Seduction

"It's really embarrassing to admit, but I forget why I killed my husband."is the very seductive opening sentence of Catherine Gildiner's psychological thriller, Seduction. It's the tale of two ex-cons who are hired to investigate the director of the Freud Academy. Catherine is a clinical psychologist who wrote her doctoral thesis on the influence of Darwin on Freud so she knows her stuff. ( I worked with Catherine at a Psychiatric Hospital in Toronto 3o some odd years ago. Our paths still cross from time to time, most recently when we organized a reunion of our confreres from "the psych". Could this get-together provide fodder for another memoir? We'll have to wait and see. ) Her wit is as sharp as a needle and it comes across in this weird amalgam of crime fiction and Freudian theory. We get a crash course in the origins of psychoanalysis in between some very snappy patter between protagonists and fellow ex-cons, Kate Fitzgerald and Jackie Lawton. The premise seemed pretty wacky to me: Kate, who murdered her husband, is released on a TA from prison by her psychiatrist in order to find out what dirt the charismatic head of the Freud Academy had on Sigmund. She teams up with Jackie who is as emotionally limited as she is. They fly to exotic locations and bump up against a motley crew of weirdos, including Anna Freud, along the way. Murder ensues. I pushed my skepticism aside as I got deeper into the book; I got sucked in and read it late into the night. I can see this as a movie. At any rate the door is wide open for a second Kate and Jackie caper and I look forward to reading it.