Claire Ladds

Crime and suspense author

crime fiction

Beneath the Flesh: a FREE Darker Minds e-book when you join my Readers’ Club – Read an Extract (Do You Love Prologues?, Part 5)

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Welcome to the fifth and final part of my mini-series, touting my love for writing prologues!

Today’s extract is quite a long one, as the prologue itself is split between the viewpoints of two main characters, from opposing backgrounds and with vastly different character traits. Prologues can, most definitely, be used to emphasise what the characters are like. I don’t think it’s easy (or necessarily helpful to the book) to use a prologue only for this purpose because the whole book itself, chapter by chapter, should be doing this anyway. But what the prologue can do is show how a character behaves and set up the reader’s expectation for the ways they might react when problems begin to be thrown at them – or, in my book’s case, probably murder…

The extract I have for you today is from Beneath the Flesh. This is, at the time of writing, the book I offer exclusively as a FREE gift to readers who sign up for my Readers’ Club emails. As you’ve probably gathered, the prologue gives the reader a massive insight into the main characters of the book. It also sets up an incident (often called the inciting incident) which directly leads to everything that happens in the main story. Without it, the rest of the action, suspicions and skulduggery would have nothing to hang on. Look at this prologue at a very wordy coat hanger, if you want!

There you have it – the final part of my mini-series showing you how much I love prologues and how I use them. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading the extracts. If you want to read more of my work, you’ll find details of all my books on this website and also on many e-book stores.

Please note that, as my extracts are crime-related books or dark fiction of some kind, they are suitable for an adult readership. Please read responsibly.

Happy reading!

Claire

P.S. The one obvious profanity is replaced with **** for the purposes of this extract.

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Show Me Dead: Read an Extract (Do You Love Prologues?, Part 4)

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Welcome to Part 4 of my mini-series on my love for prologues, and where I’m giving you a bit of an insight into how I use them, and what they do to add that bit extra to the reading experience.

There’s a couple of things I’ve not yet mentioned in this mini-series about prologues and the functions they can serve. For me, certainly in today’s extract, these two functions go hand-in-hand. One is the way they can set the tone of the book. The extract in this post is from Show Me Dead, a suspense thriller which adopts elements of the Gothic to set its tone, and certainly also skirts the borders of horror. You’ll see that I use physical darkness in the prologue to allow the main character’s imagination and memory to run amok and reveal some of her darkest secrets, right from the beginning. The book itself allows her to explain why over the course of the story.

The other function this particular prologue serves is more of a narrative, structural device. I don’t want to say anything about the story itself in too much detail here, because I don’t want to spoil the book if you’ve not yet read it, but the device I’m talking about here is the cyclic structure. This involves beginning a book in a particular place (either physically or psychologically) and developing the story in such a way that, by the end, the structure of the story has returned to the place it started – but with massive changes. It really hits home to the reader, then, how the character has changed as a consequence of the events in the book. The prologue used this way portrays something one way in order for it to be clear that this specific ‘something’ is very different by the end of the book, or has been adapted to create a hugely different feel to the tone, or possibly even an extension of, or a complete twist on, the prologue.

As we are less than a month away from International Women’s Day as I write this, I felt it appropriate to include Angel, a character I grew to love and respect, and admire more than I can say. I traced her story through some of the most horrendous incidents imaginable. Of all my female characters so far, she stands apart as determined, resilient, and an example of strength – if a somewhat dark one (I have tears in my eyes while I’m writing this. You can tell how strongly I feel about my characters, and Angel in particular). If you have already met the character of Angel, I hope you love her. If you haven’t, then I hope she intrigues you.

Please note that, as my extracts are crime-related books or dark fiction of some kind, they are suitable for an adult readership. Please read responsibly.

Happy reading!

Claire

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No Deadlier Time: Read an Extract (Do You Love Prologues?, Part 3)

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Welcome back, to part three of my mini-series on my love for prologues. And, you know, I really do love them! I have realised that, to date, all of my novels have some form of prologue, although not all of them are labelled as such.

I love planting seeds (and definitely not the gardening kind – my dad could tell you about my efforts from a very young age at how adept I clearly was, even then, at destroying the planting!). The seeds contained in a prologue could, potentially, make or break a reader’s full experience of the story – or the story that I, as author, have imagined you will experience, that I want you to engage with and think about, long after you’ve read the book.

As I said in Part 1 of this mini-series on prologues, there are various reasons for using a prologue in a story, but the most important thing to remember as a writer is that it has to do something. It’s not just a random scene that is disconnected from the story. Quite the opposite – it’s intrinsic to the story in some way. Without it, it’s possible that there are deeper elements to the narrative, or potentially even basic and important ones, that the reader would miss out on if the prologue wasn’t there.

