The Spider on the Ceiling: An Anna Newsom Mystery (Unabridged‪)‬

Dr. Anna Newsom is a 31-year-old forensic psychologist whose passion is defending women who have been sexually abused and have gone on to murder their abusers. Using forensic analysis techniques that she herself has pioneered, Anna seeks to prove her defendant’s claims of justifiable homicide when obvious, physical evidence of rape, such as DNA, is missing or not readily available. When the story opens, Dr. Newsom is traveling to England to promote her new book, The Spider on the Ceiling; a compilation of five of Dr. Newsom’s most dramatic cases. As the tour is coming to an end, Anna is reluctantly drawn into the case of Elizabeth Barrett, a 15-year-old girl who has brutally murdered a local dairy farmer whom Elizabeth claims was raping her.

But there’s more. When Anna was thirteen, she herself was raped, and the event had two long term effects; the rape was the motivating force in her decision to become a forensic psychologist, but it was also the catalyst that triggered within Anna the gifts of an Empath; the ability to feel the emotions and experiences of others, and in Anna's case, the rapes of her clients.