About this ebook
The lifeless body of a woman wearing an evening dress is discovered in the party room of the wax museum. Everything would suggest suicide, but DCI Eric Shaw, team chief at the Forensic Services of Scotland Yard who’s investigating the scene with crime scene investigator Adele Pennington, immediately notices a few similarities with the case of a serial killer nicknamed Plastic Surgeon, closed three years ago with the arrest of Robert Graham.
Perhaps someone is emulating Graham, or he had an accomplice, but there is a third possibility that especially concerns Eric, who, being convinced of Graham’s guilt, tampered with the physical evidence to ensure his conviction.
What if he made a mistake and sent the wrong person to jail?
After eleven months, and despite her reluctance, he once again finds himself working with DI Miriam Leroux from the Murder Investigation Teams. Now they have to race against time to follow the trail of the elusive murderer.
This is possibly Shaw’s final major case before a promotion to superintendent. The other contender for advancement being DCI George Jankowski, a man who is not afraid to weed out the dirty secrets of others to get what he wants.
And Eric and his pupil hide an unspeakable secret.
The destiny of DCI Eric Shaw is about to be fulfilled.
This book is written in British English.
The final act of the trilogy.
The Detective Eric Shaw Trilogy
Set between 2014 and 2017, the Detective Eric Shaw Trilogy has as the main character a detective chief inspector leading a forensic team assisting police detectives in their investigations at Scotland Yard.
DCI Shaw is facing a crucial period in his life. Excessive dedication to work caused his marriage to fail and turned him into a cop ready to break more than one rule to satisfy his obsession with bringing criminals to justice. His already precarious balance is undermined by a forensic investigator on his team who is much younger than him, Adele Pennington, for whom he has feelings that he considers inappropriate given the age difference, and by a series of murders on which he investigates together with his god-daughter DI Miriam Leroux. They bear similarities to a 1994 cold case in which Eric himself rescued a seven-year-old girl from a crime scene, the only witness to the massacre of her family.
In this psychological crime thriller series, the border between investigation and crime becomes blurred in a story that isn’t only about finding the culprit, but rather observing how the main character decides to react to his shocking findings. In a dark game of deception and suspense, the reader will be thrown into modern-day London and will end up wondering where the line between good and evil, justice and revenge really is.
The trilogy includes the following novels:
1) The Mentor;
2) Syndrome;
3) Beyond the Limit.
About the author
Rita Carla Francesca Monticelli is an Italian science fiction and thriller author.
She has lived in Cagliari (Sardinia, Italy) since 1993, earning a degree in biology and working as a writer, scientific and literary translator, and freelance web copywriter. In the past she also worked as researcher, tutor and professor’s assistant in the field of ecology at ‘Dipartimento di Biologia Animale ed Ecologia’ of the University of Cagliari.
Rita Carla Francesca Monticelli is an Italian science fiction and thriller author.
She has lived in Cagliari (Sardinia, Italy) since 1993, earning a degree in biology and working as a writer, scientific and literary translator, and freelance web copywriter. In the past she also worked as researcher, tutor and professor’s assistant in the field of ecology at ‘Dipartimento di Biologia Animale ed Ecologia’ of the University of Cagliari.
She has written original fiction since 2009.
In 2012-2013 she wrote and published a hard science fiction series set on Mars and titled Deserto rosso.
The whole Deserto rosso series was also published as omnibus in December 2013 and hit No. 1 on the Italian Kindle Store in November 2014.
Deserto rosso was published in English, with the title Red Desert, between 2014 and 2015.
It includes the following books: Red Desert - Point of No Return, Red Desert - People of Mars, Red Desert - Invisible Enemy, and Red Desert - Back Home.
She also authored three crime thrillers in the Detective Eric Shaw Trilogy – The Mentor (Il mentore, 2014), Syndrome (Sindrome, 2016), and Beyond the Limit (Oltre il limite, 2017) –, an action thriller titled Kindred Intentions (Affinità d’intenti, 2015), five more science fiction novels – L’isola di Gaia (2014), Per caso (2015), Ophir. Codice vivente (2016), Sirius. In caduta libera (2018), and Nave stellare Aurora (2020) – and a non-fiction book titled Self-publishing lab. Il mestiere dell’autoeditore (2020).
Her crime thriller The Mentor was first published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2015 and became an international bestseller hitting No. 1 on the Kindle Store in USA, UK, and Australia in October 2015. A new edition of The Mentor was published in November 2022, followed by Syndrome in February 2023.
The final novel in the trilogy, Beyond the Limit, is her twelfth book.
She’s also a podcaster at FantascientifiCast, an Italian podcast about science fiction, an Italian Representative of Mars Initiative, and a member of the International Thriller Writers organization.
She’s often a guest both in Italy and abroad during book fairs, including Salone Internazionale del Libro di Torino (Turin Book Fair) and Frankfurter Buchmesse (Frankfurt Book Fair), local publishing events as well as university conferences, where she gives speeches about self-publishing and genre fiction writing. She has also taught a class on self-publishing at the University of Insubria (Varese, Italy) since 2016.
Her books have been reviewed or recommended by national magazines and newspapers such as Wired Italia, Tom’s Hardware Italia, La Repubblica, Tiscali News and Global Science (magazine of the Italian Space Agency).
As a science fiction and Star Wars fan, she is known in the Italian online community by her nickname, Anakina.
