Debt Collector
Season Two
Episodes 10-18
Susan Kaye Quinn
Genre: Urban Fantasy with a Cyberpunk Twist
Date of Publication:
Dec 15, 2014
ASIN: B00OF18W50
Number of pages: 500
Word Count: 125,000
Cover Artist: Steven Novak
Book Description:
What's your life worth on the open market?
In this gritty urban fantasy, debt collectors take your life energy and give it to someone more "worthy"... all while paying the price with black marks on their souls.
Wraith is a shadow in the night, haunting the bedrooms of the rich "high potentials" who have stolen life energy from the desperate and dying. The justice and the sweet mercy hit that follow keep her from falling into her own personal abyss.
Her secret nighttime work also keeps her on level for her real mission: carrying on her father's legacy of attempting to bring an end to debt collection as a whole. But when a mysterious debt collector interrupts her in the act and discovers her secret, everything Wraith loves may be destroyed by the one thing she can never fix-- the original sin of being a debt collector herself.
Available at Amazon
Contains mature content and themes.
Book Trailer: http://youtu.be/0-ngIMiEF1M
"Wraith is amazing and just as compelling as Lirium--once again I'm hooked!!"
"I loved being back in this world! Wraith has captivated me."
OPTIONED FOR VIRTUAL REALITY BY IMMERSIVE ENTERTAINMENT
2014 Semi-Finalist in Science
Fiction in the Kindle Book Awards
The nine episodes of Season Two
of the Debt Collector serial are collectively 125k words or about 500 pages.
It is recommended that you start
with the first season, but each season is a complete story for that debt
collector and can serve as an entry point to the series.
There are five planned seasons in
the Debt Collector series, the first four each from the perspective of a
different debt collector with the fifth season bringing all four together.
READING
ORDER
Season One - Lirium - COMPLETE
Episodes 1-9: Delirium, Agony,
Ecstasy, Broken, Driven, Fallen, Promise, Ruthless, Passion
Season Two - Wraith
10 - Wraith (10.20)
11 - Specter (10.27)
12 - Menace (11.3)
13 - Temptation (11.10)
14- Shattered (11.17)
15 - Penance (11.24)
16 - Judgment (12.1)
17- Corruption (12.8)
18- Atonement (12.15)
BOX SET (Vol 10-18) - (12.15)
Excerpt:
My new
collection suit weighs less than a shadow on my skin, and my soft-soled boots
don’t even whisper as I creep across the thick, yielding carpet of my target’s
apartment. With the best bullet-resistant synthetics money can buy, the black
curve-hugging suit makes me look more like female-special-forces than someone’s
hot date for the night. It raised the bellman’s eyebrows, but an untraceable debit
card got me waved through the lobby, no problem. Money buys a lot of things.
Access to one of the highest-security luxury buildings in LA. A
ninety-fifth-floor apartment high above the smog-soaked city, complete with all
the clean air you can breathe. And the no-doubt illegal collection of
ivory-handled daggers I passed on the way in. It’s too bad for data-mining
mogul Adrien Odel that money can’t buy your way out of a blackened soul.
I know.
I’ve tried.
And tonight I’ve
come to collect a debt he doesn’t even think he owes.
Outside the
floor-to-ceiling windows of Odel’s apartment, the city is lit up with a
nighttime electric haze, the kind that makes it look seedy even in the
high-rent district. It’s the perfect backdrop for a collection, and my suit is
a black silhouette against it, a hole of death punched in the city’s twinkling
lights. The high-tech fabric clings to me like the original sin I can never
expiate, the one every debt collector is born with: the ability to deliver
death with the slightest touch. We traffic in it, surround ourselves with it,
and can never escape it.
Not that I
haven’t tried that, too.
But even a short
three-week dry spell away from collecting has me needy as all hell. The craving
for a life energy hit claws at my back, and every step across the carpet amps
up the desire. Even the possibility of Odel pulling a gun and shooting me dead
hypes the thrill a little. My palm aches in anticipation—for the justice and
the high that comes with it—but I take it slow, watching the placement of my
feet and checking the windows. Along one edge, next to a mile-wide screen and
some pretentious artwork, there’s a control panel. Only the rich want windows
that open in the city, but it’s a bonus for me, especially given the windows
face the broad expanse of the skyline and not the high-rise next door.
As I check out
the control panel, the high-rise becomes a peep show. A woman’s naked body is
pressed against the glass, exposed to the city’s onlookers as a man clutches
her bare skin and makes love to her. I’m transfixed by the way they move, skin
against skin, without care for the contact or the watchers. In a moment,
they’re gone. Maybe reason broke through the passion. Maybe the glass was cold,
in spite of the perpetual heat of LA.
Regardless, the
image holds me hostage.
Having a lover
isn’t something that’s part of my future. Or my present, for that matter. But
that doesn’t stop the base need from surging up, usually at the least
convenient of times. Then a different image—a cold, pale specter from my
past—crawls out of the dark corners of my mind and reminds me I’m not the kind
of woman who gets to have a normal life. I’m the kind who takes life and then
gives it away. And the ecstasy of that is the closest I’ll ever get to the
normal kind again—so it had better be good enough.
I couldn’t
stomach even that pleasure for a while, not after what the debt collectors did
to my father. I managed a whole three weeks without a single collection. But in
the end, it’s the only thing that keeps me stable. And I’ve had a severe lack
of stable ever since my father’s death nearly tore down the teetering scaffold
of lies that comprises my life. That’s when the abyss reared up and stared me
full in the face. Will-power alone wasn’t enough to stop it—the darkness just
opened its maw and threatened to swallow me whole. At least that would have put
an end the torment… but I couldn’t let the sin of who I am destroy everything
my father had worked for. That we had both worked for. So here I am, dressed
like a phantom, stalking the rich to give to the poor. With a tremor in my
hands that’s more than a little unsettling. For better and worse, it’s the one
thing that keeps me out of that dark place and gives me hope that one day I
might redeem everything I am and everything I’ve done.
About the Author:
Susan Kaye Quinn is the author of the bestselling Mindjack Trilogy and the Debt Collector serial, as well as other speculative fiction novels and short stories. Her work has appeared in the Synchronic anthology and has been optioned for Virtual Reality by Immersive Entertainment. Her business card says "Author and Rocket Scientist" but she mostly sits around in her PJs in awe that she gets to write full time.
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1 comment:
sounds interesting
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