Chloe Hooper

JILTED! It was a humiliation no bride should bear, but Dr. Virginia Waters had survived it. Now she anxiously awaited her wedding to Zack Bullock, brother of her former fiance. But could this renowned and rugged Mountie make her forget her girlhood crush--and find her womanhood in his arms? Inspector Zach Bullock vowed to do the honorable thing and take Virginia Waters to wife. Marrying his brother's cast-off bride would neatly serve family obligations with no emotional upheaval for anyone. But the gangly girl he remembered from childhood had blossomed into a stunning, exemplary woman, one he desired more than anything--and a looming danger threatened to keep them apart forever!

Kate Byrne is having an affair with the father of her most gifted pupil, Lucien. Unnervingly, her lover's wife has just published Murder at Black Swan Point, a true crime novel about the brutal slaying of a young adulteress. When Lucien displays violent imagery in his crayon sketches, Kate wonders how well her pupil understands his mother's grisly work, and why he's exposed to it. Suspecting the adult account of Black Swan Point's murder to be wrong, Kate imagines her own version of the novel, for children, narrated by Australian animals. But has her obsession with the crime aligned her fate with that of the murdered adulteress? Chloe Hooper brilliantly portrays a young woman reluctant to enter or conform to the world of adults. Kate Byrne is compelled by the lives of her nine-year-old students, a misfit among their parents. And though Lucien's father brings her to life sexually in scenes of escalating eroticism, he does nothing to penetrate her obsession with the past. Kate is fixated on the crime of passion that occurred years earlier, less and less aware of her own reputation in the present. In a small town near Port Arthur in Tasmania in the mid-nineties, Kate Byrne is having an affair with the father of her most gifted student. Kate becomes fixated on the unsolved crime of passion that occurred years earlier, less and less aware of her own reputation in the present. Is it her imagination, or is someone stalking her?