The Lonely Places Book

When love turns to obsession there’s no place to hide.

Preparing to escape the darkest period of her life, Ruth Gemmill needs the consolation of her brother, Alex, a man she cannot breathe without. It’s not the first time. She couldn’t breathe without Matt either. Matt, who loved to beat her—until Ruth found the strength to escape the terrifying abuse of her domestic existence.

Or so she would like to think. Little does she realize the extent of the crippling cobwebs her vicious lover has spun throughout her mind....But fate deals Ruth another blow when Alex suddenly disappears. To bring him home, Ruth is forced to confront her emotional demons through a bewildering landscape, where the phantoms of a menacing past lurk around every corner, determined to wake Ruth up to the most horrifying reality of all. Some webs can never be swept away, some spiders sting to destroy.

Publishers Weekly

Self-declared all-around victim Ruth Gemmill, the heroine of Morris's debut suspense novel, flees her abusive lover and heads to the small northern England town of Greenwell for a surprise visit with her brother, Alex, a gay high school teacher. But Ruth is in for a surprise herself: Alex has disappeared, and few in Greenwell know or care where he has gone. Ruth's anxious inquiries bring to the surface her most disturbing memories and dreams of lurid childhood traumas, not to mention the unwelcome reappearance of the abusive lover, Matt. Meanwhile, the behavior of the Greenwell populace is so ominous Ruth suspects that even apparently helpful townsfolk like kindly Keith and lovely Liz may not be what they seem. Indeed, they are not. Ruth falls into the hands of rough policemen and the arms of friends of both sexes before winding up in the lonely places of the title, sites like the abandoned train station where Matt suffered the childhood rape that has made him so violent. Billed as "a novel of psychological suspense," the book is more like an over-the-top compendium of titillating terror, including scenes of pedophilia and sadomasochism. Morris's hallucinatory mixture of memory and nightmare, aggression and submission, pain and excitement will intrigue some readers and vex many others, as will the ending, which suggests Ruth's emotional roller-coaster ride was, like the town of Greenwell and its inhabitants, not at all what it appeared to be. (May) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.