Added by: JustGoodNews | Karma: 4306.26 | Fiction literature | 7 April 2011
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The Madmans Tale: A Novel
It’s been twenty years since Western State Hospital was closed down and the last of its inmates reintegrated into society. Francis Petrel was barely out of his teens when his family committed him to the asylum, after his erratic behavior culminated in a terrifying outburst. Now middle-aged, he leads an aimless, solitary life housed in a cheap apartment, periodically tended to by his sisters, and perpetually medicated to quiet the chorus of voices in his head. But a reunion on the grounds of the shuttered institution stirs something deep in Francis’s troubled mind
Frey urges writers to aim high-not to try to write a good-enough-to-get-published mystery, but a damn good mystery. A damn good mystery is first a dramatic novel, Frey insists-a dramatic novel with living, breathing characters-and he shows his readers how to create a living, breathing, believable character who will be clever and resourceful, willful and resolute, and will be what Frey calls "the author of the plot behind the plot."
The lives of two disparate women—a single mother working hard to make ends meet and a young figure skater at the top of her game—entwine in an unforgettable novel of warmth, depth, and wisdom.
In this first in a trilogy Ross is developing on ex–Special Forces men reacclimating to civilian life, ex-SEAL Zach Tremayne returns to his South Carolina small town to try to forget the horrors of the Iraq War. Sabrina Swann has returned to recover from a terrorist attack on the Italian hotel where she was waitressing.
In A Great Deliverance Elizabeth George probes the delicate motivations of the heart against a backdrop of buried scandals, unresolved antagonisms and dizzying ambiguities. It was her debut novel, the winner of the Agatha and Anthony Awards for best first novel as well as France's Grand Prix de Litterature Policiere. It was nominated for both a Macavity and an Edgar.
