Life Penalty

Zusatztext "Fielding has made the woman-in-jeopardy genre her own." --People "Fielding knows how to turn the screws of suspense." --The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) New York Times bestselling author of Missing Pieces Informationen zum Autor Joy Fielding is the author of Don't Cry Now, Tell Me No Secrets, See Jane Run, Good Intentions, The Deep End, Missing Pieces, The Other Woman, Kiss Mommy Goodbye, Trance, The Transformation, and The Best of Friends.   A graduate of the University of Toronto, she lives with her family in Toronto and Palm Beach. Klappentext She's searching for the man who killed her daughter. But will he find her first? In a novel that grips like a waking nightmare, master storyteller Joy Fielding creates a searing examination of a horrifying crime, the limits of the law, and a woman's terrifying journey into a killer's twisted mind. In one tragic afternoon everything changed. Until then, Gail Walton had considered herself lucky. With a successful husband, two daughters, and a house in the New Jersey suburbs, Gail lived a safe and predictable life. Then the unthinkable happened: her six-year-old daughter Cindy was abducted, sexually assaulted, and murdered. Consumed by grief and rage, Gail has retreated into herself. Her family and friends fear she's losing her grip on reality. The police warn her to let them handle the investigation. But not one of them knows the truth: that Gail has a description of the killer, a plan to set herself up as a decoy, and a room in a run-down boardinghouse. And Gail Walton has just bought herself a gun....She saw the police cars as soon as she turned the corner, and knew immediately, instinctively, that they were parked in front of her house. Her first reaction was panic. She dropped the few parcels she was carrying and stood, unable to move, staring straight ahead, her breath holding her stomach in tightly, pressing into her back. In the next instant she was running toward her house, unmindful of the bags she had dropped, seeing only the police cars, knowing as she glanced down at her watch and saw that it was seventeen minutes after four, that for her time had stopped. Later, much later, when the sedative they would give her was starting to take effect and her mind was hovering in the mid-ground between dreams and reality, her thoughts would keep returning to how her day had been spent, how things might have been different. That somehow it was her fault. She had changed the routine. Lesley Jennings' mother had called first thing in the morning, just after Jack and the girls had left, to tell her that Lesley had spent the better part of the night throwing up and must have picked up some flu bug at school and therefore would not be able to have her regular Friday afternoon piano lesson. Gail had commiserated with the young mother, remembering how upset she used to get whenever Jennifer came down with anything, realizing how calm she was with Cindy, and telling the young woman what she was sure her doctor had already told her, to keep the child quiet and in bed, no solid foods and lots of liquids. Mrs. Jennings seemed grateful for the advice, confiding with obvious guilt that she was desperately trying to locate someone to come and stay with Lesley while she ran off to work. Gail told her about the daughter of a friend who had recently dropped out of school and might be interested in picking up a few extra dollars by baby-sitting, and again Mrs. Jennings was grateful, adding that she hoped Gail's children would be spared the flu bug which seemed to be sweeping the Livingston school system, probably because of all the rain they'd been having lately and wasn't it just typical that the child would get sick when it finally looked as if the weather was starting to break. Children were just little incubators for germs, Gail remembered thinking as she hung...

Product details

• Authors: Joy Fielding
• Publisher: Random House Inc.
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 01.01.1998
• EAN: 9780440223382
• ISBN: 978-0-440-22338-2
• No. of pages: 392
• Dimensions: 106 mm x 175 mm x 28 mm
• Weight: 200 g
• Series: Dell
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature