Helen Vance Smith, my mother, my spiritual and moral compass, and surely the most quietly complicated of them all.
Judith Johnson Smith, my wife, whom I love now more than ever, and who after more than thirty years together remains as fascinating to me as the day we met.
Molly Boulware, my first friend, whose death at age twenty-five shaped me in ways too numerous to count. I miss her still, and dedicate this book to her memory.
Lisa Wren, my only sister, a bottomless well of strength, grace, encouragement, and endless good humor until her death in September 2015, just as I was finishing this book.
And Susan Ginsburg, my literary agent, whose unfailing support and wise counsel over the years have helped me become the person I always imagined I would be.
Also, the members of my former writing group, the Mavericks, offered much-needed feedback on the manuscript as this novel took shape. Their input, as always, was invaluable. In addition, Robin Abcarian of the Los Angeles Times let me borrow her daughter’s name.
Four remarkable women ran the Writer’s Colony at Dairy Hollow in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, when I wrote an early version of this book there in the autumn of 2006—Jane Tucker, Sharon Spurlin, Cindy Duncan, and Sandy Wright. I thank them for the extraordinary gifts of time and space. Among the many talented writers I met while in residence at Dairy Hollow, Paige Britt of Austin, Texas, helped me better understand the character of Ron Starke. I thank her for sharing her scars.
Not all of my support team is female, though. My friend and fellow writer, Philip Reed, offered some great suggestions as I struggled during the late stages of writing this novel. The team at Diversion Books has been terrific, and I especially appreciate editor Randall Klein’s unwavering faith in my abilities as a storyteller. His suggestions on the manuscripts of this novel and its predecessor, The Disappeared Girl, were invaluable in helping both books reach their potential. And his digital resurrection of the three novels before that, Time Release, Shadow Image, and Straw Men, have introduced those books and characters to new audiences around the world. I hope to someday repay his faith.
Martin J. Smith
Granby, Colorado
More from Martin J. Smith
MARTIN J. SMITH is a veteran journalist, author, and magazine editor who has won more than 50 newspaper and magazine awards. He’s a former senior editor of the Los Angeles Times Magazine, and for nine years was editor-in-chief of Orange Coast magazine in Orange County, CA. His first three crime novels were nominated for prestigious crime fiction awards—the Edgar, Barry, and Anthony. He also is the author of three nonfiction books, including The Wild Duck Chase, Poplorica: A Popular History of the Fads, Mavericks, Inventions, and Lore That Shaped Modern America, and Oops: 20 Life Lessons From the Fiascoes That Shaped America.
The Memory Series is available now!
Time Release
Pittsburgh, 1986: The city is gripped in a panic as a maniac slips poison onto pharmacy shelves. All of the evidence has pointed to Ron Corbett, but shoddy policework let Corbett off the hook, left the crime unsolved.
Ten years later, it’s happening again. This time, for the most personal of reasons, Detective Downing has made it his mission to see Corbett behind bars. He enlists the help of Jim Christensen, a psychologist who specializes in memory, to interview Corbett’s son, now a young man with a painful past and problems of his own. Does the boy remember his father slipping poison into pill containers? Has he blocked memories of a horrific crime spree enacted in his own house? As Christensen explores the boy’s memory and Downing grows more obsessive investigating the case, both men fear that the killings now may not be as random as they once thought, and that unlocking memories may draw them too close to a vicious predator.
Shadow Image
The Underhill family has loomed over Pennsylvania politics for four generations as the most powerful in the state. Now, with their youngest son locked in a tight gubernatorial race, a simple accident threatens to derail the entire campaign. After Floss Underhill, the family matriarch, has been discovered alive after falling from a gazebo into a ravine, Brenna Kennedy gets brought in as a defense attorney to the family. The police don’t seem to believe that her fall was an accident, however, and soon neither does Brenna.
Jim Christensen, a psychologist, memory expert, and Brenna’s partner as they raise their children together, has been studying Floss Underhill for months in a group of Alzheimer’s patients. Her mind ravaged by the disease, her body broken by the fall, Floss Underhill nevertheless knows something, and is trying to tell Christensen a family secret so explosive it could bring down an empire. To help bring it out of her, though, will make them powerful enemies, and bring both the truth—and the danger—very close to home…
Straw Men
Eight years ago, Brenna Kennedy defended Carmen DellaVecchio: a loner, a freak, a man accused of a heinous crime. She lost the case, and DellaVecchio was sent to prison for the brutal rape and near murder of Teresa Harnett, a Pittsburgh cop.
But DNA evidence has cast doubt on DellaVecchio’s guilt. While he waits for a new trial, he is free, and Brenna still believes that he is an innocent man. But if DellaVecchio is innocent, then that means there’s a guilty sociopath out there, and all that’s standing in his way from getting away with a grisly crime is one meddling lawyer…
Jim Christensen has the key to unlock memories. Brilliant and compassionate, he’s dedicated his career to studying the effects of memory loss, including on victims of trauma. When Teresa Harnett asks him to help her remember that terrible night, he resists. Ethically, it’s unsound, as Christensen and Kennedy have been together for six years. But Christensen is drawn into the case, and soon everyone involved is caught in the web of a man who will kill to stay free…
The Disappeared Girl
Nothing stays buried forever, especially not the past.
Two men stand out in a crowd overlooking the Ohio River. A plane is being taken from the water where it crashed decades before. Both men helped put it there.
Jim Christensen’s daughter, Melissa, has been troubled of late. She has dreams that feel like memories, unsettling images percolate to the surface. She remembers a terrifying past, possibly her own, from a time before she was adopted by her father. Christensen’s work as an expert in memory makes him the ideal person to help unlock his daughter’s fragile grasp on her own history. But will he want to learn the truth of where Melissa came from? Who she was before? Who might still be looking for her?
This dizzying novel of suspense takes the reader back into a dirty war and its human costs, into the fevered mind of one of its survivors, and through the crosshairs of a man desperate to keep his own history vanished.
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