Love Me Now; Kill Me Later

Danny Shepard isn't a typical sailor. Smart, skilled, scheming, the femme-fatale entices men and collects mementos. Love Me Now; Kill Me Later depicts the evolution of a serial killer, a thirty-year voyage that takes an unlikely mariner from fertile wheat fields of Washington State's Palouse to seaports on every continent, from deckhand to captain-perfect venues for fortuitous encounters and untraceable murders. When Danny returns to Spokane to claim an unexpected inheritance-half-a-million dollars and a remarkable house her father built fifty years earlier-the sailor-sans-conscience is forced to confront her past. A collection of diaries, the earliest entry made at the age of eight, and mementos stored in a cigar box disguised as a book, are resurrected; friends, lovers, murders revisited; harrowing nightmares relived. They provide insight into the mind of a woman who is both victim and villain. Looking back at an irrefutable record of dirty deeds, Danny feels no remorse-yet cannot imagine a future. In her father's house on South Hill, she plots an end to the Danielle Shepard story.