'Makedde 'Mak' Vanderwall has her PhD and has started a new life in Australia with her detective boyfriend, Andy Flynn. To scrape together extra cash to start her first forensic psychology practice, Mak begins working part-time for an infamous Sydney PI. With a knack for investigation and bending the law, she might just have stumbled across her true calling and the career choice that could finally bust up her relationship once and for all.
'Then Mak is hired by a mysterious client to investigate the murder of A-list PA Meaghan Wallace. The police believe it's an open and shut case: a junkie street-kid is guilty. But the case turns out to be a lot more complicated as Mak uncovers a dangerous web of cover-ups, killers for hire, the powerful and debauched rich, and Australia's sleazy underbelly. If the boy didn't kill Meaghan, then who set him up? And how far will they go to keep their guilt a secret?' (Publisher's blurb)
'Mak Vanderwall - beautiful, street-wise daughter of a cop, graduate in forensic psychology, and now PI - is hired by a widowed mother to track down her missing nineteen-year-old son.
Has he come to harm? Or has he run off with a bizarre troupe of shady French cabaret artists sweeping through Australia? Has the dark beauty of the burlesque, the magic, the mind-bending contortion, beguiled him? Or has he been seduced by the mysterious and amoral older woman who has a terrifying starring role in the troupe's modern performances of the Grand Guignol "Theatre of Fear", famous in Paris in the early 1900s?
And what of the rumours of violence and tragedy that have plagued the troupe for the past decade? Is their horrifying past fact or fiction?
Meanwhile, Mak is increasingly obsessed with the powerful Cavanagh family, one of Australia's richest and most ruthless families, whom she believes has got away with murder. And it seems their security advisor Mr White, and his hit man, Luther Hand, may not have forgotten about Mak either ...' (From the publisher's website.)
'This article evaluates rape–revenge narratives in literature, asking how written scenes of rape and revenge depict female bodies without relying on visual representations that replicate evidence-based investigations of the crime. It then examines how authors and readers may seek scriptotherapy through rape–revenge literature, both fiction and memoir. It takes up Elizabeth Grosz's theories of corporeal feminism, feminist criticism on rape–revenge by scholars such as Tara Roeder and criticism on scriptotherapy. Primary texts discussed include novels and memoirs by Barbara Wilson, Y. A. Erskine, Tara Moss, and Alice Sebold. The article positions the rape–revenge narrative through the prism of therapeutic reading and writing, and compares it to the current public responses to sexual assault in Australia. The article determines that rape–revenge narratives in literature are more nuanced than their filmic counterparts. Furthermore, it concludes that memoir can only act therapeutically in a one-on-one sense and has no greater public service to the treatment of rape victims, and is, therefore, no more therapeutic than rape–revenge fantasies.' (Publication abstract)
'This article evaluates rape–revenge narratives in literature, asking how written scenes of rape and revenge depict female bodies without relying on visual representations that replicate evidence-based investigations of the crime. It then examines how authors and readers may seek scriptotherapy through rape–revenge literature, both fiction and memoir. It takes up Elizabeth Grosz's theories of corporeal feminism, feminist criticism on rape–revenge by scholars such as Tara Roeder and criticism on scriptotherapy. Primary texts discussed include novels and memoirs by Barbara Wilson, Y. A. Erskine, Tara Moss, and Alice Sebold. The article positions the rape–revenge narrative through the prism of therapeutic reading and writing, and compares it to the current public responses to sexual assault in Australia. The article determines that rape–revenge narratives in literature are more nuanced than their filmic counterparts. Furthermore, it concludes that memoir can only act therapeutically in a one-on-one sense and has no greater public service to the treatment of rape victims, and is, therefore, no more therapeutic than rape–revenge fantasies.' (Publication abstract)