STRANGER CHILD Rachel Abbott Spotlight!

STRANGER CHILD
Rachel Abbott
E-book publication date: 24TH February
Price: £3.48

Rachel Abbott, the best-selling thriller author whose novels regularly top
the Amazon charts and who recently sold her millionth e-book, is back with
another tense and dramatic story of sinister manipulation within an
apparently ordinary family.

David Joseph’s wife was killed when her car veered off the road one night. When
help arrived, his little daughter, Natasha, had vanished from the scene of the
accident. Six years later, he has remarried and his new wife, Emma, has given
birth to a son. Then a stranger walks into their lives, and their world tilts on its
axis.



Extract from Stranger Child

By Rachel Abbott

Emma glanced out at the dismal day. The black clouds heavy with rain were creating
such gloom that the kitchen lights were a necessity even this early in the afternoon.
For a moment, she was in a trance, staring at nothing because in her head she
could see summer days when the garden was finished, the beds bursting with newly
planted flowers. She could almost smell the lavender she would grow in the borders.
She wasn’t sure of the moment that it happened. It wasn’t an instant in time, it
was more of a gradual awareness, but as she stared blindly at the black window,
dreaming of the happy months ahead, something moved at the edge of her
peripheral vision. Her eyes refocused from the garden to the surface of the glass, the
bright lights of the kitchen against the dark sky beyond creating a perfect mirror.
Every nerve ending in her body prickled, and she gasped as her brain finally
acknowledged what she was looking at.
It was a pair of eyes. A pair of eyes that were behind her, watching.
Close behind her. In her kitchen.
A beam of sunlight burst through the black clouds, hitting the kitchen window
and obliterating the reflection as if it had never been there. Emma’s fingers gripped
the edge of the sink. Had she imagined it? But as quickly as the sun had come out, it
was chased away by the squally clouds and the mirror image returned.
Locking eyes with the ghostly reflection that ebbed and flowed as the light
outside adjusted from black to grey, Emma groped along the draining board,
searching with her fingers for a weapon. Reaching up to the cutlery holder, she felt a
sharp pain and a rush of liquid warmth as her fingers grasped the blade of a sharp
boning knife, and she followed the steel down to grip the handle with damp, sticky
fingers.
Scared of breaking the fragile eye contact for even a second in case the person
moved – moved closer to her or to Ollie, moved out of her line of vision or into the
hall, where she would be forced to follow – Emma took a deep breath and spun
round, leaning heavily back on the sink for support as her legs suddenly weakened.
Her heart thumping and her throat too tight with tension to scream, she stared at
the person in front of her as adrenaline pumped through her body, preparing it for
fight or flight.
It was a girl, little more than a child.
‘What are you doing in my kitchen?’ Emma asked. ‘Get out now, before I call the
police.’

The girl didn’t move. She just stared back, her eyes never leaving Emma’s face. 

The universal link to Stranger Child on Amazon is:

http://myBook.to/Stranger-Child

Other links:

Web :               rachel-abbott.com

Blog:                rachelabbottwriter.com 

Twitter:           @Rachel__Abbott

Facebook:        RachelAbbott1Writer
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5349971.Rachel_Abbott

The Author

Rachel Abbott is the UK’s most successful independently published author. She
was born just outside Manchester. She became a systems analyst, forming her
own software company in the mid-80s and selling it in 2000. She then moved
with her husband to Italy and bought a small ruined monastery with its own
chapel, restoring it and making it into a home. In 2009 she decided to try writing a
novel. Only The Innocent was published in 2011 and was a number 1 e-book
bestseller for four weeks from mid-February 2012. Her subsequent books, The
Back Road and Sleep Tight, were also bestsellers. Her work is translated into
seven languages.
Following the report of her million sales in The Sunday Times, Rachel Abbott
declared herself ‘astounded’ by the numbers, and by the fact that her first three
books had remained in the Amazon Kindle top 100 for the best part of six
months. 

“My goal was to sell a thousand books,” Abbott said, “but what I now have is a
whole new and exciting career. I love it. Choosing to self-publish my first book is
one of the best decisions I ever made.”