Private investigator Erika Balogh is obsessed with a dead man.  NYPD detective Sloan Morrissey has been missing for a year, but Erika is sure she's spotted his powerful form stalking the dark streets...sure she's inhaled his scent in her bedroom.  Is she going crazy--or is her lover still alive?

Dear Reader,

Over the years, I have created many heroines, but none sprang to the page with as much verve as Erika Balough.  Strange, considering Erika is a woman who has been battling with grief and a death wish, that she seems so alive to me.  Then again, perhaps that's precisely why she seems real.  This is a character who has serious flaws, yet she manages to maintain her strength -- and her sense of humor -- through everything that fate throws her way.

I hope you enjoy Erika's most memorable investigation.  She certainly finds more than she expected!

Ingrid

P.S.  Like me, Erika loves chocolate in any form.  Here's one of her favorites
 
 

Featuring three original novellas of romantic suspense:

"Fooling Around," by Linda Turner
"The Man in the Shadows," by Ingrid Weaver
"A Midsummer Night's Murder," by Julie Miller

     Erika Balough was thinking about chocolate when she saw her lover's ghost.
     Neither event was unusual.  Chocolate was Erika's one remaining indulgence.  She'd sworn off alcohol four months ago when she'd awakened in her car at the side of the Jersey turnpike with no memory of leaving her uncle's bar in Queens.  She'd kicked her nicotine habit long before that because she didn't like the smell of  cigarette smoke and hated doing laundry.  She'd even given up taping her soaps two weeks ago when the rubber bone she'd lobbed for Rufus had bounced off the floor and broken her VCR, but give up chocolate?  No way.
     So she was thinking about the Hershey bar that she'd stashed in the glove compartment, debating whether to break off another square now or to ration it so it would last to the end of the stakeout, when Sloan Morrissey flickered on the edge of her vision.
     But as she'd realized, seeing Sloan wasn't unusual.  Over the past year, it had become an all too common occurrence.  Erika understood it was a natural step in the grieving process, that reluctance to let go, the refusal to accept that a man as vital as Sloan could possibly be gone.
     For weeks after the funeral, she'd seen him everywhere.  In passing cars, in the crowd at a Jets game, in elevators just before the doors closed.  He appeared each time a tall man on the subway platform shoved his hands into his pockets and angled his shoulders a certain way as he looked for the train.  Or when some man cocked his thumb to push a lock of black hair from his forehead or chewed the inside of his cheek when he wasn't sure what to say.  Sometimes when she jogged through the park she caught snatches of Sloan's laughter, or an echo of his footsteps just out of sight.
     Damn, it was embarrassing.
     At least with practice she was getting better at restraining herself from actually chasing the ghost.  Experience had taught her that most men got nervous when they spotted a sobbing woman running toward them while screaming another man's name.
     Yet Erika had never learned how to get used to that first, raw instant, when her senses trumped her logic and her breath caught and her pulse spiked and her heart shouted that the man she saw was real.
     Oh God, yes.  Please, let it all be a mistake.  How could Sloan be dead when she still held him in her soul?  How was it possible that she would never feel his body fit so perfectly with hers again?  It couldn't be over.  She'd never had the chance to say goodbye.
     Or to say that she was sorry.
     Maybe, just maybe, he had managed to come back.  What if...?
     Exactly.  The two most powerful words in the English language.  What if.
     She fumbled her can of root beer into the cupholder and snatched her camera from the passenger seat, adjusting the focus for maximum zoom...

"The Man in the Shadows," 
by Ingrid Weaver
Signature Anthology CORNERED
September 2005, ISBN 0373285280