It all started with a little murder…

NYPD Detective James Gurson is on his walk home from the Central Park stationhouse one wintry March morning when he happens upon a snowbound vintage Mercedes. Inside, a New York psychiatrist is breathing his last, an apparent suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning.

Hours later, Gurson's partner, Didi Kane, stands over a burned body in the north end of the Park. These two deaths, at first seemingly unrelated, affect the officers in intensely personal ways.

In AN HOUR TO KILL, the debut thriller from new talent Karin Yapalater, nothing is as it seems. Before long, the two bodies will reveal secrets: who wanted them dead and why. On their way to cracking these cases, Gurson and Kane travel through the bizarrely interconnected worlds of Manhattan's tight–lipped psychoanalytic community, the chief city prosecutor's bedroom exploits and failures, and the Park's women of the night and their drug induced sexual charades. At the heart of this mystery lays the dead psychoanalyst, Orrin Gretz, and the ramifications of his professional indiscretions.

Yapalater, a longtime student of the human psyche, based AN HOUR TO KILL's murderous storyline on famed psychoanalyst Carl Jung and his own professionally prescribed affair with a female patient. In doing so, Yapalater explores with chilling insight what can happen when doctors exploit the patients who entrust them with their fragile minds. She also presents, in terrific detail, a behind-the-scenes look at the New York City justice system, based on extensive research.

AN HOUR TO KILL introduces a diverse group of characters: black and white, gay and straight, sane and certifiable, whose intellectual powers are distorted by jealousy, vengefulness, sexual frustration and greed. The intricate plot, inspired by the teachings of Freud, Jung and Bettelheim, explores the duplicity of the human condition: good and evil, pleasure and pain, sex and ethics.

Through the darkest hours of this provocative mystery, steadfast and tenacious detectives, Gurson and Kane struggle to surmount their own pain, lending a deeply human touch to an otherwise inhumane world and establishing AN HOUR TO KILL as a psychosexual thriller of the highest order.