The Muse

A series of carefully staged, sadistic killings has the city on edge. Detective Gene Tripp and his partner notice something the public has not: each murder reproduces a scene from the bestselling novels of thriller writer Brody Pierce.

Pierce has not published in some time. Writer's block, he says. The detectives are less sure, and the more they learn about how precisely life is imitating his art, the harder it becomes to say where the fiction stops.

The Muse is a short suspense story from Jeffery Deaver's Unsettling collection, which pairs conventional detective work with a step into the supernatural. It can be heard or read in a single sitting.