Fielder's Choice

Book excerpt: W.D. Fielder's prim Virginia bred mother certainly wasn't looking for her seventeen-year-old's disgusting pinup magazines. But when she found them, while cleaning up his room, that rainy spring afternoon in 1989, she just kind of lost it. She had never raised a hand to either of the twins, William David or Wallace Daniel, but she did that day and paid for her lose of control with her life. Over the next decade, the late Edna Fielder's miscalculation fostered a flood of missing persons reports being lodged with the Barnwell County, Maryland Sheriff's department, but none of the almost three dozen missing women were ever found. The authorities, chagrined at being unable to solve even a single one of the cases, took the position that the girls had most likely just run away to see the world in Washington, D.C. or Baltimore or maybe even New York City. Then the newspaper publisher's daughter disappears while investigating the controversial Forest Vista land development project, located on one of the Fielder family properties, and all hell breaks loose. From the opulent corporate boardrooms of Washington, D.C. to the drug infested Baltimore slums and the rich rural farmlands in between, follow Jillian Hargrove and Architect Romulus Reynolds as they search for Reporter Chelsa Wellington and the other missing girls, even as the WD's track their every move. Initially reluctant to accede to his client's request to get involved in the search for the missing reporter, Reynolds is even more reticent in agreeing to let Jillian help. It's not just that she represents a group of neighbors, who want to stop his client's project. What really makes him uncomfortable is the possibility that she has become the kidnapper's next target. As their investigation reveals the magnitude of the twins' depravity, Rom's reservations are complicated by the fact that he has fallen passionately in love with Jillian. As their relationship deepens and the investigation accelerates, so do his fears that he will soon be coming face to face with the prospect of Jillian's death at the hands of the twins.