Chosen for Death - Hardcover

Flora, Kate Clark

3.92

482 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312855982 ISBN 13: 9780312855987

Publisher: Forge, 1994

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A dynamic businesswoman, Thea Kozak is a young widow who has thrown herself into a career to overcome grief at her husband's sudden, senseless death. It's a lonely life, but slowly Thea is coming to terms with her loss and starting to rebuild her world. When Thea's younger sister Carrie is brutally murdered, Thea must once again come to grips with loss... and with a deadly puzzle.
Carrie was always the baby of the family: a beautiful, blond waif living among dark giants. An adopted child, Carrie was surrounded by a loving family - but never felt truly at home. Her dearest friend was big sister Thea, who was always there to "fix things" whenever Carrie's life fell apart. But Thea's love couldn't ease Carrie's loneliness. In her twenties, Carrie became convinced that only by finding her birth parents would she find true peace. Her search for answers brought only death...and Carrie's murder has left Thea with more questions than answers.
The police have no leads and everyone - especially Thea's family - seems willing to accept the murder as one of life's tragedies. But Thea can't let Carrie go unavenged. As she retraces her sister's last months, Thea confronts ugly facts that suggest she didn't know Carrie as well as she thought.

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Review:

Fans of smart, sexy, slightly screwed-up female crime solvers can add a new name to their list of favorite characters: Thea Kozak. When the heroine of Kate Flora's Chosen for Death takes time away from her career as a consultant to private schools to solve the disturbingly brutal murder of her adopted sister, Carrie, her investigation turns up painful truths she's reluctant to face. Still recovering from the emotional desolation of her husband's accidental death and the shock of Carrie's murder, Thea reenacts her sister's search for her birth mother in hopes of finding the killer in the process. Accompanying Thea--and occasionally battling with her--on her journey of discovery is Andre Lemieux, a Down Eastern detective with more than crime solving on his mind. Flora's full-bodied, complex characters bob and weave, and occasionally collide, in an intricately laid plot that explores the sometimes uncomfortable side of intimacy. More than just another well-written detective novel, Chosen for Death is also a thought-provoking study in identity, autonomy, and family dynamics that mystery lovers are certain to enjoy.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Thea Kozak is madder than hell, and you can't blame her. Before she's recovered from her husband's death in a car crash, her adopted sister, Carrie McKusick, is assaulted and killed up in Maine, where she'd gone to search for her birth parents. When Thea doesn't have quick enough answers for Detective Andre Lemieux of the Maine State Police, he provokes her by showing her horrific photos of Carrie's corpse. When she treks up to Carrie's place to clean it out and finds that Carrie had been seeing her brutish high-school boyfriend again, the boyfriend beats her up, douses her with beer, and rams her car into a tree; and when she reports back to her stiff-necked family, they close ranks against her, refusing to believe her story and refusing to authorize her request for Carrie's birth records. So Thea, haunted by a dream in which Carrie asks for vengeance, retraces her sister's steps on her own, runs an obstacle course of self-righteous adoption agency bureaucrats and antisocial social workers, and reaches a revelation every bit as nasty as the clues have predicted. Thea's inexperience, or first novelist Flora's, reduces her dialogue to a stream of tag lines (``I wanted to make love to that inscrutable, fiercely controlled trooper who hid a secret human being inside, and I was scared stiff by my feelings''). But there's enough raw pain--Thea's, Carrie's, even the rabbity birth mother's- -behind the clich‚s to propel this new series to a red-hot start. -- Copyright �1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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