From Publishers Weekly
Five-year-old Lorraine Quade loves her momma, but crazy Hedy Quade returns this love in mighty peculiar ways: "Squeezing her hands around my throat so that my eyes opened wide and there were splotches of black like sequins and I started to panic and kick and Momma relaxed her grip, it was O.K. Momma was only just playing, like Momma did sometimes." The emphasis falls squarely on the
psychological in this unusual novel of psychological suspense, as pretty soon momma loads Lorraine and older brother Ryan into their 1968 Chevy sedan and drives into an oncoming freight train. Twenty-two years later, Lorraine is alive though badly scarred both mentally and physically; she's changed her name to Lara and is working as a research fellow at the Institute for Semiotics, Aesthetics and Cultural Research at Princeton. After receiving an anonymous gift of an expensive ticket to a concert, she finds herself seated next to an unlikely classical music fan: "The intruder was a youngish ox of a man with unshaven, stubbled jaws and punk-style hair." His name is Zedrick Dewe, and Lara, who's inexplicably drawn to him, later lets him come up to her apartment, with disastrous consequences. Lara's life, never a model of stability, begins to unravel even further as she seeks answers to mysteries involving murder, incest, insanity and obsession. Kelly couples stylish (and sometimes affected) prose with an unusual plot structure, casting back and forth from past to present to build suspense and gradually reveal secrets. This is not your mother's whodunit, but readers with a taste for the unusual will find it chilling and compelling.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Product Description
Lauren Kelly, with amazing power and authority, explores the secret kinship of "soul mates," in a mysterious and demonic love story.
Lara Quade, a disaffected intellectual associated with a prominent Princeton research center, is a young woman whose physical beauty has been scarred in a childhood accident. She is jarred out of the routine of her life by a seemingly chance meeting with a young man named Zedrick Dewe, whom she seems to know somehow as he in turn seems to know her. What is the connection between them? Who has brought them together? And why are they drawn so powerfully to one another? Their encounter leads to a highly charged erotic experience that takes an abrupt turn from tender to violent, predictable to terrifying. And from this initial episode springs a sequence of inexplicable events and revelations so shocking that they lead Lara, long in denial about her life, to uncover the truth about the buried hurt and rage in the tortured past of her family.
