30 Covers, 30 Days 2023: Day 12
Representing day 12 is The Shell Game by YWP Writer Stella Holt, and it's a wonderful Thriller/Suspense novel. This cover was designed by the amazing returning designer, Victoria Pickett!
The Shell Game
A chef. A range officer. A museum curator.
Three people.
One spy.
Jamie McNamara is a bounty hunter but she doesn’t hunt people. Not after a job-gone-wrong three years ago. So when she’s approached with a mission to find Derek Knox, a rogue sleeper agent, and get him back to his employers, she fears the contractor knows more about her past than she’d like. But unfortunately, he pays well, and she’s broke.
She accepts the job, but quickly realizes there’s more to it than she thought. The rogue agent is currently hiding under one of three potential covers. Her task is to find out which two are innocents, and which one is the spy.
But the deeper Jamie gets into the job, the more questions arise. At first, all three people appear harmless. But then not only does Jamie find questionable connections with one of them, all three of their innocence is put in doubt.
There’s only one spy. But what if the other two aren’t all they seem, either?
About the Author
When not stressing out about how few hours are in the day, Stella Holt loves finding beauty in Creation; from the mystique of a caliginous night, to the simple wonder of existence.
About the Designer
Victoria is a recovering design educator working in the Mayor's Office of Urban Analytics and Innovation at the City of Cleveland. She made the leap from academia to city government almost a year ago. She works with data analysts in data visualization and creates infographics. She enjoys contributing to a team whose work is doing good. This is her fifth year designing a cover for NaNoWriMo.
Cover Design Process:
This year. we gave designers the optional prompt to explain their design process for the cover! Here's Victoria's:
The title immediately made me think of each character peeking out from under a shell in the classic shell game. But I wanted to push that idea and created three silhouettes in hotel windows with awnings that look like shells.
