Its only a little Lovesick
Paul was just a normal teenager. But what sets a normal person to kill his best friend and lying in his pool of blood. This is exactly where Paul is found when the cops find him.
Dr. Lisa Boyer is contacted by Paul's attorney. Who happens to be an old friend of Lisa's. Paul's attorney wants Lisa to interview Paul and learn the truth about why Paul did what he did. Dr. Boyer agrees but gets more than she bargains for.
I agree with the other readers that this book was seperated into two stories...Paul's and Dr. Boyer's. While, I did enjoy this book, I felt that it fell a little short where Dr. Boyer’s story was involved. She didn’t jump off the pages and come to life for me. In addition, she did nothing to help Paul other than just listen to his story.
Although, it was quite a story. Which I figured out pretty quickly in the beginning, what the story was. There was nothing really new about the story other than the ending was a little bit of a surprise for me. I did not really see it coming.
Paul’s story did draw me in. He had personality. He may have seemed quiet and with drawn but he was a lot stronger and grown up than he really was. I felt bad for Paul. Paul was the nice guy that finished last.
When it came to learning about Dr. Boyer and her tragic past, I thought she was a victim of it and thus was weak. After a while, I would just skim over her parts of the book to get back to Paul's. Overall, this was a pretty, good book. This book did show me enough of what Mr. Seidel is capable of and I will check out some of his other prior novels.
By Spencer Seidel
“‘He’s got a knife!’ Jimmy said after seeing the glint of a blade in the kid’s hand. Jimmy brought his gun up and squared it at the kid.”
A murder rocks Portland, Maine after police discover an incoherent teen sitting in a pool of blood late one night. Paul Ducharme is found with a murder weapon in one hand, the dead body of his best friend in the other, and no clue how he got to the Eastern Promenade Trail.
A teenage love triangle gone wrong brings Spencer Seidel back with a vengeance in LOVESICK (PublishingWorks; $14.95; June 2012), the follow up to his breakout novel Dead of Wynter. Seidel deftly illustrates the trying relationship amid a friend and love interest – each with their own desires, issues and shocking agendas.
Wendy, the girl of Paul’s dreams, has been missing for weeks. Her boyfriend Lee has been murdered–apparently by Paul. It’s an open and shut case–or so most of Portland thinks.
When forensic psychologist Dr. Lisa Boyers is asked to interview Paul, who claims to forget the events leading up to the murder, she reluctantly agrees. In her jailhouse interviews, Lisa helps Paul to recover his memories, but the murder’s circumstances force her to recall her own troubled past.
Media attention mounts. Reporters stream into Portland. All eyes turn to Lisa. She seems intent on exonerating the “brutal teen killer” but quickly finds herself the focus of an over-zealous reporter with a knack for digging up dirty secrets. But the killer who has Lisa in the crosshairs already knows them all.
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LOVESICK
By Spencer Seidel
PublishingWorks, June 2012
$14.95; 378 pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-935557-69-2
Fiction/Suspense
The Terrifying World of a Writer By Spencer Seidel
Ask anyone who knows me, and they'll tell you that I can be overly scheduled, neurotic, a tad eccentric . . . Well, I won't go on. You get the picture. Let's just say that sometimes I'm not real good with going with the flow.
Show me a writer who isn't a little strange, and I'll show you a mediocre writer. Writers throughout history have been weird. Hemingway was weird. Same goes for F. Scott Fitzgerald. Do I even have to mention Truman Capote?
I think there's a simple reason for this.
For those of you who don't write, let me describe the concept with an analogy. Suppose you woke up one day with a sense of smell as keen as a bloodhound. Can you imagine how awful that would be? You'd smell everything vividly. Every cleaning product on every surface, your own BO, or worse, everyone else's BO. And I won't even mention that cat box or God forbid, the old cat herself. And that's just the beginning. What about the garbage, the laundry hamper, or the week-old milk in the fridge? Even sex would be a challenge. You'd go mental.
But there's a flip side. Imagine how wonderful freshly baked cinnamon rolls would smell. Or bacon in the morning. No wonder dogs are always begging around for food or dying to get outside. The complex and sometimes overwhelming smells must drive them nuts.
Being a writer is a lot like that, except instead of smells, it's motivations, emotion, and possibilities. When I get into the car to drive to work every morning, it isn't hard for me to make my writer voice say things like, "His last day on earth began just like any other." Yikes! Even on that short drive to my day job, I'm always seeing possibilities. Things that could happen, little things that change lives forever, events that books are made of, like a dropped cellphone on the passenger-side floor that makes someone stray into oncoming traffic, or a blown tire. The more complex the situation, the worse this effect gets.
p>I think this can make writers a little crazy and regimented in their ways as they seek to control their environments. But, like with our newly found bloodhound senses, there is a flip side. Although some can be extremely introverted, writers are very good at sniffing out people's angles and motivations. I contend that this makes writers very difficult to lie to. Think your writer spouse could never find out that you're having an affair? I'll bet she already knows. Or suspects, anyway. We can be hypersensitive and detect subtle verbal clues and facial expressions people aren't even aware they're using. We do that because that's in part what makes good characterization. That's a powerful thing.
People are always telling me I would have made a great psychologist. I'll bet that's true of most writers. That's because you really need to understand people at a gut level to make believable characters.
That also gets a little hairy. You can't just think about all the good things people do, although there is plenty of that around, despite what you hear on the news. Sometimes you have to live inside the head of a killer or rapist or worse, trying to understand how a character like that would think. It can be frightening.
I mean, what if I find out I sort of like it in there? Damn, there I go again.
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