New by R. A. SCOTTI

BASILICA
The Splendor and the Scandal
Building St. Peter's

&

SUDDEN SEA
The Great Hurricane of 1938

A Lterary Guild Selection.
“A brooding legal thriller that enthralls the reader until the final word.”—Publishers Weekly
”DON'T MISS IT! A story that could easily have come from today’s headlines offers plot twists that will keep you turning pages and a conclusion that will leave you reeling.”—West Coast Review of Books

Tim and Georgii Hillman are a golden couple living on a peaceable island in New England. Tim is a sculptor—handsome, charming and sought-after. Georgie is a devoted mother to their two children—until one night, she aims a hunting rifle at her sleeping husband’s head and pulls the trigger. Her unique defense: Murder by proxy. She says that she was acting for her 8-year-old daughter who is too young to defend herself against her sexually abusive father. Is Georgie Hillman a desperate mother protecting her child, as she claims? Or a disenchanted, delusional wife, as the prosecution charges?


Read an EXCERPT
I didn’t plot my husband’s death. That is, I didn’t decide that on the eighteenth of June when he had gone to bed and was sleeping soundly, I would clean and load my brother’s hunting rifle, which had been sitting in the garage since November, and empty it into Tim’s brain. But I can’t deny that I had thought about it. It was a goal I set myself, as a golfer strives for a hole in one, a gambler to hit the jackpot, an archer to make a bull’s-eye, a speculator to make a windfall.

I would have preferred my husband to die a natural death. A heart attack. An accident in a car or boat. Something as quick and painless as a bullet to the brain. I’ve had enough of protracted suffering. I would have held his hand and stroked his head. I would have whispered the final words of love and let my tears fall on the sheet that covered him.

If I had my druthers, I would have hugged Sarah and cried with her. Sprinkled rose petals from the garden on his open grave, and then, after a decent period of mourning and grief, I would have reshaped the memory of Timothy Hillman so that it fit neatly into the 8” x 10” sterling silver frame that held the photograph of him skippering the Blithe Spirit in Ossacutta Bay—a man in command. Strong, healthy, smiling. It would be a memory that a family, or what was left of one, could cherish without ambiguity or reservation. I would chip away the encrustations and smooth over the seams that years of marriage had exposed. Then Tim would become once again the American Adonis I had glimpsed across a crowded piazza, a golden boy full of promise, and out life would stretch before us as if everything were still possible, and that is the truth, the whole heart and soul truth, so help me God.

If beggars were choosers, that is the way I would have liked my husband’s life to end. There is something ennobling about premature death. The grief is unfeigned, the murmurs of sympathy real. Tim would have preened at the clichés. “So much to live for.” “So young.” “So talented.” “So tragic.” “A man who had everything.”

But waiting is just short of dying, a poet wrote, and Tim was the picture of health. He was too cautious to have an accident, and grand disasters, like avalanches or tidal waves that sweep some into death. are Acts of God.