If you’ve read any of my books, or read the extracts in the other posts in this mini-series, you may have realised I have often used the prologue as a device to point the reader to something that happened at some time before the book ‘proper’ gets started. In the extract from The Secrets That Haunt Us, for instance, the letters directly impact the ‘present’ of the story. Because of those letters, two characters have already set their course of action for the story, and the prologue goes some way to explain why, although the full impact of those letters at the beginning is fully and tragically clear until much later on. In the extract from That Killer Image, an event in the villain’s past leads to his atrocity later in life – and here I also give the reader a sneak peek into the truly creepy, split-second, psychological moment that follows him through the entire novel.

Today’s extract is the prologue from No Deadlier Time. This book is a suspense thriller which borders on (or for some readers, is) also psychological horror. Again, because I just can’t help myself it seems, this reveals a past event which impacts so much more than the main characters of the story. It foreshadows what might happen, should Harry, a boy in this prologue, follow in his father’s footsteps once he’s older. But does he? You won’t know unless you read the book (no spoilers here!). It also introduces another character who appears in a minor role here, yet is embroiled in this family’s story in ways you can’t possibly imagine. Or can you..?

Please note that, as my extracts are crime-related books or dark fiction of some kind, they are suitable for an adult readership. Please read responsibly.

Happy reading!

Claire

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That Killer Image: Read an Extract (Do You Love Prologues?, Part 2)

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Welcome to the second in my mini-series as I give a bit of well-deserved love to one of my favourite writing devices – prologues (and I love reading them, too!).

The extract I have for you today is from That Killer Image, one of my Darker Minds Crime & Suspense books. I have a particular love of prologues that show the reader something that happened in the past life of one of the characters, and which directly influences the life of the clear ‘villain’ of the book. It allows the reader to keep this event in mind as they watch the villain build up to their darkest deed of all, or maybe change over the course of the story and come to terms with this event of the past. The reader has an opportunity to question the behaviour, knowing what they do about the character. It may even make the reader complicit in the dark deeds, or at best, unable to do anything but watch and shout, ‘No, don’t do it!’ But, imprisoned in the book as he/she is, the villain can’t hear you…

I’m not giving away spoilers by telling you that this prologue is all about Anthony, and if you’ve read the novel you’ll know how quickly it’s obvious that he’s going to be the bad boy of the book. We first meet him when he a small boy. Anthony loves and adores his mother, and in particular, certain features about her. A specific event that occurred in his childhood has a massive impact on his psychology – and on his dreadful motivations for what he does (which I’m definitely not giving away!) in That Killer Image. I hope you enjoy it. Or that it creeps you out, just a bit, by the end. Either way, it means the prologue did one of its jobs!

Please note that, as my extracts are crime-related books or dark fiction of some kind, they are suitable for an adult readership. Please read responsibly.

Happy reading!

Claire

P.S. I’ve replaced any swear words in the novel with ****, for the purposes of this extract. Please also be aware that this scene contains domestic abuse and death/murder and in no way condones either. If this is likely to upset or trigger you in any way, please skip this extract.

Edited 10th March 2023

Unfortunately, this extract is no longer available to read. If you’d like to read the prologue (and the rest of the book!), you can buy it on Amazon, or read with your Kindle Unlimited subscription.

That Killer Image by Claire Ladds
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No Deadlier Time by Claire Ladds
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Show Me Dead by Claire Ladds
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Also available as a digital boxset

If you prefer e-book boxsets, then you can find all three of these Darker Minds Crime & Suspense books collected together. The boxset includes:

  • Show Me Dead
  • That Killer Image
  • No Deadlier Time
BUY HERE

Sign up for my Readers’ Club and get a FREE suspense book as a welcome gift.

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The Secrets That Haunt Us: Read an Extract (Do You Love Prologues?, Part 1)

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It’s February – the month in which love abounds, obsession comes to the fore, and… murder? Well, as you would expect from me, love, obsession, murder – they all combine in my books!

Okay, so this is a bit off-topic for Valentine’s month (you’d think!), but I have a question for you. Do you love prologues in your dark fiction, be it crime, mystery, psychological thrillers or suspense? They have a bit of a love-hate relationship with readers, and over time I’ve seen some quite passionate discussions on social media about them!

Personally, I love them – with the caveat that they do need to have a purpose, a genuine reason for being there, as far as the story is concerned, and also provide the reader with that all-important ‘extra’ which makes elements of the book clearer on a whole different level. Because of their purpose, they can have a variety of functions. For instance, they can set a scene for something that comes later (sometimes called foreshadowing), or provide the reader with a snapshot of the past which influences the book as a whole. They can hide a clue to whodunnit by providing just enough information for the reader (even when the reader doesn’t know it yet!), or ultimately deepen the reader experience by providing that ‘aha’ moment about a character or incident later on, which wouldn’t have been there without the prologue. They could even be dreams or memories of a character who is very much rooted in the ‘now’ of the book, and these may impact the story in all sorts of ways.

