Sandman by Morgan Hannah MacDonald

Available: Now Amazon

Type: Suspense/ Rom Suspense

Publisher: Self Pub

My Copy: Sent

Beware the SANDMAN he’ll put you to sleep. . .forever. 
A serial killer on the loose, a woman being stalked, and a homicide detective who must find the connection between the two before she becomes his next victim. 

He collects women. He imprisons them, plays with them, tortures them. Until they bore him. Then he removes a souvenir. They call him the Sandman. 

Meagan McInnis is being plagued with late night calls, yet when she answers, no one is there. Then one night she makes a grizzly discovery in her own backyard. 

The caller is silent no more. 

Homicide Detective, J.J. Thomas, realizes Meagan is the key to finding the Sandman. Now not only must he protect her, but he must find the connection between Meagan and the killer before she becomes his next victim.

.

With a serial killer on the loose, Detective Thomas knows he has no time to spare. The Sandman is escalating his kills and leaving tortured womens bodies for the cops to find up and down the coast of California. They all bare a striking resemblance to each other, long blonde hair and blue eyes. Though when he is done with them they barely look human.

Meagan thinks he her is stalking her. Hang up calls almost every night and strange occurances in her yard. She never once thinks the killer might be after her too. She doesn’t fit his profile at all with her curly red hair. The Sandman has set his sights on her though, and he wont give up till she is his…forever.

.

Oh, where to begin on Sandman. First off, from reading the blurb Sandman sounds like a romantic suspense huh? I guess in a way it loosely is, though the two main characters of Meagan and Thomas don’t actually meet until you’re 55% into the book. Kinda hard to connect the main characters emotionally on such short notice. Up till that point it was like reading two different books woven into one. It was odd to say the least.

Thomas is our hero. A cop that seems to be having a hard time getting over the death of his wife two years earlier. He is a functioning alchoholic. Runs himself ragged working cases and then goes home and drinks until he passes out. I get the distraught part, but I would have liked to see him at least be on the road to recovery on his own. Otherwise Meagan (when they finally meet) seems like a huge re-bound. He is working a case dubbed as The Sandman. A serial killer is stalking young women, all with long blonde hair and blue eyes. He tortures them in unspeakable ways before cutting their breasts off and letting them bleed to death. He then drops them on the beach for some unsuspecting innocent to find. Horrific, yes. In fact The Sandman was the best part of the entire book. What does it say when I think that?

Meagan is our heroine…and to be quite blunt, she is just to stupid to live. She has been getting hang up calls for months and recently they have increased tenfold. She doesn’t call the police even though she has seen her ex hanging around her house and outside her work. She figured it’ll just go away on its own. Seriously? Oh wait, it gets better. She also has a creeptastic boss that could be the poster boy for sexual harassment. He couldn’t possibly be behind it either right? She lets her dog out one night and he freaks out and starts growling into the night. The dog refuses to come back in the house resulting in her having to go outside and collect him from the backyard, growling into the darkness, in the middle of the night. Then her and her friends go out for her birthday dinner and she ends up hooking up with the lead singer of some band that was “singing just to her” who owns a chester the molester panel van. Now tell me…if you’re a young woman constantly getting threatening mouth breather phone calls and your dog is growling into the bushes outside your house every time he needs to pee, you’re just going to go hooking up with some dude you don’t even know just because he seems sweet? I don’t care if the van is for his band…I’m not going near some guy I don’t know with a flipping panel van. No thanks. Not with a serial killer being splashed all over the news. Within the span of a few chapters her and Mr “who knows his story” are in her house making out. Well gee, he seems so nice. That’s what they say say before their throats get slashed. All the while the phone calls are escalating every night. It gets better people…just wait. Megan gets woken up by her dog, Godzilla, a few nights later because he wants out. He takes off into the darkness and she goes back to bed with the back door standing wide open…the chick goes to sleep! Perv-o then sneaks through her wide open door and proceeds to jack himself off over her bed while she’s sleeping. For reals? When she finds her dog dead in the backyard the next morning, throat slit ear to floppy ear, I’m not surprised in the least. At least the cops were called at this point but they really don’t seem to care about the calls or the dead dog. All the while Meagan keeps seeing Mr band guy but he dissapears for a few days at a time and doesn’t call. One night she gets a phone calls where mouth breather actually says something in some kind of creepy mechanical voice. He tells her he left her a present. That would be the head of her friend on the back patio. So, because its a murder guess who FINALLY gets to meet our heroine? Oh yeah, 55% in and Thomas and Meagan meet! Thomas actually thinks this in one paragraph:

 ”It seemed that the woman had a stalker who’d been tormenting her for weeks. First with phone calls in the middle of the night. The the morning before she found her dog murdered. As if that wasn’t bad enough, she discovered the decapitated head of her friend in the back yard”

I know right? Do you know how hard it is to get blood off patio furniture.  You can’t! It just soaks on in there and you can’t get it off. The poor woman is gonna have to buy new furniture now. I mean, the least the killer could have done was put the head in the grass so the blood would soak into the ground. Inconsiderate killer.

