Out of Control
Author: Sarah Alderson
Published by: Simon Pulse
Publication date: May 12th 2015
Genres: Thriller, Young Adult
A girl looking to escape her past in New York City ends up on the run from a dangerous conspiracy in this sizzling, high-stakes novel.
When seventeen-year-old Liva came to New York City, all she wanted was to escape the painful memories of her past and finally find a fresh start. Her hopes for a new future were dashed the moment she became the sole witness to a brutal murder. When she’s taken into police custody—supposedly for her own protection—she realizes something isn’t right, but it’s too late. Soon, bullets start flying, and Liva realizes that she is not just a witness, but the target—and she needs to escape before it’s too late.
With the help of a sexy car thief that she met at the station, Liva manages to get away from the massacre unharmed, but now the two of them are alone in New York, trying to outrun and outwit the two killers who will stop at nothing to find them. Liva and Jay are living on the edge, but when you’re on the edge, there’s a long way to fall.
The boy snatches the key from my outstretched hand and jams it into
the tiny hole. The cuff springs apart, freeing him.
Instantly, he throws himself on top of me. ‘Get down!’
A bullet smacks itself into a filing cabinet just behind us as we
tumble to the ground. His chest presses down on mine, my face is buried in his
shoulder. Quickly he rolls off me and pushes me towards a desk. I scoot
underneath it, banging the side of my head on the sharp metal corner of a
drawer unit. I let out a cry.
‘Shhh.’ His hand clamps over my mouth.
I tug his arm away. ‘What’s going on? What’s happening?’ I whisper.
Before he can answer me, the shooting stops and a silence falls that
is even more terrifying than the gunfire. The boy and I both freeze, staring at
each other unblinking, just a few millimetres between us. Together, enclosed in
the tight space beneath the desk, we strain to listen, and over the radio
static and the whir of the air conditioner overhead, I pick out faint cries
coming from somewhere in the distance; the unnatural keening howl of a wounded
animal.
The boy shifts his weight. His back is pressed to one cabinet, his
feet to the drawer unit. Carefully, he peers around the edge of the desk then
ducks quickly back, breathing fast. A bead of sweat trickles down the side of
his face.
‘Shit,’ he murmurs, resting his head back against the cabinet and
closing his eyes.
‘Wh— ’ I begin, but stop when I hear the sly creak of the door being pushed
open. A boot crunches on glass. The boy’s eyes flash open and lock on mine,
holding me in place, silencing the scream that has risen up my throat and is
threatening to tear free. My legs begin to shake from holding still in a
crouching position. The boy’s right hand squeezes my knee hard – another
warning, his eyes wide and burning fiercely into mine, telling me: Do not
move.
Something topples off a desk on the far side of the room and, over the
boy’s shoulder, through a gap between two filing cabinets, I glimpse the back
of a man’s leg. Whose? Is it a cop? Where is everyone else? What happened to
the cops who ran out into the corridor?
No. I shut off the thought, not wanting to go there.
The man in the room is standing stock-still with his back to us. What
is he doing? I can’t see. He’s facing the wall – the chalkboard with all the
homicide cases listed on it. The seconds seem to extend into whole hours, days,
centuries, and I’m holding my breath and the boy’s hand is still squeezing my
knee and my heart is bursting, literally bursting, as though too much blood is
pumping through it. My leg muscles are on fire and, without warning, my foot
slips. Not far. But it bumps the edge of the desk. The man spins instantly in
our direction. The air rushes from my lungs and the boy shifts beside me, a
single word that I don’t catch, falling from his lips like a dying man’s
prayer.
The man starts to head in our direction, is almost on us, when someone
somewhere else in the building shouts something that’s instantly swallowed in a
storm of gunfire and the man rushes out into the corridor.
The boy darts his head out and then he’s out from under the desk and
reaching for me.
‘Move!’ he says, pulling me to my feet.
Having spent most of her life in London, Sarah quit her job in the non profit sector in 2009 and took off on a round the world trip with her husband and princess-obsessed daughter on a mission to find a new place to call home. After several months in India, Singapore, Australia and the US, they settled in Bali where Sarah now spends her days writing by the pool and trying to machete open coconuts without severing a limb.
She finished her first novel, Hunting Lila (winner of the Kingston Book Award), just before they left the UK, wrote the sequel on the beach in India and had signed a two book deal with Simon & Schuster by the time they had reached Bali.
A third book, Fated, about a teenage demon slayer, was published in January 2012.
The Sound, a thriller romance set in Nantucket, was published in August 2013 and this was followed by the critically acclaimed Out of Control in May 2014.
She also writes New Adult romance for Pan Macmillan (UK) / Simon & Schuster (US) under the pen name Mila Gray.
You can find Sarah on facebook and at www.sarahalderson.com or follow her blog at www.canwelivhere.com
Rian by Michelle McLoughney
