AuthorSuite Blog

Wednesday, March 7, 2018

An emotional look into a broken mind

#Betrayal #Vengeance #MFRWHooks

For this week's Book Hooks blog hop, here's a short excerpt from Take Back the Memory and a teaser: What would you do if you discovered that the man you married is not who you thought he was?

When you’ve finished with my hook, I hope you’ll visit some of the other authors “hooking” today. You’ll find their links at the end of the post.

Blurb

Paige Lyman, an accomplished psychiatrist, is on the verge of madness but she doesn't know it yet. The madness begins when she gets it into her head to write her memoirs. As her brilliant mind assembles bits and pieces of her life for the book, ugly skeletons, long forgotten in the closet, begin to rear their heads.

It had all begun with a simple act of love. And love, for her, was a blond-haired Irish boy named Bill, so when Bill abandoned her for priesthood the world around her collapsed. Seized by a different passion—vengeance—she seeks her proverbial pound of flesh in the beds of various priests...

But that is before she meets Stern W, a medical researcher, who sweeps into her life like a hurricane and marries her, and they live happily ever after until he dies in a helicopter crash and she discovers the startling truth about who he really was.

Take Back the Memory is the saga of her compelling backward journey through her own life on a psychotherapist's couch.

The Hook

The door of the consulting studio swung open at 9.00 a.m. and Dr. Wilson, a slender, pipe-smoking clinical psychologist stuck his hoary head in the doorway. His face lit up at the sight of Paige sitting cross-legged in the cozy waiting room.

“Hello Dr. Lyman,” he smiled courteously, “I had no idea you were here already.”

Paige glanced up, her face a frozen scowl, and gazed at him. She had expected them to be on first-name basis this morning; the unexpected formality fazed her quite a bit.

“Good morning, Dr. Wilson,” she said wryly. “Sorry I’m early, a habit, I guess.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” he said quickly, the smile on his lips waning. “I’ll be with you in a minute.”

She nodded and looked away as he disappeared back into the consulting room. Left alone, she gazed across the lounge. The psychotherapist’s studio was illuminated by the sun’s rays through an opened Venetian blind, and the balmy sunlit ambiance fascinated her.

“Like the cheery whisper of an admirer after a heartbreak,” she said wistfully and rose.

As she did so, echoes of distant traffic momentarily brought her to a state of mental alertness. Palms sweaty, Paige walked to the window and opened it. She gazed, mesmerized, at the sun-drenched avenue on the breezy late September morning and noted the peak time for fall foliage in New York was weeks away yet. She closed the window.

Shrugging, she walked back to her seat and plopped down. Her hand trembled slightly on the black zebra-print clutch bag in her lap.

“Darn,” she mumbled, her thoughts turning to her daughter, who had convinced her to come.

“I shouldn’t be here, Diane,” she whispered savagely. “I just shouldn’t.”

Buy Links