Play Dead by Anne Frasier

No one is more familiar with Savannah’s dark side than homicide detective and native resident Elise Sandburg. She’s been haunted for years by her own mysterious past: She was abandoned as a baby in one of the city’s ancient cemeteries, and it’s rumored that she is the illegitimate daughter of an infamous Savannah witch doctor. The local Gullah culture of voodoo and magic is one that few outsiders can understand, least of all Elise¿s new partner. Now someone is terrorizing the city, creating real-life zombies by poisoning victims into a conscious paralysis that mimics death. As the chilling case unfolds, Elise is drawn back into the haunted past she’s tried so hard to leave behind.

PLAY DEAD is available from Amazon and Audible.

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Frasier (Sleep Tight, etc.) has perfected the art of making a reader’s skin crawl, which is evident from this book’s very first scene, in which a medical examiner discovers in the midst of an autopsy that the cadaver he’s working on is really a live person. Set in Savannah, Ga., this exceptional thriller follows the hunt for the deranged person who’s drugging people so that their minds remain wide awake even as their bodies resemble death. The creepiness factor increases when Frasier introduces homicide detective Elise Sandburg, who was abandoned in a cemetery as a baby and who knows Gullah spells and culture. Elise’s partner, anti-social David Gould, is equally strange; his past holds secrets so dark he should be under psychiatric care. Formerly with the FBI, Gould currently lives in a rundown, foul-smelling apartment and sleeps with a prostitute who works for a voodoo priestess. As the two detectives follow leads to the priestess and the former college professor who researched the drug, they forge a tentative bond and come to terms with their own troubled pasts. Frasier’s characters are not only fully realized, but fascinating to boot, and she evokes the dark, mystical side of Savannah with precision and skill. Appropriately, this unsettling tale closes with a grim children’s rhyme and a spell for “Elise’s Follow-Me-Boy Mojo.” Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Anne Frasier is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of twenty-five books and numerous short stories that have spanned the genres of suspense, mystery, thriller, romantic suspense, paranormal, fantasy, and memoir.  During her award-winning career, she’s written for Penguin Putnam, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins Publishers, Bantam Books/Random House, Silhouette Books, Grand Central Publishing/Hachette, and Thomas & Mercer. Her titles have been printed in both hardcover and paperback and translated into twenty languages.