Mario Acevedo: May 2009 Archives

Nancy Taylor Rosenberg's newest book The Cheater (Tor Forge) weaves the lives of three women in an intense and taut legal thriller.  Lily Forrester returns from Rosenberg's New York Times bestsellers, Mitigating Circumstances and Buried Evidence.  This time Forrester is a county judge in Ventura, California.  She meets another lawyer, the charming and vivacious Anne Bradley, but their friendship shatters when Bradley accuses Forrester's husband of rape.  Meanwhile, FBI agent and profiler Mary Stevens is on the trail of a black widow serial killer who lures cheating husbands to their deaths and mutilates their bodies.

The story is an intricate, psychological drama.  Rosenberg's intensely psychopathic villain introduces a fascinating weapon into the arsenal of fiction thrillers: the drug Versed to sedate her victims and eliminate them in humiliating and gruesome ways.  Forrester struggles with her personal demons and this plays into the hands of the serial killer.  Stevens finds her professional skills tested to their limits as she pursues a murderer across a web of deceit and misdirection.  The climax is not a simple consolidation of plot lines but a collision--a controlled crash that will leave the reader practically stumbling out of the wreckage, emotionally drained yet very satisfied. (You may want to smoke a cigarette afterwards.)

The inspiration to write The Cheater came from two incidents.  First, Rosenberg was compelled to draw upon the actual story of a girl who was abandoned by her father to die along a deserted winter road.  This experience, when combined with sexual molestation, could drive the victim to rationalize committing acts of chilling violence against others.  Second, Rosenberg learned about alibi clubs and was convinced they'd be great plot devices to add more mystery to already suspenseful plots.