M. K. Perkins

Welcome to the fiction of M. K. Perkins where suspense meets the acting world in a new novel called Deadly Play. The story is about Kate Sachs, a young actress in rehearsals for a Broadway tryout at a theater in Westport, CT. Rehearsals are dreadful, with the cast arguing continuously. Then disaster strikes when she discovers her director lying unconscious in the actor’s lounge and a man in a mask lurking in the shadows. The man almost kills her, but runs away when he hears producer David Sobel calling her name. While an ambulance rushes her director to the hospital, Detective Matt Warren questions Kate and David. His sloppy, easy-going manner contrasts jarringly with David’s too well groomed self-absorption. The detective never lets on he’s a huge fan who has seen everything she’s ever done.

By the time Kate returns to her apartment, the last train to NYC has long departed and David can’t get home. Reluctantly she offers him her spare bedroom. She knows he’s arrogant and vain, and is annoyed at herself for finding him so attractive.

Haunted by her boyfriend’s death, nightmares intrude anytime she’s attracted to someone new, and this time is no different. She awakens before dawn and drives to the beach to jog off the dream’s effect, but a living nightmare awaits her: the man in the mask. She barely escapes with her life, but never anticipates the vicious rampage that follows. When he kidnaps a boy from the theater, she’s afraid to confide in Detective Warren who knows she’s hiding something.

Her indomitable family close ranks and hire a bodyguard who is almost killed defending her. But it’s Kate’s photojournalist mother who provides the clue to the man in the mask’s identity while filming a street fair. At last Kate knows what he looks like, and now the hunter becomes the hunted.