Welcome to Sneak Peak Sunday, where authors offer six paragraphs from their work to entice and entertain! Click on the graphic to travel to other participating authors for their snippets.

Today I’m featuring The Unmasking, which is #FREE through midnight tonight, June 22. Reviews at Amazon average 4.7, with comments like  One of the best stories ever written by Adriana Kraft…a truly great read, and could not put it down until I finished it,and full of unexpected twists, the mystery and suspense intensifies as does the need to keep turning the pages.

Here’s cover, blurb, and a fresh excerpt for you.

BLURB

Whose mask will crumble first—
the enigmatic professor of Celtic Studies,
the undercover cop masquerading as a co-ed,
or the campus stalker,
biding his time to strike again?

Is anthropology professor Matt Bayfield the Blackthorn College rapist, or a potential ally? Aloof and unapproachable, Matt has academic ambitions. He can’t escape Blackthorn College soon enough, and he doesn’t want any entanglements to slow down his exit.

Nancy Appleby would like nothing more than to solve the string of campus rape cases before Thanksgiving so she can go home. The last thing she wants is a relationship to complicate her life—but she’ll settle for a fling, especially when the sex sizzles.

The stalker has his own carefully crafted timetable, with a special date just for Nancy. Can Matt and Nancy force him out of his hidey-hole before it’s too late?

BUY LINKS

#FREE through midnight June 22 at Amazon

EXCERPT

Set up: Nancy and Matt are spending Christmas at a remote cabin in Wisconsin’s North Woods, where they’ve just tramped out a new cross-country ski trail on their snowshoes. They’ve paused to rest in a spruce grove.

“I still like to dream little girl dreams when I sit under these boughs—of a knight on a great steed coming to rescue me,” Nancy said

“You do have a vivid imagination.” Matt wondered what she had in mind.

“This is my favorite tree.” Nancy crawled under a huge spruce that had to be very old and stretched out on spruce boughs that shifted with her weight. Had the boughs fallen that way, or had she arranged them? She held out her hand inviting him to join her. Without breaking the silence, he stretched out beside her. The bed of boughs flexed accommodating his weight.

They lay there with their heads tucked up against the tree trunk. Without saying a word, Nancy pointed above them. It was uncanny, but through the boughs he saw a patch of blue sky. Was that the canopy of heaven so many of the ancients had talked about?

This was a charmed place, almost surreal. There was no wind. The layer of snow on the boughs added to the illusion of having a blanket of warmth. Maybe he’d crossed into the non-ordinary reality of the shaman. He caught a glimpse of Nancy out of the corner of his eye. There was nothing ordinary about that woman either.

“So,” Nancy said, “has my knight recovered enough from snowshoeing to make love to his damsel?”

~ I hope you enjoyed that – just the right amount of winter chill to take the edge off this summer’s heat wave, and then a chance to heat things up with a little action. When hubs and I lived in Minnesota’s North Woods, we created our own cross country ski trails using snowshoes, just like Nancy and Matt. Not gonna confess whether we ever took that next step in the frozen tundra, though…