Would you kill someone—anyone—if you knew you could get away with it? Or if your life depended upon it? David Benning's life is unraveling. Unemployed, running low on cash and with the responsibility of caring for a father struggling with Alzheimer's, he finds himself blackmailed by a shadowy cabal with mysterious and deadly goals. Known only as "The Group," David quickly learns they breed killers. Turning everyday people into accomplished assassins with unusual targets.As he's dragged farther down into this dangerous world of secrets, guns and payoffs, their true motives are slowly, chillingly revealed. With nowhere to run, David can trust no one, not even the woman he's been sent to kill...and has grown to love. Can they work together to free each other from the deadly grip of this lethal game? Kill-Off is a tough, no-nonsense and inescapable thriller in the vein of Richard Stark's The Hunter or James Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice.
Author
John F.D. Taff is a multi-Bram Stoker Award short-listed dark fiction author with more than 30 years experience, and more than 100 short stories and seven novels in print. He has appeared in Cemetery Dance, Eldritch Tales, Unnerving, Deathrealm, Big Pulp and One Buck Horror, as well as anthologies such as Hot Blood: Seeds of Fear, Hot Blood: Fear the Fever, Shock Rock II, Lullabies for Suffering, Gutted: Beautiful Horror Stories, Behold!, Shadows Over Main Street 2, Horror Library V, Best of Horror Library, Dark Visions Vol. 1, Ominous Realities, Death's Realm, I Can Taste the Blood and Savage Beasts. His work will appear soon in The Seven Deadliest and I Can Hear the Shadows. His novels include The Bell Witch, Kill-Off and the serialized apocalyptic epic The Fearing. Thunderstorm Books and Grey Matter Press will release a one-volume version of The Fearing in 2021, in limited edition hardcover, soft cover and digital. Short fiction collections include Little Deaths: The Definitive Collection and Little Black Spots, both published by Grey Matter Press. Taff's novella collection, The End in All Beginnings, was called one of the best novella collections by Jack Ketchum and was a Stoker Award Finalist. His short "A Winter's Tale" was also a Stoker Finalist. His upcoming anthology Dark Stars, a tribute to that seminal '80s work Dark Forces, will be published by Tor/Nightfire 11/2/21. His website is at johnfdtaff.com. Follow him on Twitter @johnfdtaff.