Up till this point we’ve heard all about Thomas running up and down the coast with his partner Shadowhawk looking at different leads from all the past murders The Sandman has racked up. For a suspense…great….fine. For a romantic suspense, yeah I don’t care, get to the point already. Shadowhawk uses the phrase “Holy Crap Batman” and I want to throw my Kindle across the room. I would think at some point the FBI should have been called for a serial killer spanning several counties up and down the coast of Cali over several years..but whatev.

So….Meagan and Thomas meet which means the story better speed the hell up because we only have 40% to go. The case falls together quickly. All the while Meagan making completely boneheaded mistakes like telling people where she is hiding out. The heat level between the two that I am somehow supposed to believe is palatable after Meagan was making out with band boy simmers quickly. Pretty soon they are having sex and to be honest with you I’m done. There were times I was hoping The Sandman would swoop in and just be done with Meagan too.  Thomas is completely over his wife and hung up on Meagan. He even hears his dead wife in his head telling him it’s okay to move on. what she should have said was “all it took was one hot redhead in distress for 2 days to get you to forget me and move on? You’ve been crying over me for two years and you suddenly snap out of it? MEN!”

The climax was decent. The Sandman himself creepy and great. The rest of the story? No thanks.

I give Sandman by Morgan Hannah MacDonald 1.50 stars

Guest post with Morgan Hannah MacDonald and GIVEAWAY

A serial killer on the loose, a woman being stalked, and a homicide detective who must find the connection between the two before she becomes the next victim.

He collects women. He imprisons them, plays with them, tortures them. Until they bore him. Then he removes a souvenir. They call him the Sandman.

Meagan McInnis is being plagued with late night calls, yet when she answers, no one is there. Then one night she makes a grizzly discovery in her own backyard.

The caller is silent no more.

Homicide Detective, J.J. Thomas, realizes Meagan is the key to finding the Sandman. Now not only must he protect her, but he must find the connection between Meagan and the killer before she becomes his next victim.

.

.

.

.

.

.

I’ve been asked where the inspiration for SANDMAN came from. Well, truth is stranger than fiction. It was November 3, 1998. I had gone away for the weekend to the mountains with a couple of friends from work. There had been rumors of snow, so we put the TV on immediately to track the storm. The minute the news came on, there was a story of a trucker who had walked into the police station, slapped a plastic bag on the counter and stated; I think you’re looking for me. The bag contained the severed breast of a woman.

As the weekend wore on, more information became available. They stated that the man had frequented a Karaoke bar in San Clemente. That perked up my ears. Five years prior, I had dated a guy who ran that Karaoke bar. I might have met this guy! Chilling.

After I got home, there was a message from my best friend. She asked if I had seen the story on the news and wasn’t that the guy I’d dated? I laughed. I’d never dated a Wayne. I would have remembered, that was my grandfather’s name. Then she told me his full name was Wayne Adam Ford, it hit me. I did date a guy named Adam, but he didn’t look anything like the guy on the news.

The Adam I knew was sexy, tall, fit and had a neatly trimmed beard that brought out his gorgeous deep green eyes. It had been the winter of 1993 and he wore flannel shirts with straight legged 501 jeans. I love that lumberjack look! *giggle* The guy on the news was heavier and balding. Of course, I hadn’t seen him in five years and people do change. But I still wasn’t convinced. My friend said that Inside Edition was doing a story on him that night.

So at seven o’clock I sat on my couch and waited. They started the segment with the exact same clip the news had showed all weekend. It was a slow motion shot of him entering a court room in an orange jumpsuit. But this time, when he turned to face the camera, I recognized those eyes. I burst into tears. It was him, it was the man I’d dated! My body trembled, then turned numb as I listened to the frightening tale. He was discharged from the marines for psychological reasons in the early eighties. In 1985 he was arrested for the rape and beating of a prostitute, the charges were dropped due to lack of evidence. That’s when it occurred to me, he was already on the brink of insanity when I’d known him!

In 1994 he’d met a young girl at that same karaoke bar. They’d married and had a child. After the birth, he started to unravel. He’d become possessive, jealous and asked her to do strange things in the bedroom. She divorced him and took the child to live with her mother. He was refused visitation rights.

That was the catalyst that started his murderous rampage. He started picking up prostitutes and hitch hikers at truck stops along his route. He raped and

tortured the girls before he killed them, then sliced off a breast as a souvenir.

The camera panned to a trailer surrounded by woods alongside a river. The picture would have been beautiful and serene if not for all the cops parading in and out carrying evidence. They announced his freezer was full of body parts. It seems that one of his victims had her legs, arms and head amputated by an ax. Her torso was found bobbing in the water by a fisherman. They were still searching the Madd River for her head.

