For a decade, Autumn survived a marriage of escalating shadows, using motherhood as a shield to try to hold herself together. She convinced herself that enduring the unendurable was the ultimate act of love, a silent sacrifice for her children's sake. Until the man who once broke her heart returns with a promise of the life she almost lived. His arrival was a terrifying hope, a spark in the darkness that her husband was determined to extinguish. But as her affair stretches into years, her husband, Elias, and his new girlfriend, who is now pulling his strings, use every "feral" maternal instinct to dismantle Autumn's life. When they move to strip her of her children, the one thing she holds closest to her soul, the shield of motherhood doesn't just crack. It shatters. Prelude to Murder is a visceral, high-tension autopsy of a mother pushed to the absolute edge where before the sirens or the headlines, there was a video. Because in the end Elias wasn't threatened. He was made a promise.