What is Katia Lief reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Katia Lief, author of the Karin Schaeffer novels, including You Are Next, Next Time You See Me, and the recently released Vanishing Girls.

Part of her entry:

The School of Night by Louis Bayard deftly shifts between Elizabethan England and present day Washington D.C., connecting characters separated by centuries with a literary sleight-of-hand that brings you deeply into both worlds.

Sixteenth century alchemist and scholar Thomas Harriot meets secretly with four other prominent thinkers to talk about things like God, alchemy, politics and the black arts, discussions considered threatening to both church and state. Inspired by these meetings, Harriot carries out a series of middle-of-the-night experiments with the woman he loves, a brilliant repressed scientist who is also his servant.

Cut to modern Washington D.C., where Elizabethan scholars and collectors vie to recover a missing letter written by Harriot and believed to contain secrets including the key to alchemy and a clue to a lost treasure. The letter will also establish as fact...[read on]

About Vanishing Girls, from the publisher:

For two years the "Working Girl Killer" hunted in Manhattan, brutally slaughtering nine city prostitutes.

And now the fiend has crossed the river.

Former cop-turned-p.i. Karin Schaeffer receives the call meant for her detective husband Mac on a Sunday night: two females found on a Brooklyn street. The first is an eleven-year-old girl, the apparent victim of a hit-and-run. But it's the second body that truly chills the blood—a young corpse bearing the grisly, unmistakable signature of a serial slayer who has eluded the NYPD for years.

But there's something frighteningly different about these latest atrocities—a kink that is leading Schaeffer's unofficial investigation down strange and twisting alleys where nothing is as it originally seems. And the haunted p.i., who once lost everything to a psychopath, is suddenly facing the darkness once again ... when the horror strikes too close to home and those she loves are in danger of vanishing forever.

Learn more about the book and author at Katia Lief's website.

Lief's previous Karin Schaeffer novels include You Are Next and Next Time You See Me.

Writers Read: Katia Lief (November 2010).

The Page 69 Test: Next Time You See Me.

My Book, The Movie: Next Time You See Me.

The Page 69 Test: Vanishing Girls.

Writers Read: Katia Lief.

--Marshal Zeringue