First Date

Naive and particular, Amandine is no stranger to being alone since both her parents died in a terrible car accident years earlier. As a neurodiverse adult orphan living in the quiet rural backwaters of Norfolk, she battles loneliness and a raft of mental health complications. Determined to end her solace and find a partner, she embarks on a troubled dating journey that ends in disappointment time and time again.Until she is introduced to the needy, vulnerable Connor, another lonely heart looking for a home. Connor plucks up the courage to ask Amandine on a dinner date, she accepts, and both their lives are changed irrevocably, for unbeknownst to them, a deranged killer is prowling the area.His primary target? Happy couples.At first, the date starts well: the restaurant location is romantic, the conversation meaningful, the food and wine excellent. Sparks fly over a candlelit dinner. But the night takes a sinister turn with their growing awareness of an unpleasant presence in the otherwise empty restaurant: Lone Diner, who acts in increasingly strange and hostile ways until he is evicted from the restaurant. The couple think that’s the end of it, but it turns out to be only the beginning. Lone Diner has a plan, and is forming a nasty habit: capturing and torturing those who are happier than him, and keeping grisly souvenirs.The date ends, and the lovestruck pair find themselves stranded outside the restaurant in the middle of the freezing night with no way of getting home. As temperatures plummet, they resort to walking the dark countryside roads, only to meet car headlights. The driver is Lone Diner, and he offers them a ride: a ride that quickly turns to a battle for survival as his real intentions become horribly clear. When the car crashes, their fate is sealed.The couple wake the next day to find themselves tied to an abandoned jetty out in the empty, reed-choked wetlands of the Norfolk broads. Alone, freezing and badly injured, they know they don’t have long before either the weather, or the violent man who kidnapped them, kills them both. Their only chance of survival lies in each other, but can they work as a team to escape before their time runs out?And even if they do, will they ever be able to escape each other?

Gemma Amor is a Bram Stoker Award nominated author, illustrator and voice actor. Her happy place is horror, speculative and dark fiction, or anything that blurs the boundaries of genre with a focus on human stories. Many of her works have been adapted into audio dramas by the popular NoSleep Podcast. She is also the co-creator, writer and voice actor for horror-comedy podcast Calling Darkness. She is also an audiobook narrator and painter. She lives in Bristol, England.