This month I’m primarily focused on trying to publish the nonfiction book I’ve been working on for the last few years. It tells the story of my fight for reproductive rights when I was a young lawyer in Chicago. It will be a terrific book. But I need to find a publisher.
While I pursue this goal, I’ve decided to devote this post to describing my three novels, all stories blending “the law” with protagonists who find themselves in perilous settings but somehow manage to survive.
Please forgive my shameless plug, but I honestly think you’ll enjoy reading about my novels.
My first published novel, A Quicker Blood, takes its title from an Emily Dickinson poem about “escape.” Dickinson wrote “I never hear the word ‘escape’ without a quicker blood.” You’re right to conclude that the theme of this thriller is “escape.”
The protagonist, Karen B. Clark, is a young lawyer living in New York City three years after getting her law degree. She’s already weary of life in NYC, disillusioned with her job on Wall Street, and fed up with her two-timing boyfriend. (I named my protagonist Karen in honor of a good friend who worked on behalf of needy clients for many years before she died. I’ve known many admirable women named Karen, and I think it’s deplorable to disparage women using the name Karen for no good reason.)
Karen Clark impulsively takes off for a lawyers’ conference in Chicago, where she meets another young woman named Karen B. Clark. Karen decides to call her “K.B.” K.B. has just finished law school and is about begin her legal career in the small town of Walden, Wisconsin, where a law firm has hired her, sight unseen.
When both Karen and K.B. are injured in separate mishaps, Karen awakens in a hospital, where she’s been identified as K.B. She spies a newspaper report of the death of an unidentified young woman and realizes that K.B. must be dead.
Karen decides to seize the moment and turn her life around. She’ll escape her life in NYC, assume K.B.’s identity, and try life as a small-town lawyer. Once in Walden, Karen relishes her new existence and begins a sizzling romance, but she soon uncovers terrible secrets that lead her to fear for her life.
A Quicker Blood has garnered many 5-star customer reviews on Amazon.com. You might want to read a few of them! Almost every reader has loved this book and asked me to write another one like it. I think you’d also love learning how Karen finds her way to Walden and deals with the challenges of assuming someone else’s identity. You’ll probably like reading about the somewhat dubious characters she encounters there, how she finds herself plunged into a perilous situation, and how she cleverly manages to survive.
My second novel, Jealous Mistress, is not a thriller but an old-fashioned mystery like the ones Agatha Christie used to write. A dead body appears on the first page, so you know that there’s a mystery to be solved.
It’s October 1981, and the Reagan administration has just declared that ketchup is a vegetable. Alison Ross has chosen to set aside her demanding career as a lawyer so she can spend more time at home with her two young children. She’d like to find a good part-time job, but because “the law is a jealous mistress,” her search for part-time work has gone nowhere.
Early one morning, Alison stumbles across a dead body at her daughter’s nursery school. (Preschools were still called nursery schools in 1981.) Because Alison saw the school janitor make a hasty exit, she reluctantly becomes emmeshed in the police investigation. When the police charge the janitor with murder, Allison has doubts about his guilt and decides to find out what really happened.
Pursuing the real killer while she juggles life at home with her husband and kids, Alison uncovers a host of shocking secrets in the quiet suburb of East Winnette.
Lots of readers have written 5-star customer reviews for this novel, too. It presents issues that many of us have dealt with. If we’ve had a demanding job before we had kids, how do we achieve work-life balance once we have kids? This may mean deciding whether to keep our full-time jobs or search for part-time work. In this story, I also ask whether a supportive husband will help his wife solve a mystery that falls into their laps, or will he get fed up with her time-consuming efforts to solve it on her own? Will the wife, in her search for the killer, find herself attracted to another man who offers to help her? And how does life in an affluent suburb affect Alison, who’s among its less affluent residents?
I had fun writing this story, which deals with all of these questions. At the same time, I delved into the time-honored phase, “the law is a jealous mistress.” What does it mean for lawyers today? I also liked flirting with the term “jealous mistress” as a term with a double meaning. If you read Jealous Mistress, you’ll come to your own conclusions.
My third novel, Red Diana, is something of a sequel to A Quicker Blood. Karen Clark reappears twelve years after we left her at the end of A Quicker Blood. She has moved to San Francisco with her 8-year-old daughter Davida (called Davi) and loves her new life there.
One terrible day, Davi is abducted on Market Street, just outside the office building where Karen works. It’s summer and Davi has pleaded with Karen to spend a day at Karen’s office. After buying M&Ms at a 7-Eleven, Davi is suddenly grabbed by someone wearing a mask, and Karen is gripped by fear. Davi is returned unharmed the next morning and Karen begins to relax, but she soon finds a threatening note pinned to Davi’s shirt: “Karen, you’re next.”
Karen must find out who grabbed Davi—and why. Her only clues are Davis’s recall of a brown sofa and the words “Red Diana.” With the help of SFPD detective Greg Chan, Karen begins her relentless pursuit of the cruel abductor who now threatens her own life.
Set in San Francisco, with flashbacks to Chicago and New York, this chilling psychological thriller explores a bunch of themes: The desire for revenge, the burden of guilt, and the tyranny of unethical lawyers and corrupt judges. It also touches on the shattering pain of losing a loved one—and the many routes survivors take to deal with their loss.
Above all, the book focuses on the intense love between parent and child–what one psychoanalyst has called “indestructible, the strongest relationship on earth.”
Karen’s search for the abductor leads her to a charming San Francisco Victorian, where she confronts a disturbed killer who puts her life in peril.
Like my other two novels, Red Diana has earned many 5-star reviews, and I think you’ll find it an absorbing read.
To sum up: Please forgive my shameless plug(s) and think about choosing one of my novels as a better-than-ordinary “beach read” this summer. You can zip through all three of them pretty fast, and I think you’ll be pleased with the sharp writing style you’ve come to like in my blog posts.
Happy reading!
susanjustwrites
Susan Just Writes 