In a moment of hysteria, I remembered how overly dramatic the guy had been. If not for the fact that they’d found all that evidence linking him to those grisly crimes, I would have thought he’d confessed just to get attention. Maybe he did. The authorities didn’t know they had a serial killer. He wasn’t even a blip on their radar. So the only way he could get his fifteen minutes of fame was to turn himself in. But the joke’s on him, fifteen minutes is all he got. After all, have you ever heard of Wayne Adam Ford? It is said that there are approximately 50 serial killers active in the United States at any given time. So if in his sick twisted mind he thought he would be another Ted Bundy, or John Wayne Gacy, he was sorely mistaken.

The final twist to this already disturbing story is that I met Wayne Adam Ford on my birthday November 3, 1993 and he turned himself in on November 3 1998. After this revelation, I didn’t trust my instincts regarding men. I didn’t go on another date for over ten years. I’m still single to this day. I guess you could say that this has really messed with my mind!

Now I know it’s a cliché, but it’s true. I never had a clue. The guy I dated was charming, handsome and had lots of friends. We dated only a short time. I questioned his relationship with his ex-girlfriend who was cooking him meals and leaving them in his freezer. He broke up with me because he said I had a suspicious mind. Funny, but I ran into him some months later and we went out to grab a bite to eat. That’s when he confessed he had to stop seeing her because he was still in love with her.

Now, when you read SANDMAN, you will find bits and pieces of these things in the story. I borrowed some facts from his case and mixed them up between the suspects so no one would be able to guess the killer’s true identity.

.

.

EXCERPT

.

Sean climbed out of the water with his board under his arm. He dragged his hand down his face to brush the salt water away from his eyes. His breathing was labored; he’d gotten in a good workout today. He walked up the beach a good distance before he detected a strange odor. As he neared his destination, the stench invading his nostrils became more pungent.

I hope there wasn’t another damn sewage spill.

Soon he heard a strange buzzing sound. He stopped, brows furrowed, and concentrated on zeroing in on the exact location of the noise. Failing at this, he shrugged, and then continued up the strand. But with each step his uncertainty grew. The irritating cacophony had increased in volume.

Within seconds Sean found himself about fifty feet from where he’d left his gear. Before him lay a blanket of black that appeared to be moving. “What the fuck?” He hesitated, waiting for the synapses in his brain to start firing, before taking another step.

When he found no logical explanation, he gently rested his board on the sand and made his way closer until he stood directly in front of the sight. His hand cupped his nose. The stench reminded him of hard-boiled eggs gone bad. Very, very bad.

Okay, strike the moving blanket crack. It was more like a black cloud hovering over his belongings. Flies. He had an inkling that it was not the seaweed they found interesting. Something dead had washed up on shore and he was less than eager to find out what it was. A seagull? A fish? A seal? Whatever it was, it would not be pretty no matter how long it had been dead.

Slowly, he reached down to pick up his sweater with one hand, while the other reached for the strap on his backpack. The flies swarmed up for a brief moment, just long enough to reveal their prey, before settling back down into a dark writhing carpet.

An unintelligible sound escaped Sean’s lips. He gasped for air while instinctively taking a step back. He’d seen some hairy things in his life, but nothing even close to this. Icy fingers of fear raced up his spine; his heartbeat hammered in his chest.

Sean couldn’t look away even if he had wanted to. Some strange fascination took hold of his brain and wouldn’t let go. Systematically, his mind dissected the grisly scene before him.

Sticking out of the rolling mound of seaweed was a woman’s arm. It was stiff as a mannequin’s, extending skyward as if reaching to him for help. The mottled blue hand wore long red fingernails, two of which had been broken down to the quick. Seaweed was wrapped around her arm like a feather boa.

Sean’s gaze then locked onto another object protruding from the sandy grave: a leg that seemed to be severed mid-thigh, but closer inspection revealed that it was really half-buried. It too appeared tangled in the bubbly brown vegetation.

The foot, like the hand, wore a shock of bright red polish on its perfectly manicured toes, clashing with the bluish pallor of the flesh. His eyes grew wide at the sight of flies and sand crabs greedily devouring the soft tissue. He choked back bile.

The spell was broken.

Sean stepped backward so fast he tripped over his own feet and landed on his butt. He scrambled up and raced toward the shore. He couldn’t get away fast enough. He reached the water’s edge before collapsing to his hands and knees. His insides lurched so hard that he thought he would spew his stomach lining. Dry heaves continued long after his stomach had emptied. He collapsed on the sand, exhausted. A wave washed over him, but he hardly noticed.

.

About the Author:

Morgan Hannah MacDonald writes Romantic Thrillers-Not for the faint of heart. She has always been interested in writing and serial killers, but it wasn’t until she found she had dated one herself that a true writer was born. She belongs to Romance Writers of America’s San Diego Chapter, as well as the Kiss of Death Chapter. She resides in San Diego, California where she is busy working on her next novel.

Email: morganwrites@yahoo.com

Website: www.morganhannahmacdonald.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MorganHannahMacDonald.Author

.

 

.

Want to win a e-copy of Sandman? Let me know and I will enter you into the contest! Leave a clear way for me to find you if you win please. Open internationally! I will close this giveaway on the 29th at 11:59pm EST and announce the winner the next day! Winner picked by Random.org.