Honeypot

Peter Simmons is everybody’s favourite neighbour, always willing and eager to help. But he’s also a man of roaming hands, a man who won’t take “no” for an answer, a man who takes whatever he wants, whether it’s cookies from a jar or the sweet as honey single Mom who moved in next door. But sometimes, getting caught with a hand in the wrong cookie jar can be deadly…

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Read an excerpt.

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This book is also available in German.

More information:

• Honeypot is is a short story of 2400 words. This story is also available as part of the collection Murder in the Family along with seven other short crime stories.
• The story was inspired by an actual case of a man who turned out to have been sexually harassing women for decades and always got away with it, because he was such a nice and helpful man that no woman dared to complain. I don’t think that guy ever went as far as raping anybody, but he was known to be harasser from his twenties up to way beyond pension age.
• The guy in question was not allergic to bee stings, though. That bit was inspired by a relative who is allergic against bee stings and consequently must take his EpiPen (it’s a brandname, who’d have guessed?) everywhere he goes.
• Hannah’s description of Peter’s legs having “the texture of Stilton cheese, a sickly white shot through with blue varicose veins” was borrowed from Martin Walser who used a similar phrase to describe the legs of his seventysomething protagonist Karl von Kahn during a sex scene with a twentysomething actress in his 2008 novel Angstblüte. The phrase always stuck in my head as a singularily icky way to describe body parts during a sex scene (not that it’s supposed to be icky with Walser). And since Hannah’s sex scene with Peter is icky, I borrowed Walser’s bluecheese imagery.
• Of all the criminals, villains and murderers found in the collection Murder in the Family, Peter is the one who disgusts me most. After writing the short scene in his POV, I felt the urgent need to shower.
• The cover image is a stock photo by photographer Mateusz Atroszko.