Over the Line

Patricia Cornwell meets Cracker. A crime thriller based on a true-life murder by one of America’s foremost forensic pyschologists. Introducing Dr Portia McTeague – witness to evil.
This first book is about the thin line crossed by a criminal when they step over it to become a monster and can be declared insane. A small, sleepy community in South Carolina is horrified to discover they have a killer in their midst who is murdering and eviscerating elderly women. A drifter, Jimmy Lee Wilder – dubbed Jimmy the weird by the press – has been charged and is judged competent to stand trial by the prison psychiatrist and while his defence lawyer wants to plead insanity, Jimmy will almost certainly gat the death penalty. The Prosecuting Attorney has ambitions to become a US senator and executing a murderer will surely win him more votes. It is up to Portia McTeague, as consultant forensic psychologist attached to the case, to prove Jimmy’s insanity and save him from the electric chair.

"She met Portia's eyes, and in that moment there passed between the two women a silent understanding. For Portia realized all over again what she had seen the first time they'd ever laid eyes on one another ... behind the efficient, almost robotic exterior of Amy Goodsnow, she too was a member of the club--the club whose members understood like no one else could all of the terrible things that can happen to children." That combination of chilling honesty and obvious insider knowledge of the darker areas of human behavior energizes every page of this thriller about forensic psychologist Portia McTeague. Faye Sultan, who has been involved in just such a role in many high-profile murder cases, and her cowriter, novelist Teresa Kennedy, used a notorious double murder in Greensboro, North Carolina, as the basis for their story. It raises a troubling question: just how crazy does a person have to be to keep a jury from sentencing him to death? There's little doubt that a hulking handyman named Jimmy Weir savagely killed two elderly women, but when a hotshot district attorney demands the death penalty, McTeague has to dig so deeply into the depths of Weir's tormented mind that her own hard-won mental equilibrium is seriously challenged.