A powerful, riveting account about a woman being victimized by a modern-day monster.
In this lightly fictionalized memoir, an author recounts her chilling experiences involving a stalker.
In her debut book, Caraway (a pen name) recalls the day she met a man called Todd. The author, a hard-working board member of a children’s nonprofit, was introduced to him by her friend Monica. Todd was the owner of a small IT business supplying services to several outfits, including the local police department. But he seemed to keep turning up, and the stakes of the drama between him and the author grew greater and greater. He used his professional skills and connections to root into every corner of her life, and the bizarre experiences that resulted made Caraway begin to feel stressed. “At my lowest point, my mind was no longer operating in organized, concentric circles compartmentalizing the psychological war I was battling,” she writes. “It had morphed into a maze with dead ends at each turn, causing chaos and robbing me of my ability to think clearly or rationally.” Caraway’s decision to craft the story of her own nightmarish experience as “a work of creative nonfiction” is telling. As she rightly points out, her subject is both grim and extremely significant; one study she mentions shows that in nearly 80% of the cases where women were murdered by an intimate partner, stalking preceded the crime. But many a manifesto has been torpedoed by shoddy storytelling skills. Fortunately, in these pages, Caraway not only tells an important story, but also a gripping one. She compellingly describes not only the slow, insidious way Todd’s stalking escalated until it was entirely choking Caraway’s life, but also her own dogged pursuit of justice in a legal system that was against her at every turn. At one point in court, Todd told her, “You’re going to regret this,” in a threatening tone and nothing came of it. The combination of fact and fiction here ends up being very potent.
A powerful, riveting account about a woman being victimized by a modern-day monster.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A chorus of encouraging voices that mix do-this instruction with companionable inspiration.
Everything you wanted to know about how to plan, draft, write, revise, publish, and market a mystery, courtesy of the cheerleaders from the Mystery Writers of America.
In a marketplace crowded with how-to-write titles, the big selling point of this one is the variety of voices behind more than 30 full-length chapters covering everything from mystery subgenres (Neil Nyren) to publishing law (Daniel Stevens), punctuated with a variety of shorter interpolations. A few of them are more pointed than the longer chapters—e.g., when Rob Hart advises, “Allow yourself the space to forget things,” Tim Maleeny says, “Love your characters, but treat them like dirt,” or C.M. Surrisi notes, “If you’re writing a mystery for kids, remember that your protagonist can’t drive and has a curfew, and no one will believe them or let them be involved.” The contributors vary in their approaches, from businesslike (Dale W. Berry and Gary Phillips on the process of creating graphic novels, Liliana Hart on self-publishing, Maddee James on cultivating an online presence) to personal (Frankie Y. Bailey on creating diverse characters, Chris Grabenstein on writing for middle schoolers, Catriona McPherson on deploying humor) to autobiographical (Rachel Howzell Hall on creating a Black female detective, Louise Penny on building a community of followers) to frankly self-promoting (T. Jefferson Parker on creating villains, Max Allan Collins on continuing someone else’s franchise). Although many familiar bromides are recycled—“All stories are character-driven,” writes Allison Brennan, and Jacqueline Winspear, Gayle Lynds, and Daniel Stashower all urge the paramount importance of research—the most entertaining moments are the inevitable disagreements that crop up, especially between Jeffery Deaver (“Always Outline!”) and editor Child (“Never Outline!”), with Deaver getting the better of the argument. Other contributors include Alex Segura, William Kent Krueger, Tess Gerritsen, and Hallie Ephron.
A chorus of encouraging voices that mix do-this instruction with companionable inspiration.Pub Date: April 27, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982149-43-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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