Dr Alex Delaware doesn't see many private patients any more, but for a young woman called Lucy Lowell he's prepared to make an exception. Referred to him by the police detective Milo Sturgis, Lucy had been a juror at the harrowing trial of a serial killer, and having survived that trauma is now being subjected to further emotional stress: a recurrent nightmare of a young child in a forest at night, watching something as furtive as it is disturbing. Now Lucy's dream is starting to disrupt her waking life, and Alex believes the power of the dream and its grip on her emotions may be a repressed childhood memory of something very real. Something like murder...
It came in a plain brown wrapper, no return address - a tape recording of a horrifying, soul-lacerating scream, followed by the sound of a childlike voice delivering the enigmatic and haunting message: 'Bad love. Bad love. Don't give me the bad love...'
Psychologist Dr Alex Delaware has always looked on Melissa Dickinson as one of his greatest triumphs. A terrified, tormented seven-year-old when she first appeared in his Los Angeles surgery, Melissa after two years seemed totally recovered. But nine years later Melissa contacts Alex again, anxious this time for her mother. As Alex recalls, weatlthy widow Gina Dickinson has problems of her own. For two decades she has hidden herself away from the eyes of the world - ever since a vicious acid attack destroyed the face of Hollywood actress Gina Prince. Then the reclusive Gina climbs into her car - and totally disappears.
This completes the "food trilogy" (Chocolat, Blackberry Wine) and explores some of the same themes, although this third book is much darker than the previous two. Set in a small village near Angers on the Loire, it deals with the fortunes of a widow and her three children, Cassis, Reine-Claude and Framboise, against the background of the German Occupation. With no father and only their harsh and overworked mother to care for them, the three children inhabit a strange and brutal world in which adults are a different race, and which works according to a completely different set of moral values.
In this exhilarating cross between The Da Vinci Code and The Birth of Venus, an irrepressible young woman in 15th-century Italy must flee for her life after stumbling upon a deadly secret when she serves as a model for Botticelli... Gloriously fresh and vivid, with a deliciously irreverent heroine, The Botticelli Secret is an irresistible blend of history, wit, and suspense.
