifer takes one step into the dark house, she hears her father shout for her to run away. As she enters, she beholds a gruesome scene. Strangers have guns to her parents’ heads. Soon, her mother and father are dead, and the strangers who have orchestrated their deaths come for her.
For Mark Beamon, FBI agent, this is very nearly business as usual. He’s dealt with kidnappings before, but what makes this one unusual is that he’s very quickly aware that there’s some choreography in this kidnapping-murder scenario. Beamon has instincts for the offbeat, and he detects what’s wrong with this picture right away.
The crime scene looks as if Jennifer’s parents may have killed themselves. But why? In investigating, he finds that the missing Jennifer was adopted by the Davises, after her natural parents died in a fire when she was two. Further complicating the issue, no one in Jennifer’s general vicinity seems to know anything. Who would murder the Davis couple? And why take Jennifer afterward, when there was no hope of ransom with the parents dead?