I thought it would be fun to give you a taster of some prologues in my novels, seeing that I’ve told you I love them so much. So welcome to a four-part mini-series of extracts from my books, where you can read the prologues I’ve used to begin some dark, obsessive stories – and each and every one with murder at its heart. Maybe you can guess why I’ve used a particular type of prologue, and what purpose it serves in the overall story.

We begin with a twisted, dark version of love: The Secrets that Haunt Us, my dark women’s fiction novel, full of love, obsession, revenge and, ultimately, murder. If ever there was a story of many loves gone wrong, it’s this one! This prologue takes the form of a series of letters, which appear to have been written shortly before the ‘present day’ of the story itself.

Please note that, as my extracts are crime-related books or dark fiction of some kind, they are suitable for an adult readership. Please read responsibly.

Happy reading!

Claire

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Darker Minds Crime and Suspense Boxset OUT NOW!

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It’s out today! I am thrilled to tell you that you can now buy, download and read the digital boxset containing three of my Darker Minds Crime and Suspense books, just in time for the Christmas holidays. This first bundle in the series of standalone psychological and suspense thrillers can be downloaded on lots of different e-book stores – so if you’ve not yet discovered the first three in this set of books, now is your chance to grab a trio of books in one go. (If you want to cut to the chase and not read the entire post, you can find the boxset here).

Here are the descriptions of the three books in the bundle:

Show Me Dead

THE DEEPER YOU GO, THE DARKER YOU GET. THE STAGE IS SET…

Ripped away from her circus family and kidnapped, Angel finds herself the unwilling ‘guest’ in a dilapidated theatre, belonging to a man who calls himself the Puppet Master.

She’s not the only captive, either. All of the broken and terrified people below ground are forced to perform for a very darkly discerning audience.

When performers begin to go missing, no one knows why, or who will be next. Fear is growing and Angel intends to ensure one thing – that it won’t be her. What is happening here? Just who is the Puppet Master, and what does he want with her? Angel may well wish that she’d never found out. But is he really the one pulling the strings?

To save them all and get to the truth, Angel has to perform the darkest show of all. But truth comes at a price. And someone will pay…


That Killer Image

THREE PEOPLE. ONE KILLER. AND A PICTURE SOMEONE WILL DIE FOR…

When Vicky meets Anthony, she sees him as a happy distraction from her claustrophobic relationship with her housemate and self-appointed guardian, Fran.

Anthony already knows Vicky because he has been following her every move. She is perfect for what he needs – a model for the ultimate photo of his life’s work – and he will do anything it takes to get that shot.

But Fran is not so easy to get rid of. Haunted by the disappearance of her sister, and blaming herself, she is desperate not to make the same mistakes again with Vicky. And when push really comes to shove, she has other ideas about that killer image.

Beneath obsession lurks something more deadly…


No Deadlier Time

A FAMILY WITH DARK SECRETS. WILL SOMEONE KILL TO KEEP THEM?

Neve Eldritch is pregnant, happy, and has one wish – to get her husband, Harry, to reconnect with his family. Neve has never met them – and with good reason. Now there’s a chance to move into the family home and heal a long-standing rift. Going home can’t be that bad. Can it? But something feels wrong from the moment they arrive.

When you’ve avoided the problem for so long, it’s bound to rear its ugly head. All Harry ever wanted was to be worthy in his dad’s eyes. There’s a secret to success, one his dad has taunted him with as a boy, but now he’s gone to drastic lengths to stop Harry getting hold of it. Desperate to prove himself, Harry takes matters into his own hands – with deadly results.

But Harry isn’t prepared for what the horrifying key to his family’s success really is, and it’s spiralling out of control. When murder follows murder, he’s sure he’s committed them. How can he stop himself and keep his family safe when the secret he now holds won’t let him – and he can’t remember any of it?

Suspicions run rife in Neve. Her husband is lying to her. Is he crazy? Or is he a killer? Or maybe – just maybe – someone, somewhere, wants rid of him, and they’ll do anything to get what they want. And she’s sure they’re here, at the isolated family home. Do they want to kill her, too?

Terrible choices lay ahead if anyone is to get out alive. One person can save them all. But time is ticking away… and it’s proving to be deadly.

Be careful what you wish for… you just might get it.

As I mentioned earlier, each book in this digital boxset is a standalone novel, and perfect for readers who love dark themes and crimes mixed with twists, turns and lots of suspense. I hope you enjoy my Darker Minds Crime and Suspense books.

Happy reading!

Darker Minds Crime and Suspense Boxset 1
Grab your digital boxset HERE