Title: No More Birthdays
Series: Carol Ann Baker #1
Author: Lissa Pelzer
Genre: New Adult/Thriller
Publication date: August 31, 2015
Runaway teenager Lilly Lessard has some secrets. For a start, that's not her real name and she wants to keep her real age on the down-low too. Bumping into ex-hitman Bobby at a small town film festival is no coincidence either. She's tracked him here.
He owes her money and she's desperate enough to come looking for it. And she's not the only one who has followed him here.
Detective Davis is after him too. She's been after him in Miami for years, but never quite managed to get him. Maybe this weekend she'll get lucky. But the closer Lilly gets to Bobby and his money, the closer Davis gets to them both.
One by one, their secrets are coming out. And Lilly's about to find out, the worst secrets are the ones you keep from yourself.
“If you’re looking for a faced paced, gripping story with lots of twists and turns then this is the book for you.” Chellsbookreviews
“Wonderful, gritty, with the feel of the 1950’s noir novels, “No More Birthdays” is a must read for all crime fiction fans out there.” Reader Review.
“Stylish and Gripping. Not Your Average Crime Novel.” Book Lovers Reviews
Dead Memories
(Carol Ann Baker #2)
Don’t you wish sometimes that you could just close your eyes and start again? With two counts of murder under her belt and Detective Davis after her, teenager Lilly Lessard has done just that.
She's taken her dead friend, Janine Kenny’s ID and scholarship and she’s off to California.
But when a traffic accident leaves her with amnesia and only Janine’s ID in her pocket, things take a turn for the surreal.
Her caseworker wants to know why her memories don’t match her history. The hospital candy stripper has noticed her hair appears blonde at the roots when it should be black.
And who is this man who wants to help her get to California, who is willing to sneak her out in the dead of night? Can he help her get back some of her dead memories?
Lissa Pelzer Guest Post!
What was your inspiration behind the series?
The series was inspired by a lot of different things. First of all, the seed of the idea came from a personal experience. When I was an exchange student in Ohio, a dodgy old man – I don’t want to say too much about him. Don’t need any lawsuits ;-) – tried to convince me and a friend to do the very same scam Lilly and Cassandra are doing in NMB.
He said he knew men who would pay for us to go to their rooms, who would be turned on by the idea of us being hypnotized. Once we were in and the money had gone through, we would bring ourselves around by falling over and would act surprised to be there and the guy would ‘obviously’ rush us out. Of course, we laughed in his face and paid no more attention to him, but over the years I started thinking; there would be some girls, who were desperate enough for money, who would have taken him up on his offer. Even at 16, I could see it was a stupid and dangerous idea, but there would be many girls a little more naïve than me or tougher even, who would’ve taken the chance. I thought about what might go wrong in such a scam, and the story of Lilly hunting him down for cash and finding out the truth about what happened to her came from there.
What was the reason, behind the second book in the series?
I hadn’t originally intended to write a series but as I was writing NMB I realized that Carol Ann Baker had a lot of room to grow and mature. In the first book she is a brat, but she’s still a street kid here; she has nothing and no one and is just desperately trying to get a grip onto a ledge that might save her from her own reality. However for the most part in this book, she doesn’t realize that she has done anything wrong and then fate intervenes and holds a mirror up to her face. I didn’t want to dump her in this horrible situation and then walk off on her. I think that is what too many young women face in real life. By the end of the first book and the beginning of the second, she’s in free-fall; she’s killed two men and shot a cop, and now she indiscriminately kills a third. I wanted this to be a rock bottom situation for her and then perform a kind of ‘act of God’ to help her reset her consciousness.
Why was the second book written differently?
The second book is written differently than the first. NMB is a real-time, single perspective story, whereas Dead Memories explores everyone else’s perspectives over a course of months. I did this because it suits the story more, because Carol Ann has to take a back seat for most of the story, and because I wanted to make Detective Davis a more central character. I also really enjoyed this method of switching formats in some other story-telling techniques, like in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series, which featured different artists for every issue. However, for the next book, we will go back to a single Carol Ann perspective as it makes for a more intense story.
Lissa Pelzer is a Crime Novel and Short Story Writer.
She lives in Germany with her husband and young son.
She’s lived all over the world and is on a mission to write a crime story based in each one.
It might take a while….
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