Siren by Tara Moss

Epigraph:  Security is mostly a superstition.  It does not exist in nature - Helen Keller

First paragraph from the book:  A brief glow peeked through the curtains, washing the crowd in crimson lights, before the little theatre plunged into shadow.  There were murmurs, and then renewed silence, ears straining for sounds beyond the curtain.  Shhhh...


Backcover blurb:  Enter a world of beauty and danger, of burlesque and terrible revenge.

Mak Vanderwall - beautiful, street-wise daughter of a cop, graduate in forensic psychology, and now PI - is hired by a widowed mother to track down her missing nineteen-year-old son.  Has he come to harm?  Or has he run off with a bizarre troupe of shady French cabaret artistes sweeping through Australia?

And what of the rumours of violence and tragedy that have plagued the troupe for the past decade?  Is their horrifying past fact or fiction?

Meanwhile, Mak is increasingly obsessed with the powerful and ruthless Cavanagh family.  And it seems their security advisor Mr White, and his hitman, Luther Hand, may not have forgotten about Mak either...

About the author:  Tara Moss, is the author of five bestselling crime novels published in fifteen countries in ten languages.  Writing has been a lifelong passion for her; she began penning gruesome 'Stephen King-inspired' stories for her classmates when she was only ten.  Tara enjoyed a successful international career as a fashion model before pursuing professional writing, first earning a Diploma from the Australian College of Journalism.  She began writing her debut novel, Fetish, when she was just twenty-three.  Her crime novels have been nominated for the Davitt and the Ned Kelly awards.  She has a star on the Australian Walk of Fame:  the first person so inducted for services to literature.

Not a writer to rely solely on imagination, she has toured the FBI Academy at Quantico, spent time in squad cars, morgues, prisons, labs, the Supreme Court and criminology conferences worldwide, taken polygraph tests, shot weapons, conducted surveillance, flown with the RAAF, and acquired her CAMS race driver licence.  Tara recently earned her PI licence, and was set on fire by Hollywood stunt company West EFX and choked unconscious by Ultimate Fighters 'Big' John McCarthy for her research.

Born in Victoria, British Columbia, Tara is a proud dual Australia/Canadian citizen, and divides her time between Sydney, Los Angeles and her hometown in Canada.  She is a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, as well as an ambassador for the YWCA and the Royal Institute for Deaf and Blind Children.

She hosts the true crime series Tough Nuts: Australia's Hardest Criminals on the Crime & Investigation Network and Tara Moss in Conversation on the 13th STREET Universal channel.  Previously, she hosted the crime documentary series 'Tara Moss Investigates' on the National Geographic Channel across Europe and Australia/New Zealand.

Rating:  3/5