Kingdom Come

Amish country in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, has always been a place of quiet beauty--until a shocking murder shatters the peace, and leaves a troubled detective picking up the pieces... After her husband is murdered, Detective Elizabeth Harris turns in her NYPD badge and moves back home, hoping that a quiet life in remote Pennsylvania Dutch country will help her overcome the dark memories of her ten years in New York. But when a beautiful, scantily clad "English" girl is found dead in the barn of a prominent Amish family, Elizabeth knows that she's uncovered an evil that could shake the community to its core. Elizabeth's boss is convinced this was the work of an "English," as outsiders are called in Lancaster County. But Elizabeth isn't so sure. All she's missing is an actual lead--until another body is found: this time, a missing Amish girl. Now Elizabeth must track down a killer with deep ties to a community that always protects its own--no matter how deadly the cost...

Praise for KINGDOM COME

“Nicely drawn characters…lend substance to this tale of secrets hid­den deep within a closed religious community.”—Publishers Weekly
 
“[Jensen’s] writing style is consistently engrossing and enticing.”—Kirkus Reviews


Praise for Jane Jensen

“Remarkable… A tour de force.”—Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, authors of Brimstone

“Fast-paced, suspenseful, and a joy from beginning to end.”—The Washington Post Book World

Autorentext
Jane Jensen is a novelist and game designer. Best known for her computer game series, Gabriel Knight, and her novel, Dante’s Equation, Jensen has published seventeen games and four thriller novels. She also publishes romance as Eli Easton. She lives with her husband, Robert Holmes, in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

Leseprobe
ACKNOWLEDGMENTSTitle PageCopyrightDedicationAcknowledgmentsCHAPTER 1: The Dead GirlCHAPTER 2: Fistful of SeedsCHAPTER 3: Bread and MilkCHAPTER 4: The NamingCHAPTER 5: A Lesson in HusbandryCHAPTER 6: What She HidCHAPTER 7: The Girl in the RiverCHAPTER 8: Pot of GoldCHAPTER 9: Broken FencesCHAPTER 10: Pulling Up RootsCHAPTER 11: GerminationCHAPTER 12: In CustodyCHAPTER 13: Wheat from ChaffCHAPTER 14: The Bloody BowerCHAPTER 15: DrowningCHAPTER 16: Snake in the GrassEPILOGUESpecial Excerpt from In the Land of Milk and HoneyCHAPTER 1The Dead Girl“It’s . . . sensitive,” Grady had said on the phone, his voice tight.Now I understood why. My car crawled down a rural road thick with new snow. It was still dark and way too damn early on a Wednesday morning. The address he’d given me was on Grimlace Lane. Turned out the place was an Amish farm in the middle of a whole lot of other Amish farms in the borough of Paradise, Pennsylvania.Sensitive like a broken tooth. Murders didn’t happen here, not here. The last dregs of sleep and yet another nightmare in which I’d been holding my husband’s cold, dead hand in the rain evaporated under a surge of adrenaline. Oh yes, I was wide-awake now.I spotted cars—Grady’s and two black-and-whites—in the driveway of a farm and pulled in. The CSI team and the coroner had not yet arrived. I didn’t live far from the murder site and I was glad for the head start and the quiet.Even before I parked, my mind started generating theories and scenarios. Dead girl, Grady had said. If it’d been natural causes or an accident, like falling down the stairs, he wouldn’t have called me in. It had to be murder or at least a suspicious death. A father disciplining his daughter a little too hard? Doddering Grandma dipping into the rat poison rather than the flour?I got out and stood quietly in the frigid air to get a sense of place. The interior of the barn glowed in the dark of a winter morning. I took in the classic white shape of a two-story bank barn, the snowy fields behind, and the glow of lanterns coming from the huge, barely open barn door. . . . It looked like one of those quaint paintings you see hanging in the local tourist shops, something with a title like Winter Dawn. I’d only moved back to Pennsylvania eight months ago after spending ten years in Manhattan. I still felt a pang at the quiet beauty of it.Until I opened the door and stepped inside.It wasn’t what I expected. It was like some bizarre and horrific game of mixed-up pictures. The warmth of the rough barn wood was lit by a half dozen oil lanterns. Add in the scattered straw, two Jersey cows, and twice as many horses, all watching the proceedings with bland interest from various stalls, and it felt like a cozy step back in time. That vibe did not compute with the dead girl on the floor. She was most definitely not Amish, which was the first surprise. She was young and beautiful, like something out of a ’50s pulp magazine. She had long, honey-blonde hair and a face that still had the blush of life thanks to the heavy makeup she wore. She had on a candy-pink sweater that molded over taut breasts and a short gray wool skirt that was pushed up to her hips. She still wore pink underwear, though it looked roughly twisted. Her nails were the same shade as her sweater. Her bare feet, thighs, and hands were blue-white with death, and her neck too, at the line below her jaw where the makeup stopped.The whole scene felt unreal, like some pretentious performance art, the kind in those Soho galleries Terry had dragged me to. But then, death always looked unreal.“Coat? Shoes?” I asked, already taking inventory. Maybe knee-high boots, I thought, reconstructing it in my mind. And thick tights to go with that wool skirt. I’d been a teenage girl living in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. I knew what it meant to care more about looks than the weather. But even at the height of my girlish vanity, I wouldn’t have gone bare-legged in January.“They’re not here. We looked.” Grady’s voice was tense. I finally spared him a glance. His face was drawn in a way I’d never seen before, like he was digesting a meal of ground glass.In that instant, I saw the media attention this could get, the politics of it. I remembered that Amish school shooting a few years back. I hadn’t lived here then, but I’d seen the press. Who hadn’t?“You sure you want me on this?” I asked him quietly.“You’re the most experienced homicide detective I’ve got,” Grady said. “I need you, Harris. And I need this wrapped up quickly.”“Yeah.” I wasn’t agreeing that it could be. My gut said this wasn’t going to be an open-and-shut case, but I agreed it would be nice. “Who found her? Do we know who she is?”“Jacob Miller, eleven years old. He’s the son of the Amish farmer who lives here. Poor kid. Came out to milk the cows this morning and found her just like that. The family says they’ve got no idea who she is or how she got here.”“How many people live on the property?”“Amos Miller, his wife, and their six children. The oldest, a boy, is fifteen. The youngest is three.”More vehicles pulled up outside. The forensics team, no doubt. I was gratified that Grady had called me in first. It was good to see the scene before it turned into a lab.“Can you hold them outsid…

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