The Ninth Step
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
Is it true what they say? That we’re only as sick as our worst secret? Because Helen Patrice has one. Last night, she murdered a stranger…
Helen is a recovering alcoholic struggling through a twelve-step program. Now it’s time to make amends for a crime she got away with—a hit and run accident that killed the wife of school teacher Edgar Woolrich. It’s time to face the consequences. When she finally gathers the courage to meet him, the ninth step begins with a lie—the first of many as their relationship grows, and Helen knows it’s far too late to reveal the truth to a man she’s come to love. Then one day, she receives an anonymous note: Does he know you killed his wife?
Now her devastating trail of deceit is about to lead her into the darkest place so far—that of other people’s secrets…
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A fatal car accident propels this sharp and edgy novel, Jerkins's third (after At the End of the Road and A Very Simple Crime). Veterinarian Helen Patrice, after a night of heavy drinking, hits the car driven by Edgar Woolrich, ninth-grade geometry teacher in the town of Mantissa Cove, killing Edgar's wife, the passenger in his car. Helen flees the scene in a panic, and quickly repairs and repaints her car. After a botched suicide attempt, the remorseful Helen joins Alcoholics Anonymous, where she discovers that the ninth step to recovery is to make direct amends to people you have injured. Meanwhile, the obsessive, methodical Edgar, who wasn't seriously hurt in the crash, is using charts, graphs, and mathematical probabilities to narrow the field of culpable drivers. You don't have to be a math geek to appreciate this darkly comic, consistently surprising, and agreeably macabre tale.
