CATCH ME WHEN I FALL

She’s lovely, alluring, successful—and someone close to her is plotting her murder.

But Holly Krauss is her own worst enemy. She knows that, knows she’s in free fall, and that the odds are better than fair she’ll kill herself before anyone else can beat her to it. This, despite the obvious plusses in her life. Yes, she’s conceived, nurtured and been the driving force for a flourishing events-planning business. Yes, she has an adoring husband and a dependable partner/faithful best friend, but, caught in the vise of a Hollycentric existence, she’s chronically blind to their value. Like her father, she’s bi-polar and sees the condition as both genetic and hopeless. So she pushes it, takes appalling risks—at the office, with business associates and clients, and away from it as well. Drunk and on drugs one night, she engages in the kind of sexual adventure that leads inevitably to a near rape. On another night, she—willfully, foolishly—drifts into a high-stakes poker game and loses big to a shark. “I feel like a ghost in my own life,” another troubled spirit says to her, and it resonates. The downward spiral continues inexorably. Holly tries suicide, fails and is institutionalized. Her husband is no longer quite so adoring. She’s become an embarrassment to her friends, and, by and large, they desert her. Except for steadfast Meg, her partner, whose devotion somehow survives Holly’s careless treatment of it, she’s alone. And when the lethal trap is finally set, it’s Meg who tries desperately to keep it from snapping shut.

French (Secret Smile, 2004, etc.), a deft hand at placing fetching young women in fear for their lives, performs as expected.