Dead Ringer

Maggie Nesbitt is depressed beyond telling. She’d had a little too much to drink at a party a couple months back and wound up in a motel with a young man vacationing from Ireland. Now she’s pregnant and she’s reasonably sure her TV newsman husband, who’d had the snip, snip operation years earlier, because he’d wanted no children, won’t understand.

While she’s shopping for dinner a couple rough looking strangers mistake her for somebody else. One of them said something about seeing her picture in the paper. Her interest piqued, she goes home and goes through all the back papers her husband had been saving in the garage and sure enough she sees her photo, only the woman on the page has a different. name She’s called Margo, not Maggie and Margo had been the name of the twin sister she’d always believed had perished when she was an infant.

Excited she looks her up in the phone book and miraculously she’s listed. Maggie hot foots it over to Margo’s, runs into her twin’s ex who is a piece of work, he wants to take Jasmine, Margo’s daughter for the weekend, the daughter doesn’t want to go. Both mistake Maggie for Margo. Maggie bluffs, protects the girl and chases away the bad ex-hubby.

Jasmine, who has been staying with a sitter, is surprised to see her mother, as she’s supposed to be on a religious retreat. Maggie plays along, Jasmine goes next door to play. Maggie turns on the tube and sees that Newsman Nick Nesbitt’s wife had been found murdered. Maggie gasps, that’s her, she’s dead, but of course she’s not, it was the twin.

How?

Why?

Turns out the rough guys in the store had been hired to kill Maggie’s sister because she’d witnessed a murder. When they saw Maggie in the store they followed her and as luck would have it, the twins paths almost crossed. The killers grabbed and killed Margo and now Maggie who doesn’t know this yet is presented with a unique opportunity. She can have her baby and save Jasmine from going to live with her horrible father, all she has to do is step into Margo’s live, become her twin.

However when Maggie who is now Margo, shows up the next day not dead, the killers are very, very upset.

My name is Ken Douglas and I’m an underpaid writer, so underpaid that I have to do my own bio here. I write thrillers and suspense stories. I’ve been doing it for the last ten years, ever since my wife Vesta and I sold everything we had and bought a boat. We didn’t really understand the sailing part, had never done it before, but heck we’d raced cars across the Australian desert going real fast, so how hard could boating be, after all they only go between four and ten miles per hour, slower sometimes.

We bought a big old raceboat, sixty feet and named it "Great White Wonder," after that first Bob Dylan bootleg. The boat was run down and ready for scrap, but we put two years of hard labor into it in Trinidad and made it new again. Then we hired someone to teach us how to sail it and we spent the next eight years cruising up and down the Caribbean island chain till the money ran out.

Below please see a brief description of my books, then I’ll write a little more about me.

Desperation Moon: Sara Hackett must save two little girls from dangerous kidnappers, but she doesn’t have the money to pay the ransom.

Dead Ringer: Maggie steps into her dead twin’s life to get out of a bad marriage only to find that her twin had been murdered and now the killer is after her.

Running Scared: Joey Sapphire wakes next to a dead man and now the killer is after her. She is in trouble and she has nowhere to run.

Tangerine Dream, written with Jack Stewart: Incest, death, tragedy, betrayal and teenage homosexual love, I don’t know how, but somehow it all works out in this different kind of thriller.

Diamond Sky, written with Jack Stewart: Beth Shannon’s husband stole conflict diamonds from the Russian Mafia before he died. Now they're after Beth, because they think she knows where they are. And she does, only she doesn’t know it.

There you have it, can’t get much shorter than that.

Oh yeah, did I mention that we sold the boat because the money ran out? Take a chance on one of my books, I think you’ll get caught up by the stories and you’ll be helping Vesta and me in our quest to save up enough money so that we can buy another boat, smaller this time, and go cruising again.

The sea, sometimes it’s cold out there, sometimes it’s scary, sometimes it’s fun, sometimes hard, sometimes it’s terrifying, but it’s never boring.

Best regards,

Ken Douglas