Her Heart in Ruins

"tremendous talent" - Sam Jordison, Galley Beggar Press

Snippet from the book: "Fernanda kneels. Uses her arms to wipe snow from the lump, fearing what she will find. Perhaps she will find her own body curled in a fetal position, experiencing the final hallucinations that precede death by freezing. She breaks away a crust of ice around the body, noticing the bruised color of her own hands, the deep cracks in the skin of her fingers. She discovers dyed cloth and skin like a turkey's, plucked and frozen. She dislodges more snow, uncovering a dark plump face, a deep frozen, mummified face, with large eyes long frozen shut. Fernanda pulls back with a start. She recognizes this frozen lump of Incan girl. She is the same girl standing next to Fernanda..."

In this, the second volume of the Else First Kiss Mystery Series, Fernanda persuades her husband Randy, an IBM consultant on assignment in Cuzco, Peru, to go hiking in the Andes in search of his customer's missing child. They are accompanied by Fernanda's ex-husband Chance, by a sickly undercover FBI agent named Ed, by Kalene, a new friend of Fernanda's who claims, in a past life, to have bedded an entire army, and by a shaman who divines that Fernanda would make the perfect human sacrifice. This divination by the shaman provokes serious consequences as they hike the high mountain Inca Trail where local tribes still practice the ancient art.

Books in the Else First Kiss Mystery Series: BATHING WITH THE DEAD (#1)HER HEART IN RUINS (#2)ALL THAT WE TOUCH (#3) 2016

Else's fiction has been broadcast by the BBC World Service, included in a literary review published by the Sorbonne in Paris, and shortlisted for the Shakespeare & Company Novella Prize.