Painted Bride

Dust jacket by Edward Miller

An all new novel of terror from Stephen Gallagher!

"I know who you are," Louise told Molly Gideon. "No way did my dad send you to get us."

"You're right," Molly said. "It was my own idea. So why come with me."

"If we hadn't, the doctors would have kept on messing with Jack. Asking him questions. Trying to get him to talk about things he could never have seen. All because of that picture. The one he painted that caused all the fuss."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"The woman in the red dress. Jack called it the painted bride. The police had Jack in a room all yesterday and kept asking him about it. Now they're all trying to twist it by saying it means something."

"What are they trying to say?"

"That he must have seen her lying on the kitchen floor. That the red rainbow means he saw her blood coming out."

Limited: 750 signed numbered copies

From Publishers Weekly:
"British author Gallagher's unrelenting novel of terror, set on an unprepossessing stretch of English coast, moves at a breakneck pace... Chalk up another winner—-brief, merciless and punchy—for Gallagher."

From Booklist:
"Gallagher's compelling thriller doesn't miss a beat, not even for the occasional puzzling (to Americans) Briticism, and should win him fans eager to read his next outing."

From The Washington Times:
"The Painted Bride is veteran thriller-writer Stephen Gallagher's tense melodrama spun from the mysterious disappearance of auto dealer Frank Tanner's wife Carol, the stalled police investigation into Frank's possible guilt -- and the complications ensuing from the obsessive actions of Carol's burnt-out, former drug-taking younger sister Molly, who knows Frank did away with his wife, and devotes her dwindling energies to protecting the children now in his care and bringing him to justice.

There's even a hint of the supernatural in an endangered child's anguished outcry: 'He killed my mother and now he won't die.' It's a neat capstone to an accomplished and suitably unpleasant shocker."