Whispers from the Swamp

Book 4: Hazel Watson Mystery

by C. A. Varian

Genres: Ghost; Mystery; Female Sleuths; Supernatural suspense

Synopsis

Finalist in the Next Generation Indie Book Awards!

Many changes are happening in the life of Hazel Watson… good changes… but the demands of the spirit world remain the same. The exhausting, stressful obligations she’s dealt with since she was a child. Helping them is inescapable.

So, when the bodies of two women are discovered in the swamps of South Louisiana, the people of New Orleans are shocked… but not Hazel. She had been seeing the faces of those same two women in her dreams for weeks, haunting her and beckoning her to find their killer.

Having never been comfortable with sharing the nature of her abilities with others, Hazel struggles with having to do just that when she receives a ghostly warning about the impending abduction of another woman.

Can Hazel overcome her fear of being exposed, and of the swamp itself, before more women fall victim to the killer who stalks the Louisiana wetlands?

Familiar Nightmares
Prologue

Sounds of the road filled her ears as her eyes saw only blackness. The cloth against her tongue tasted of sweat and dust, but she could not push it away, forcing her to gag against it. The car jerked along the road as it hit ruts and potholes. She guessed it was not paved. Something about the moment felt familiar, like she had experienced it once before, but had somehow survived the ordeal. The air in the trunk thinned, causing her breath to come in short bursts and her head to spin. She tried to remain stoic, to fight her emotions as much as she planned to fight her captor, but her eyes betrayed her, allowing her backstabbing tears to reveal her fear.

As the car slowed to a stop, she wiped at her tears, attempting to harden her look before the trunk opened and revealed her as a weak, sobbing mess. She needed to fight.

Trying to shift her weight, to stretch her legs before fighting for her life, she kicked something large on the other side of the space. The mass budged only slightly against her feet, but she could not see what she was touching. Panic swelled in her chest as though a hand squeezed her heart.

The brakes squeaked as the car pulled to a stop, and the driver only took a second to climb out of the car and slam the driver’s side door. She started to hyperventilate. The footsteps were nearly silent as they approached the trunk, making her think they were parked on a soft surface, like mud or dirt.

The setting sun barely lit the interior of the trunk as the door flung open, leaving her captor in shadow. She knew it was a man, but she could not make out his face.

Chancing a glance at her feet, she stifled a scream when she saw what she had been trying to kick. A woman, long chocolate hair and amber eyes staring sightlessly at the darkening sky, laid dead by her feet. Struggling to scoot her body away from the corpse, she expected the man to grab her, to kill her, but he only grabbed the dead woman and slammed the trunk door above her head, shutting her back into darkness.

***

Jolting awake, Hazel flung herself into a sitting position in the bed, feeling around herself to ensure her hands and feet were not bound. She closed her eyes, trying to make sense of her nightmare.

Another memory. The dead woman who was outside the building… it was her.

But she was not one of Raymond Waters' victims… was she?

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Release date: February 7, 2022

Publisher: Independently published

Print pages: 334