Memory and Desire
Wildside Press
November 1, 2000
ISBN-13: 1587152681
Available in: Hardcover
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Memory and Desire
by Lillian Stewart Carl
Claire came to the English village to find her best friend, Melinda, who'd vanished after performing in a play which re- creates a seventeenth century witchcraft trial. What she found was a murder mystery — and a man.
A man who, like her, is trapped between memory and desire.
The play takes place at the manor house where the protagonists lived and died, a house where the past is still a haunting presence. Did Melinda ask too many questions about the village's tragic history? To find her, Claire, too, must ask questions. What she learns is that everyone in the village is playing a role — not just in the melodrama, but in real life.
Claire must walk a fine line between repeating the past and surviving the present. For if she puts one foot wrong she won't be seeing the future at all, let alone spending it with the man she's not only come to trust but to love.
Other Books by Lillian Stewart Carl
Lillian Stewart Carl's Bio
After growing up in Missouri and Ohio and spending many years in North Texas, I've developed a passion for mountains and oceans, particularly the ones in Scotland, which is heaven's front porch and which I visit as often as possible. In my youth I was lucky enough to travel to other parts of Europe, the Middle East, India, and Japan.
While I've worked a few "real" jobs, as an engineering aide, a librarian, a newspaper columnist, and a college history teacher, all along I was writing stories and critiques first for my desk drawer and then for fan magazines. My first professional fiction was published in the Amazons II anthology in 1982.
My husband is a retired geophysicist. Our two adult sons are in advertising and computers respectively. We have a cat, a thirteen-pound tabby, and an assortment of houseplants I view as rentals -- how long can I keep them before they die? Our home is a tract house cleverly disguised as a book-lined cloister.
My hobbies (or what I do when I'm trying to avoid working) include needlepoint and knitting, bread-baking, music (particularly Celtic folk/rock), gardening, public television, walking and yoga, and crossword puzzles.
Unlike more methodical writers, I never sat up one day and said, "I'm going to start writing now". I've always written, just as I've always read. Just as I've always breathed, for that matter. And I've been aided and abetted since the age of twelve by my best friend, science fiction writer Lois McMaster Bujold.
If I could be anything other than a writer (as if!) I'd probably be a librarian.
Over the years I've been inventing my own genre, mystery/romance with supernatural/ historical/ mythological underpinnings. And I've become a firm believer in the odd synchronies of the writing life. Soon after finishing Ashes to Ashes, for example, which is about a woman from Missouri named Rebecca working in a replica of a Scottish castle, I visited the real castle and discovered the tour guide was a woman from Oklahoma named Rebecca.
I am a member or former member of SFWA, MWA, Sisters in Crime, Novelists, Inc., and The Author's Guild.
