Oceanview Publishing, 2021, ISBN 978-1608094202 (HC) and 2022 978-1608094837 (paperback)
What would it take for you to kill someone for money? And if you did, who—or what—would you have become? These are the questions one woman faces when she loses everyone she loves and everything she has. When the opportunity arrives to reinvent herself as a killer for hire, she takes it. She’s good at it—and if she doesn’t do it, someone else will.
Then everything changes when she learns about a serial killer so horrible she vows to find him and kill him until—overcome by self-doubt—she seeks redemption rather than vengeance.
Fans of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Dexter will love Endings
* “[In Endings], Richards combines a damaged protagonist readers will root for with a twisted, whiplash-fast plot filled with layers of moral ambiguity. This harrowing tale of love, loss, and the value of life is not to be missed.” —Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
“Brilliant. Terrifying. Compulsively readable.” —Hallie Ephron, New York Times best-selling author
“Provocative and powerful . . . Page after page, Richards ratchets up the tension, weaving tradecraft, disguises, and psychology into a riveting tale that peels back the layers of the soul. The prose is often lyrical, the descriptions of the human heart achingly accurate. It will surely stand with the year’s best suspense thrillers.” —Gayle Lynds, New York Times best-selling author
“Linda L. Richards’ Endings grabs you by the throat on page one and doesn’t let go until The End. The writing is crisp, and the story has plenty of whiplashing twists and turns. Endings is the confident return of a writer at the height of her powers.” —Matt Coyle, Anthony, Shamus, and Lefty Award-winning author
“An unusually haunting thriller with a complex, seriously badass heroine. Endings brings you into a strange and dark world from page one, and then shows you the light. I highly recommend this book.” —Sheena Kamal, Macavity Award-winning author
Some reviews for Endings:
Publishers Weekly (Starred review)
“Richards combines a damaged protagonist readers will root for with a twisted, whiplash-fast plot filled with layers of moral ambiguity. This harrowing tale of love, loss, and the value of life is not to be missed.”
Mystery Scene
“This action-packed, adrenaline-fueled thriller from Richards breathes new life into a genre dominated by brooding male protagonists. The main character may be damaged and the subject matter dark, but the dry, witty tone coupled with the plot’s introspective bent and hopeful conclusion keeps the tale from skewing too bleak. By declining to name the narrator, giving her a prosaic origin story, and writing in the first-person, Richards grounds the tale and suggests to readers that with a cruel twist of fate, this story could be theirs.”
BookTrib
“Richards uses first-person narration to track her unnamed heroine from the depths of a painful personal tragedy, through a transformation that sets her on a deadly career path, and beyond. The writing style allows readers a close look into the mind of the protagonist, while the book’s short chapters serve to keep the plot progressing forward easily. As our narrator isolates herself more and more, we as readers get to know her meditative ticks and particularities on a granular level that makes even her most shocking choices nearly relatable.”
New York Journal of Books
“…a tightly woven, fast-paced, tension-filled thrill ride full of surprises. Some readers will cheer on this killer for hire. Some won’t like her one bit. Others will be ambivalent. But one thing’s for sure. She won’t be soon forgotten.”
ShotsMag
“[Endings is] a thought-provoking parable of sorts, an exploration of the costs of re-invention, of redemption and questions motivation, and if ever the ends justify the means. It can of course be read as an exciting story, or if one reads between the lines, it becomes far more.
“I found it useful to check the dictionary definition[s] of ‘Assassin’ when I put the book down. A fast and furious read, it will rest in the mind for far longer, than the journey that this novel took to read; the exploration of the perils of reinventing oneself in a world cloaked in darkness.
“Despite the gender switch, I was reminded of a line from True Detective “The world needs bad men. We keep the other bad men from the door.” Because when the door is closed, we have endings – plural, not singular.”
