Destroyed by Malice (ePub)

The world's most famous novelist, Barker Drule, is gunned down in his driveway by an unknown assailant.

About forty-five minutes after dusk had fallen, the car turned up the long driveway and parked a few feet in front of the garage, while the person standing behind a nearby tree watched it carefully. Perfect—everything was going exactly according to plan. The sweat on the palms of the hands and the pounding of the heart weren't part of the plan, but that was probably a natural thing to experience when one was about to murder two people.

The door on the driver's side of the car opened and Barker Drule stepped out. The man was so famous it was ridiculous, and what had he ever done to merit all the attention that had been showered on him for the last twenty years? Thirty-six novels—that's what he had done, and every one of them was a piece of disgusting commercial trash, even if he had sold almost five hundred million books. However, in just a few seconds, the tables were about to turn on this pathetic creature--instead of writing about murders, he was going to participate in one; instead of being the recipient of one idiotic reward after another, he was going to be the recipient of four bullets.

From behind the large oak tree, the shadow emerged. Barker turned—he had heard something. "Who's there?" he said. For an answer, there was the nearly silent sound of three gunshots—that's what the silencer was good for. Barker staggered backwards two steps and crumpled to the pavement.

The next one to deal with was his wife—the one who knew everything about everything. Stepping around Barker, the shadow—dressed in black and wearing a black hood--yanked open the passenger-side door and leveled the gun at Gertrude Drule. She had no idea who it was and put her hands up as if to surrender. Tonight, however, there would be no prisoners; tonight, it would be death by the firing squad.

Three more shots—one of them when right through her heart. But the shadow didn't know whether she was alive or dead, and since she had collapsed backwards towards the steering wheel, the shadow walked around to the driver's-side door, opened it, put the gun to her temple, and pulled the trigger. That ought to do the trick.

It isn't long before detective Jeff Willard is certain that the murderer is a member of the Drule family. Perhaps it's Lenore, the oldest daughter, who was secretly raped by her father when she was thirteen; perhaps it's the beautiful twenty-seven-year-old Raylene, who wrote a novel about a rape victim that her father had managed to have the publishing industry blackball; perhaps it's Ricky, the twenty-five-year-old son who has become a drug dealer and is desperate to get his hands on his father's money; and perhaps it's Dalton Drule, Barker's ill-tempered eighty-two-year-old father who lives in the Drule mansion and has the same type of gun that was used to murder his son and daughter-in-law.

Besides being a clever murder mystery, Destroyed by Malice is also a satirical excursion through the underlying forces that create a best-selling novel. Many readers will laugh at the persistent dark humor, but some may find the mockery to be a little bit too intense and claim it is all an exaggeration. However, Barker Drule isn't meant to represent any specific person; rather, he represents the whole conglomeration of ills and idiocies that have driven books of merit into oblivion.