Love Me Now; Kill Me Later

Danny Shepard isn’t a typical sailor. Smart, skilled, scheming, the femme-fatale entices men and collects mementos. Love Me Now; Kill Me Later depicts the evolution of a serial killer, a thirty-year voyage that takes an unlikely mariner from fertile wheat fields of Washington State’s Palouse to seaports on every continent, from deckhand to captain—perfect venues for fortuitous encounters and untraceable murders. When Danny returns to Spokane to claim an unexpected inheritance—half-a-million dollars and a remarkable house her father built fifty years earlier—the sailor-sans-conscience is forced to confront her past. A collection of diaries, the earliest entry made at the age of eight, and mementos stored in a cigar box disguised as a book, are resurrected; friends, lovers, murders revisited; harrowing nightmares relived. They provide insight into the mind of a woman who is both victim and villain. Looking back at an irrefutable record of dirty deeds, Danny feels no remorse—yet cannot imagine a future. In her father’s house on South Hill, she plots an end to the Danielle Shepard story.