O'Halloran's Lady. Fiona Brand

      I hate your latest book in which you have portrayed ME as the villin. Besides the romance and the hero being unreel (no one looks that good) the villin is not as bad as you’re making out, he deserves a medal for not trying to do away with Sara in the first chapter. Take “Deadly Valentine” off the market NOW. If you don’t you will regret it.

      Jenna drew a long, impeded breath. As chilling as the content was, and the veiled threat, the writer of the email, ekf235, had no particular literary aspirations. He had misspelt villain and unreal and had committed the cardinal sin of joining two independent clauses with a comma instead of a semicolon. If her editor, Rachel, saw it, she would have a fit.

      Jenna sat back in her office chair, her normal determination to see the positive side of every fan letter she received, even if it was scathingly critical, absent. The misspellings and dreadful grammar, the sideswipe about her characterisation, didn’t take away from the fact that whoever had written the letter was nutty enough to think she had patterned the villain on him.

      Since Jenna had never heard of ekf235, let alone corresponded with him, that claim was highly unlikely.

      For long seconds, Jenna stared at the screen of her laptop, and tried to catalogue all of the men she had known through her life, but her mind seemed to have frozen. It was mild shock, she realized.

      For the second time in one night.

      Hooking her glasses off the bridge of her nose, she sat back in her chair, and rubbed at the sharp little throb that had developed at her temples.

      She was tired and sore, despite taking a couple of painkillers and rubbing arnica and liniment into her bruised knee. She shouldn’t have started on emails this late. Buying in to the ramblings of an emotionally disturbed person, who didn’t have the courage to reveal their real identity, was always a mistake.

      Taking another deep breath, she let it out slowly and tapped the button that generated her auto-reply, thanking the fan. A small whooshing sound indicated that the reply had gone.

      She glanced at her collage board, which was littered with all of the various materials she had used as inspiration for the highly successful series of novels that had shot her to the top of bestseller lists.

      The only photos she had were those of various male and female models, which she’d cut out of magazines over the years to provide inspiration for her heroes and heroines.

      Massaging the throb in her temple with fingers that still shook annoyingly, she wondered what O’Halloran would think about the cowardly, threatening email then pulled herself up short. After the episode with her new book cover, then the moment in the mall parking lot, she had decided that for her own emotional well-being, the sooner she managed to cut O’Halloran out of her life, past and present, the better.

      Blinking away tiredness, she examined the rest of the board, which was littered with snapshots and pictures of houses, landscape settings and assorted weaponry.

      She had not amassed anything much about a villain. As a rule of thumb, she had found that the less that was said about a villain the better. Mystery was far scarier than knowledge and, besides, fans of her stories responded to the hero, not the bad guy.

      Picking up her hot chocolate, she sipped and let her mind go loose, a technique she used to help with memory, especially for allowing seemingly insignificant details to surface. She frowned when her mind remained a stubborn blank.

      The person who had emailed had claimed that she had used him as the villain, which meant she must have met him at some stage. There was always the danger that, subliminally, she could have remembered and applied characteristics from someone she had known in her past. In Deadly Valentine, she had been influenced by a couple of incidents from the past, but she was also aware that those incidents—the delivery of a single rose and a secret online “lover”—were neither new nor unusual elements.

      One thing was sure, no one she had ever met, or knew, came even close to the devious fictional criminal who had hunted Sara down in Deadly Valentine.

      The only character she had ruthlessly drawn from real life was the heroine, Sara, a private investigator whom Jenna had based on herself. Somehow her own persona and single lifestyle had seemed to fit Sara Chisolm even better than they fitted Jenna.

      In the fictional world Sara moved in, living alone was a bonus. Although maybe the fact that Sara was a little on the hard-boiled side and far more confident in the bedroom than Jenna could ever pretend to be had something to do with that.

      Her finger hovered over the delete button, but in a moment of caution, she decided she couldn’t afford to blot the email out of existence altogether. The meticulous filing habit she had nurtured over the past eight years of researching detective and police procedural material for her books was too ingrained. In eight years she had not deleted one piece of correspondence without first obtaining a hard copy, and she was not starting now.

      She didn’t expect to hear back from the poisonous fan. Her innocuous thank-you email was designed to neutralise unpleasantness, and it usually worked, but that didn’t mean she shouldn’t be cautious.

      She pressed the print button and waited for the sheet to feed out.

      The internet provided a forum for a lot of flaky people. Most of them were harmless. The thought that the vague threat in the email could eventuate into an actual problem was something she was determined she was not going to lose any sleep over, but she couldn’t dismiss it altogether.

      As a writer, she had lost count of the number of times an inconsequential document had proved pivotal in her fictional investigations. Perhaps that was why the email had felt so chilling.

      Shoving the hard copy into the plain folder that contained her negative fan mail, and which she kept in the bottom drawer of her desk, she deleted the email.

      On impulse, to balance out the unpleasantness, Jenna opened a folder in which she kept all of the mail she received from the technical experts who helped her with research. She selected the file containing all of the correspondence from Lydell88.

      As she read through the last couple of emails, the tension that had gripped her faded. Lydell wasn’t exactly a shoulder to cry on, but reading his no-nonsense prose was, in an odd way, steadying.

      There was nothing to indicate where Lydell88 lived. All she knew was that he was an Auckland cop with considerable experience, and that he didn’t mind answering her occasional questions. She had found him by emailing the Auckland District Office. One of the detectives had eventually responded by supplying her with Lydell88’s email address.

      Generally he supplied precise police procedural information, but over the years he had begun making incisive, relevant comments about her plots and characterisation, indicating that at some point, he had begun to read her books.

      His compliments were sparing, but she valued them all the more for that. When he liked something, he was unequivocal about the matter and she basked in the glow for days.

      Lately, he had even begun to suggest plot lines she could develop in future books. The ideas were well thought out and stemmed from an intimate knowledge of her characters and an even better understanding of the criminal mind.

      However, she was aware that wasn’t what gave her the warm glow of delight every time she opened one of his emails.

      Over the years, talking with Lydell88 about the technicalities of developing the police procedural side to her stories had, in an odd way, become the closest thing she had gotten to a date that she could actually enjoy, which was strange considering that he was a cop.

      She guessed it came down to mutual interests. They both enjoyed the books, she as the writer, he as a reader and researcher. Somehow, those two things had gelled along with a subtle, intangible quality she could only call chemistry, and they had become immersed, together, in that fictional world.

      When her editor had holidayed with her last summer, Jenna had allowed her limited access to the file, keeping the more private exchanges to herself. It had seemed too personal