Blood & Diamonds: Barefoot on Nails

She danced on a stage full of nails. She didn't stop. Now the truth has nowhere left to hide. Eighteen-year-old Elara Voss has spent her whole life in rooms she wasn't supposed to be in. The Whitmore Grand Prix is the biggest room yet - a prestigious dance competition that could define her career. What she doesn't know is that the nails scattered across the stage were put there by the son of the woman who killed her father.She doesn't stop.Seven minutes and forty seconds later, Elara stands in her own blood in front of eight hundred people - holding up a nail and a crossed-out result card, saying the name of the person responsible. The competition was rigged. The result was falsified. And the woman in the VIP box who just watched her bleed is Diana Hartwell: empire-builder, CEO, and the person who signed the memo that denied Victor Voss's medical claim eighteen years ago.Diana also just saw something that stopped her cold.A butterfly-shaped birthmark. One she has been looking for for eighteen years.Blood & Diamonds is a propulsive, emotionally devastating novel about class, cruelty, secrets buried in hospital rooms, and a girl raised to be invisible who refuses to stay that way. It is about what a company does to protect itself from the truth. What a mother does when she is afraid. What a daughter does when she finally stops being afraid.And it is, underneath everything, the story of a man named Victor Voss - who worked for six years and was careful and paid attention and made rooms better - and whose daughter danced for him in Monaco in March and said his name in front of four hundred and twenty people and put it in the permanent record where it always belonged.

Pages: 579, Paperback, Independently published