Hello and welcome back.

I got an email today regarding a writing prompt about taking your character on vacation. It was from The Write Practice. So I thought I’d take Melissa on vacation.

This will likely end up in the book Message In A Bottle so here goes with fifteen minutes of what can happen.

Melissa is on a vacation back packing through Europe. Her intention is to get over the stress of a relationship breakup and the stress of her job as a contract killer.

A complication arises when one morning she wakes up in a room that was not the Bed And Breakfast she was staying at. It is a farm in Scotland. A man had brought her here because he found her overly drunk and wanted to make sure she was safe.

As she gets to know the man asking why he had brought her here, Melissa finds out that the man’s own daughter had been abducted twenty years ago and never found. The man was simply trying to keep women like his daughter safe.

Later he reveals that he’s terminally ill with cancer, maybe a year left to live. He wants nothing more than to find out what happened to his daughter before he dies. Melissa says to him that she’ll take on this mission to find out what happened.

Her vacation now becomes an investigation where she goes through old police reports and interviews with guys who were at the bar where the daughter and her friends were last seen. She starts tracking them down. Some are dead, some still alive. One has gone missing, but she finds a new identity that began close to when the missing man disappeared.

That man now mainly cruises the world in his boat and currently that boat is docked at her own hometown. A city where she is wanted by the police. An obvious danger to her if she goes there or should she wait until the suspect docks at another port?

While doing her research she sees reports about a series of messages in bottles that wash up on shore all over the world, a girl who is being held captive on a boat and asking for help.

Fifteen minutes are up.