Peggy Jaeger, Author

So, I’ve been hinting ( or hitting you over the head, you decide which, lol!) with notices about my upcoming 4.23.2024 release of RETRIBUTION. Today, I decided to do a little background story about how this project came to be.

If you’ve read anything by me before you should know this book is a huge departure from the lighthearted, small-town, romance books I usually write.

And you may be upset by that. I get it. This book is so not a lighthearted rom-com.

But before I ever wrote a word in the romance genre, I wrote short stories and books about death, dying, and serial killers.

I’m the girl Netflix invented the serial killer binge-watch for, lol.

Serial killers, and people who murder in general, have always fascinated me ever since I was in nursing school. I attended Hunter College, Bellevue School of Nursing and one of the years I was a student, a group of foreign nationals held a failed terror attack on New York. Several of the injured would-be-terrorists were treated in Bellevue’s ER and then sent to the prison wing of the psych lockdown unit. Having narrowly missed becoming a statistic, I found myself fascinated about what would compel someone to kill like this. The pseudo-vigilante group, the Guardian Angels, took up residence outside my dorms during this time as a protection blanket for the students.

In my junior year of nursing school, Mark David Chapman shot and killed John Lennon. That day will live in my mind forever as the day I decided that psychiatric nursing was calling my name. Unfortunately, I already had a job in a medical/surgical unit waiting for me when I graduated. But while working, I learned everything I could about the criminal mind, and centered on killers and serial killers, what made them tick, why they needed to kill, and how their minds worked.

I know: Not exactly the kind of thing you’d expect from someone who writes Happily Ever Afters.

RETRIBUTION was written almost 20 years ago on my very first home computer. At the time, I wrote it simply for me, and it was called VINDICATION. Once done, I left it in a file on my desktop and never thought about it again while I continued writing more grisly short stories. Many of them were published in short story magazines of the day and last year I compiled a collection of them in the book Death Between the Pages the same time, Kindle Vella was launched and I thought, why not put up the first real book I’d ever written?

So I did.

The response was wild. Good reviews- and some really nasty ones – later, I decided to update the story and publish it to print.

I won’t be abandoning my sweet-to-sexy romance stories any time soon, so don’t worry. But I really needed to get this one out into the reading world, so…

When I have preorder or order links, I’ll post. For now, here’s the cover and blurb:

6 teenage girls have been kidnapped, brutalized, and murdered in the Washington DC area and the FBI’s SPCD Unit – the Sexual Predators of Children Profilers – are nowhere close to finding the monster responsible.   How are the victims chosen? How does the killer find them, contact them, lure them into his sick web? Questions the team has no answers for.

When a high-ranking US Senator’s daughter is the next victim, SPCD team leader, Tucker Petrie, is forced to call upon retired profiler — and his last partner — Kella O’Brien for help. Kella’s been out of the game for 10 years, but her expertise and insights into a serial killer’s mind are unparalleled. If anyone can discover who this madman is, it’s Kella.

But as the team rushes to prevent another young girl’s death, clues the killer leaves behind have Kella wondering if his endgame is all about…her.

~Peg 1/24