Excerpt: The Man in Black by L.R. Liverpool

Book Details:

Book Title: The Man in Black

Author: L.R. Liverpool

Publisher: Black Cab Productions / Texas Poetrope

Cover Artist: Gabriel Sanche

Release Date: November 22, 2022

Tense/POV: First person, past tense, single POV

Genres: MM Historical Romance/Thriller

Tropes: Enemies to lovers, forbidden love, dangerous environment, solving mysteries

Themes: Old West, outlaws, mysterious pursuer, hurt/comfort, murders, emotional traumas, scary dreams

Heat Rating:  4 flames

Length:  897 pages in Kindle format       

It is a standalone story and does not end on a cliff-hanger.

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#Historical, #MM, #Thriller, #Romance,

Naive dreamer Fenimore James runs from home and goes west to become a famous outlaw––Simon Shaw. However, his fantasies of glamorous robberies quickly evaporate as he joins the notorious Red Evans gang and finds himself in the middle of a strange and bloody game, where gang members are suddenly being murdered one-by-one at the hand of a mysterious pursuer, who leaves cryptic signs scarifying their bodies.

To complicate matters further, Fenimore’s waking hours become torture, when he begins questioning his own sexuality, finding himself falling head-over-heels for a fellow male gang member, whom he hated and feared just recently. While his nights are plagued by a bizarre dream figure––the Man In Black.

Meanwhile the boss of the gang slowly gets paranoid, starting to suspect that the killer is someone among his own men...

WARNING: The Man In Black is an LGBT thriller and mystery that contains violence, occasional foul language, and adult sexual situations.

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Sometime later I had a strange dream, which I still remember in great detail, as if I only saw it yesterday: I’m sitting in a hut by a frost-covered window and watching a stagecoach arrive in the yard. It seems to me that my new friends are also somewhere in the house, but this is more of a feeling, because I don’t really see them anywhere. I get up and walk outside. The door does not open into the house, but outward––so I force it hard with all my weight, because there is one hell of a snowdrift on the porch. After a couple of violent shoves, it finally swings open. Everything is white all around––continuous snowy expanses and a snow-covered forest are in front, blackened with tree trunks. And some sort of mountains. I look at the stagecoach and notice that it is also all black, and the horses are black too. Even before I have time to call out to the intruders, the coachman climbs down off the beam and walks in my direction. A tall––very tall––man in a tattered black coat with fluttering hemlines and a worn black hat. He stops a yard away from me and says he’s looking for Red Evans. I answer that Red is in the house and inquire who’s asking for him. “He knows,” the man replies in a low, hollow voice, as if speaking from underwater. I keep trying to see his face, but I can’t. The twilight is still light, and the whiteness of the snow illuminates everything all around. But the man’s face is still not visible in the shadow of his wide-brimmed hat and high collar. I feel goosebumps rise, and I want to run for the hills––from this figure in black––without stopping. But I nod, go into the house to search for Red and find him sitting with Monty and Doug in front of a bright fireplace. The color scheme of the entire dream is black, white, and blue; and only the fire is blood red. I tell the boss that so-and-so, some guy arrived and announced that he was an acquaintance. Then Red reluctantly gets up from his place, and we all go outside. We go out of the house, but there is no stagecoach anymore. No stagecoach, no mysterious guest. Here, of course, they ridicule me, and I scream, convincing them that I saw everything with my own eyes, heard the creak of wheels, the clatter of hooves.

“Maybe,” I suggest, “the guest has already left?”

To which they ask me, “Where are the tracks then?”

And indeed there are no tracks either. Only an endless cover of pristine snow and the prints of our own boots from the doorstep. I remain alone in the yard and continue to stand in the deepening twilight and stupidly stare at the sparkling snowdrifts, trying to understand what happened. And, it seems, there was nothing special in this dream. However, it left an unpleasant feeling in my soul for a very long time.

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Lily has been writing short stories to entertain her friends since her teen years, and before coming to pen her own novel, she helped her writer friends with research for their fiction and non-fiction. She is a collector of all things dogs, and Balto& Togo, an animal shelters volunteer, a history buff, a vintage trinkets and toys enthusiast.

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