Walter Donway
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The Lailly Worm by Walter Donway
A chance to live again, love, and fight back–if Caroline Brecher's spirit can survive… A man who loves her, but knows the battle is not only for justice but for the woman she had been…
“Caroline Brecher is every woman–and human being–whose courage and will to live and love again are tested when the unimaginable–and unendurable–strikes out of nowhere.”
To Caroline Brecher, her weekend house in fashionable East Hampton is a symbol of success and the reward of hard work. Arriving on a perfect August afternoon, she doesn't care that she has no social plans, no date, no visitors. But suddenly she does have visitors–terrifying visitors, and her life becomes a surreal torment, “the perfect torture of a woman…”
Will the soul-destroying ordeal ever end? Is there escape? Can what has been done to her and her very concept of herself as a woman ever be avenged? Can the love of a tough ex-Marine who conceives a passion for Caroline save her–even from herself–as their affair blazes into life in the presence of deadly danger?
“The Lailly Worm,” named after the beloved Scottish ballad, is a romantic thriller about how evil, striking in an instant out of nowhere, can crush the beautiful, the successful, the “safe”–even in the privileged seclusion of a Long Island resort town. And how fate can offer a slender chance to fight back.
The pace of this novel keeps accelerating right up to the moment innocence and evil come face-to-face.
” I would absolutely love to see this as a movie. Charlize Theron would make an awesome Caroline…. “–An Editor's Review.
Don't miss this second novel by Walter Donway, author of “The Price of Hannah Blake.” Donway is not only a novelist but a poet whose sensuous style ensures that stories like “The Lailly Worm” are both thrilling and sensuous to read.
The Price of Hannah Blake by Walter Donway
THE PRICE OF HANNAH BLAKE is in the tantalizing tradition of the Victorian underground erotic novel, but with the pace and suspense of a contemporary thriller, as Hannah Blake fights for survival in Victorian England’s bizarre “Duke’s Troupe” of dancers and actors.
You fall in love with Hannah’s beauty, her courage in the face of unimaginable abuse, and her determination to assert her own awakening passion—and love—in the duke’s prison of luxury and license.
You are swept along as the unspoiled farm girl from Devon is torn from her family, stripped and appraised by her ruthless instructors, forcibly “initiated” into the cruel erotic games of the young men and women of the troupe—and fights to survive and preserve her deepest values. It is romantic suspense that seizes you and draws you forward ever faster as Hannah falls in love with the man who will risk everything to save her from enslavement to the duke and his consorts–a fate no one ever has escaped.
Here is a bitter and beautiful recreation of the Age of Victoria, a period that has become synonymous with modesty and sexual repression, but which concealed a frenzy of secret lust, twisted sexuality, and cruelty.
Striding through these pages, as the peril of young Hannah Blake and her daring lover mounts, are historic figures such as the great reformer Prime Minister William Gladstone, his First Lord of the Admiralty, Sherlock Holmes and the malevolent Professor Moriarty–and the prostitutes, sailors, lords and ladies, courtiers, and often desperately poor English country folk who gave the age its color and character.
Bringing them all together is the unbreakable spirit of Hannah, a prisoner of corruption and lust who awakens to a yearning passion—and love—few in the repressed and rigid age of Victoria could imagine.
