Fortune's Sweet Kiss

Vincent Wolfe is a homicide detective with the Toronto police. Lately he's been unable to close his cases. He keeps seeing homicides where his partner sees suicides. To Vince, the crime scenes seem staged to make it look like a victim has taken his own life. But Vince is a troubled man. The recent death of his father is forcing him to confront memories of his abusive childhood and the long-suppressed memory of the accidental death of his older brother. It's clear to Vince's partner and his lieutenant that Vince is becoming unstable, and when he starts to assert that obvious suicide scenes are linked to a perpetrator who may be staging them, the department assigns him involuntarily to Dr. Denude, the in-house psychiatrist. Cassandra Wells is a woman in her twenties who is similarly haunted by memories of her father's abuse and his ultimate suicide. When a man she has invited to her apartment becomes the next death in a strange pattern of ostensible suicides, she is traumatized again. And worse, she is the only living witness. In gaining Cassie's trust, Vince reveals his background to her, and the two of them discover that not only do they share a traumatic history of paternal abuse, they share it with a third party -- a "suicide killer." And all of their lives are at stake when the killer decides that Cassie has betrayed him. FORTUNE'S SWEET KISS is a relentlessly paced psychological thriller -- at turns comic, sensitive, sensual, and tragic -- that explores and ultimately conquers the dark memories that rule the lives of childhood victims of physical abuse. —Lisa Klein