The Shut-In

Book 0: BookShots

by James Patterson, Duane Swierczynski

Genres: Crime Fiction; Psychological Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

I know you’re watching me.

Confined to a studio apartment, Tricia Celano watches the outside world through a flying drone. But when her high-tech toy records a vicious murder, she’s determined to track down the killer—a killer who knows she’s being watched.

Release date: March 7, 2017

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 144

Sample

Chapter 2

No, you weren’t just floating along with a friendly neighborhood guardian angel. I’m not dead, and you’re not a ghost.

Those glorious city views are courtesy of my personal drone, Amelia. I send her out every morning and evening to see a bit of the world that I can’t.

I pilot Amelia using an app on my smartphone. The controls are super sensitive, so getting her to zoom back in through my rear window without knocking off a propeller takes a bit of finesse. When I first bought Amelia, she bumped into the side of my brownstone building so many times I’m surprised she’s still in one piece.

Some lucky drone owners are able to go outside into an empty field and launch their quadcopters straight up into the air.

But not me.

My name is Tricia Celano. Call me “Trish” at your own peril. I’m twenty-five years old, live in a small but sweet studio apartment at 20th and Green, and if I step outside, the sun will kill me.

No, for real.

I have a condition called solar urticaria, which is a rare allergy to the sun. Yes, the same ball of swirling gas ninety-three million miles away that gives everything else the gift of life wants to give me a severe case of death.

My symptoms were minor back in college—hives, itching, burning. But soon I was breaking out in severe body rashes that made me look like a lobster–human mutant hybrid. By senior year, the condition was so severe that I stayed in my room to finish classes remotely and even had to sit out my graduation.

All of which turned me into a twenty-five-year-old shut-in—confined to my apartment all day, every day.

But you’d be surprised how easy it is to live your entire life indoors. Before the internet, I’m sure I would have withered away and died. But now I can order pretty much everything online—food, clothing, entertainment—and have it delivered, downloaded, or streamed straight into my apartment.

As for other forms of entertainment…well, sometimes I’ll pull a Jimmy Stewart and spy on the people coming and going from my building. I especially like to watch the hot dark-haired guy who lives upstairs in 3-D. I’ve gotten to the point where I recognize the way he clomps down the stairs toward the entrance of the building just a few feet from my door. Usually it’s a mad scramble to the peephole to catch even a tiny glimpse of him, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen his entire face. But the parts that I have seen…

Anyway. You might say, But Tricia, if you’re allergic to the sun, why don’t you just go out at night?

Because…well, life really likes to stick it in and twist sometimes.

In the three years since graduation, I’ve also developed this oh-so-charming phobia of the dark. The very thought of stepping out into the night paralyzes me with raw, naked fear. Logically I know I’d be fine. But try telling my subconscious that.

Friends from college will try to coax me out for a drink, but…I just can’t. Once I was even showered and dressed, make-up and hair done…and then broke down sobbing in the vestibule of my building.

I miss the outside world so very, very badly. Chatting through social media or even Skype doesn’t quite fill the void. I yearn to be out in the world again, eating it, drinking it, bathing in it.

So, as I did with my other challenges, I came up with a technological solution.

Amelia—named after legendary aviatrix Amelia Earhart—is a ready-to-fly quadcopter with a built-in camera and absolutely no problems with the sun. She cost me a shade under three hundred bucks, but who can put a price tag on the feeling of being part of the world?

I can fly Amelia within a half-mile radius of my apartment, and her camera feed is sent straight to my cell phone in real time. She’s my amazing, soaring window on the world. Or at least my tiny sliver of it.

Technically, I’m breaking the law. There’s this thing in drone culture called “line of sight,” or LOS, which basically means that you’re supposed to keep visual contact with your drone at all times.

But the Philadelphia Police Department has bigger fish to fry than tracking a lonely girl’s renegade drone. Which is a good thing. Because what started as a hobby has turned into a bit of an obsession. And now I’m not sure how I’d live without it.

I work as a marketing associate for an entertainment company with offices in California, Scotland, and Germany, so I find myself working at odd hours anyway. My day is broken up by Amelia flights, at least three per day. They span eleven minutes each, which is exactly how long her batteries last.

First flight is usually during the morning rush, when there’s a lot of people to watch. Same goes for the evening commute. But lunchtime has become fun, too. I like to take Amelia downtown, just beyond the tightly packed rows of Victorian homes, where you can make out the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. It’s modeled after the Champs-Élysées in Paris and is usually full of a mix of tourists and homeless people.

When darkness falls, however, it’s game over. It’s too risky to fly Amelia in the dark, and not just because of my phobia. The images on my phone are too dim to help me avoid the obstacles out there.

Night is when I feel most like a prisoner.

Chapter 3

But this is a bright Thursday morning in early September, and it’s time to send Amelia out into the world to see what’s up.
. . .