Bike Route by Rachel Lee Remick

About the book

Bike Route opens at a mall in suburban Philadelphia, from which Nellie Feinberger is escorted after being discovered soliciting sexual favors to various store employees. Her situation goes from bad to worse when, while trying to separate an elderly woman from her purse, she is subdued by Detective Humer Ellory. When Ellory realizes she is the daughter of a fellow officer who has been reported missing, he is reluctant to accept as true her story that she was kidnapped and held prisoner by a madman. He believes instead she is hiding the truth about her association with a well-known drug dealer and pursues that angle of her case despite orders from his superior to let it go. Although Hume's investigating does uncover a liaison between the two of them, he is ill prepared when the trail leads to a deserted house hidden in the mountain regions of Southeastern Pennsylvania, where Laurence Taback is keeping his latest acquisition, Melura Bishop.

Led by Ellory, the police storm the house and find Melura locked away in a room upstairs, handcuffed to a bed. She is taken to an area hospital and believes her ordeal is over until she learns Laurence has evaded the authorities and has vowed to come back for her. She takes refuge in Ellory's house and, seeing him as her savior, quickly falls for the detective. He reciprocates her feelings, but is reluctant to act on them as he believes she is more in love with the image of him as Superman than she is with him.

Laurence avoids the police long enough to escape to Chicago, where he steals a car and formulates a plan to make good on his promise to have Melura. He returns to Pennsylvania and pays a visit to an unsuspecting Nellie Feinberger, now back on drugs and estranged from family and friends. He extracts from her the whereabouts of Hume and Melura, who have finally succumbed to their mutal attraction. They are upstairs together when Laurence arrives at Ellory's residence. The two men battle each other in the dark hallway while Melura lies crouched in a corner of Hume's bedroom, listening as several gunshots are fired. Thankfully, she learns Laurence has been shot and killed.

Hume and Melura try to make their relationship work, but after a miscarriage and the psychological scars both bear as a result of the entire experience, they decide to part ways.

A year after they met, Hume and Melura encounter each other again in an airport, boarding the same flight to Las Vegas, he for business, she for pleasure. They agree to meet for dinner during their stay, both secretly hoping it is their second chance to begin the life they always knew they were meant to share.

About the author

Rachel Lee Remick was born and raised in Northeast Philadelphia. A child of divorce at an early age, she found escape in movies, television and books. At family gatherings she would enact scenes from Dark Shadows and Charlie's Angels and, when encouraged, things she'd written herself.

She graduated from St. Basil Academy where she excelled in English and Creative Writing, and wrote skits for talent shows and Foreign Language Week. Rachel next attended Temple University as a Radio Television Film major, leaving several semesters shy of graduation to pursue travel and writing. Cross country jaunts with friends Marni and Lisa (the "real" Charlie's Angels; or at least the eventual Golden Girls sans Blanche) yielded many ideas for stories, but it was a bike ride through the mountains that gave birth to the concept of her suspense novel Bike Route. That, and watching too much MTV.

Through a smattering of jobs that included day care, selling shoes, and making hoagies at a convenience store, Rachel set aside other long-sitting writing projects to concentrate on Bike Route, her second completed novel. Although originally conceived as a movie script, with its focus on character development and the exploration of the inner conflicts of the human mind, Bike Route seemed destined to at first be a late night page turner.

Currently Rachel is working on a sequel, as well as another novel dealing with the dark side of humanity. She is single and lives outside Philadelphia with the above mentioned friend Lisa and her Pug Lord Sciante, named after guitarist John Frusciante.