A face to face meeting quickly ripened into sexual intimacy.

Twice divorced Flint, Michigan housewife and mother Sharee Miller, 27, met ex cop Jerry Cassaday in an Internet chat room. Morris has created a novel that is at once devastatingly plausible, utterly poignant and impossible to forget. With chilling emotional precision and searing insight, J.

Some webs can never be swept away, some spiders sting to destroy… To bring him safely home, she will be forced to confront her emotional demons through a bewildering landscape, where the phantoms of a menacing past lurk around every corner, wielding memories, determined to wake Ruth up to the most horrifying reality of all. But in the grim, foreboding town of Greenwell, where her brother now lives, fate deals Ruth another blow. Little does she realize the extent of the crippling cobwebs her vicious lover has spun throughout her mind. Ruth found the strength to escape the terrifying abuse of her domestic existence. Matt, whom she loved with a maso*chistic passion that destroyed everything in its path. She couldn t breathe without Matt either. She needs the consolation of her brother, Alex: a man she cannot breathe without. As autumn s shadows begin to seep through her London home, Ruth escapes to the fading twilight of northern England in a last, desperate attempt to stave off the encroaching darkness. All she has known, all she has loved, all she has ever desired, have laid her waste. The Lonely Places Then along came a spider Who sat down beside her… The Lonely Places etches a fiendishly compelling portrait of madness and menace, eroticism and terror, that pits a woman’s mind against a world where nothing is as it seems. Morris savagely plumbs the depths of psychological terror in an uncompromising and brutally brilliant suspense debut.

In the electrifying tradition of Minette Walters and Ruth Rendell, J.

Stitch by Mark Morris