The Lion’s Den by Perrin Briar is a short story I purchased from Amazon at the great price of USD 0.00. At 60 pages, only about twenty pages are the story The Lion’s Den. The other 40 pages are a teaser for Compulsion, a full-length novel. Usually, this would annoy me but both the short story and the excerpt were quite good. I even bought the full-length novel. Almost. I put it in my Kindle Unlimited queue to read next.
The Lion’s Den starts out with a Security Guard at a mall attempting to help an attractive 12-year-old girl. We know where this is going. In the story, the exact age of the girl is not stated but reading it will give a reader that impression. The helpful guard, Robert, watched previous security tapes from his control center to determine what times Beth showed up daily at a mall McDonald’s. The second time she appeared Beth smiled at Robert as she told him her mom had to work overtime and would not be able to pick her up. Beth agreed to wait at the mall in Robert’s security center until he finished his shift and would be able to take her home. The two became close and friendly as Beth expressed curiosity about the monitors and equipment in the security center.
