I’ve recently put Murder by Mortgage up on Kindle and Barnes & Noble. Plus, the book is available as a trade paperback on Amazon.
I love the characters in Murder by Mortgage and the plot as well.
Jennifer Roberts lost her daughter in an auto accident eight months before the book opens. Barbara, seventeen, was addicted to heroin and caused the accident.
For some time, Jennifer was simply trying to survive her loss. As she described it:
I’d existed, for a few days or maybe weeks, in a timeless void, where sounds were just noises, and white was the only color I saw.
Shapes were meaningless. Even thought had no basis, no tether. I was not a conscious being with thoughts and dreams, with a concept of past, present, and future. I’d shut down, almost an act of self-destruction except that I breathed and my heart beat strongly. My brain was simply on neutral.
I watched television endlessly. I thumbed through magazines. I stared at the wall.
Her best friend and next door neighbor, Evelyn Addison, was her lifeline. Evelyn kept her from losing it completely.
One day, however, Evelyn was found dead.
Stunned and shocked, Jennifer was forced to emerge from the bubble of her grief. She believed Evelyn was murdered and that she owed it to her best friend to discover the truth.
I loved Evelyn. Throughout the book Jennifer recalled bits of wisdom from her friend, such as when Evelyn said:
“You go along thinking your life is fine,” Evelyn said. “And something suddenly changes. Something, I don’t know what, makes you look at things not full on, but from an angle. Like you stepped out of your body. Then you realize you aren’t as happy as you thought you were. You’re lonely. And alone.”
Throughout her search for the truth, Jennifer was forced to come face to face with Talbot, the cop who brought a stoned Barbara home once too often. To her surprise the antipathy she felt for him mellowed to friendship. But while she was beginning to make headway in the murder investigation, her personal life was falling apart.
Finally, she confronted her husband, Tom:
This moment had been coming since I woke in the hospital to find Tom looking at me, the expression on his face all too easy to read. He would have preferred that Barbara had survived, and that it had been me lying under that tarp.
This moment had been coming ever since I went to him after the funeral, wanting him to hold me. Instead, his arms hung lax around my body, reluctance in every one of his movements. Ever since, he’d been miserly with his comfort and if he felt any affection for me, he’d hidden it well.
This moment had been coming ever since he stopped talking to me, stopped wanting to discuss anything. Instead, he’d been holding blame in a glass bubble with my name on it and hated me.
Jennifer does discover the secret to Evelyn’s murder. Along the way she also begins to heal and create a new life. I loved her story because she began to notice the world, feel amusement, and look at her situation with honesty and forgiveness. Jennifer became a survivor. Or, as Evelyn would put it:
“Life is like a movie, Jenn. It can either be one of those silent black and white features, where someone else plays the music for you. Or you can have an epic, guns blazing, music soaring, lust, love, and adventure.”
The ebook of Murder by Mortgage is sale priced at $5.99 for a limited time. The trade paperback is $14.99. (Oh, and the book is written under my pseudonym of Katherine Storm.)