The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady

Zusatztext 41135090 Informationen zum Autor Elizabeth Stuckey-French is the author of the novel Mermaids on the Moon and the story collection The First Paper Girl in Red Oak, Iowa . Her short fiction has also appeared in the Atlantic Monthly , Gettysburg Review , Southern Review , Five Points , and other literary journals. She lives in Tallahassee, Florida, where she teaches fiction writing at Florida State University. Klappentext A Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year Marylou Ahearn is going to kill Dr. Wilson Spriggs. In 1953, the good doctor gave her a radioactive cocktail without her consent, and Marylou has been plotting her revenge ever since. When she discovers his whereabouts in Florida, she hightails it to Tallahassee, moves in down the block from where he resides with his daughter, Caroline, and begins the tricky work of insinuating herself into his life. But she has no idea what a nest of yellow jackets she's stumbled into. Spriggs is senile, his daughter's on the verge of collapse, and his grandchildren are a mess of oddballs, leaving Marylou wondering whether she's really meant to ruin their lives … or fix them. Marylou By the time Marylou Ahearn finally moved into the little ranch house in Tallahassee, she’d spent countless hours trying to come up with the best way to kill Wilson Spriggs. The only firm decision she’d made, however, was that proximity was crucial. You couldn’t kill someone if you lived in a different state. So she flew down from Memphis to Tallahassee and bought a house on the edge of Wilson’s neighborhood. Doing so had been no problem, because she had a chunk of money left from the government settlement as well as her retirement and social security. She furnished her new place quickly with generic “big warehouse sale” furniture. Back in Memphis she rounded up a graduate student couple she’d met at church—a husband and wife who both needed to give their spectacles a good cleaning—to house-sit, and then she transferred her base of operations to Tallahassee, informing friends only that she’d be taking an extended vacation. Completing her task in Florida, unfortunately, was taking a while. Every morning when Marylou and her Welsh corgi, Buster, left their house at 22 Reeve’s Court and set out on their walk toward Wilson Spriggs’s house at 2208 Friar’s Way, Marylou chanted to herself: Today’s the day. Today’s the day. Today’s the day he’ll suffer and die . Every morning she fully believed that by the time she’d walked the three blocks to Wilson’s house she’d have figured out how to do him in, despite the fact that she’d been setting out on this very walk a few times a day for the past two weeks and it was nearly May and the best method and right time had yet to present themselves.   She tried to spur herself on with angry thoughts. Would she feel better after she’d killed him? Darn tootin’. She didn’t expect to go around giddy, not after all that had happened, but she expected to feel relieved, to have a sense of accomplishment, like when, fifteen years ago, she’d stepped out the doors of Humes High School, never to have to spoon-feed Chaucer to tenth graders again. It must be a good sign that she was now living in a neighborhood where the streets were named after Chaucer’s characters. The Canterbury Tales had returned to mark this next big passage in her life.   It didn’t help that the walk to Wilson’s house was so pleasant. Canterbury Hills was once a suburb of Tallahassee; but the city, moving northward, had swallowed it up, and it was now spoken of by Realtors as Midtown. The homes in Canterbury Hills, mostly ranch houses from the fifties and sixties, weren’t as stately as the houses in her Memphis neighborhood, but they all sat on spacious lots full of flowering shrubs and well-tended flower gardens, shaded by live oak trees; and Marylou enjoyed looking aro...

Product details

• Authors: Elizabeth Stuckey-French
• Publisher: Anchor Books USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 10.01.2012
• EAN: 9781400034864
• ISBN: 978-1-4000-3486-4
• No. of pages: 352
• Dimensions: 133 mm x 202 mm x 18 mm
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature