Unspeakable Madness

In Lisa Jackson's sequel to Shiver, Eve Renner returns to New Orleans to forget her past, to forget the night she was nearly killed and her lover tried for murder.

But in Absolute Fear the past will not forget Eve.

Someone is watching, planning, luring Eve back to the ruins of Our Lady Of Virtues Hospital, a Catholic run, mental asylum in New Orleans. This is the institution where Eve's father was a doctor, where Eve spent her childhood exploring its secret chambers.

And as Eve's memories surface, bodies are found--victims are slain in ritual fashion, numbers are tatooed into their bodies. The only connection between the killings is:

Our Lady of Virtues—

Somewhere in its decaying rooms lies the key to a terrible crime, a crime that seems to lead to Eve. And though the only person she thinks she can trust is her former lover, Cole, he may be a cold-blooded killer.

"I've always been intrigued by any kind of psychosis," says Jackson. "I was intrigued by what happened to mental hospitals during the Reagan era when many of these institutions closed down due to lack of federal funding. A lot of people ended up on the streets that shouldn't have been there."

Jackson visited New Orleans five or six times. "I liked the city for its inherent history," she says. " It has a real eeriness to it and lends itself to that atmosphere." Both Absolute Fear and Shiver take place before Katrina. "

As for her interest in Catholicism, Jackson says she grew up in a small town in Oregon where most of her neighbors and friends were Catholic. She was a non-practicing Protestant. "I was captivated by the mystique of the Catholic church and fascinated by the rituals," she says. "They were so different from what I knew."

Lisa Jackson's Absolute Fear is a sequel to Shiver, and a companion book to two other New Orleans novels (Hot Blooded, Cold Blooded,) and one or two more forthcoming. Her books regularly place high on the New York Times, USA Today and Publisher's Weekly best seller lists, with her recent novel, Fatal Burn climbing to number 1 on the New York Times list. She lives with her family and an eighty-pound dog in the Pacific Northwest. You can read and listen to an excerpt here.