Seduction

Catherine Gildiner

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During her decade in prison, Kate Fitzgerald has learned a few things: absorb yourself in your own world, never make eye contact with your fellow inmates, and the last person you can trust is your prison psychiatrist.

When Kate's psychiatrist, Dr. Gardonne, offers her a temporary leave and a job working for him on her favourite subject, the work of Sigmund Freud, she leaps at the chance. Things become complicated, and quickly, when Kate becomes an unlikely confidant to the director of the Freud academy. who is receiving death threats and attacking Dr. Gardonne's psychoanalytic organization.

Racing to uncover secrets and working with an unwelcome partner, a private detective, Kate is forced to consider that she may have been set up. But by who?

Catherine Gildiner gives readers a gripping detective story full of fast-paced twists--a remarkable intellectual thriller.

Book Details

Publisher: Vintage Books Canada
Publish Date: Nov 29th, 2005
Pages: 496
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 7.95in - 5.20in - 1.34in - 0.90lb
EAN: 9780676976540
Categories: • Thrillers - Psychological• Crime• Psychological

About the Author

In 1999 Catherine Gildiner published her first book, a humorous memoir of her childhood called Too Close to the Falls. The story is told through the eyes of young Cathy McClure (Gildiner) who, at the age of four, is put to work assisting the delivery man who works for her father's pharmacy, in order to curb what the local pediatrician considers her hyperactivity. Gildiner was prompted to write the book after a friend kept bugging her to write down all the crazy stories she had from her childhood -- even though Gildiner thought her upbringing quite ordinary. After writing the first chapter she mailed it away to a publisher, not expecting much to come of her efforts, but it wasn't long before she received an almost unbelievable reply: an advance cheque in the mail, with a Post-it Note saying "finish it." The memoir was published in Canada, the United States, England and Australia to wide acclaim, received award nominations and spent more than 70 weeks on Canadian bestseller lists. "I was surprised and amazed that people would be interested in what I call a happy, normal childhood," Gildiner has commented, "but I've now come to see it's not as normal as I thought."

By then Gildiner had already been working for a few years on the novel that would become Seduction. In fact, Sigmund Freud and Charles Darwin had been inhabiting her mind as characters for more than twenty-five years, ever since she worked on her Ph.D. thesis, which looked at Darwin's influence on the father of psychoanalysis. As Gildiner explains in her note at the start of Seduction, her extensive study of the two men and their theories brought some "inconsistencies" to the surface -- "not in the theories, but in the motivations behind them." From there, Gildiner began to build on and revise their personalities and histories until the two men existed for her as larger-than-life characters, destined -- two decades later -- for the page.

Gildiner was born in 1948 in Lewiston, New York, and came to Canada in 1970. After completing an M.A. and a Ph.D. in psychology, she established her private practice, and has worked as a clinical psychologist for more than twenty-five years. She also writes journalistic pieces for various newspapers and a monthly column for Chatelaine. Gildiner lives in Toronto, Ontario, with her husband and three sons, and is on a masters rowing team that rows competitively worldwide. She is currently working on a sequel to Too Close to the Falls that will cover her life between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five.

Praise for this book

"Very clever . . . definitely a cut above other thrillers."
-NOW (Toronto)

"There are enough twists, turns and identity shifts to keep you guessing... Like a dream, it makes you question what's real and imagined."
--Time

"Seduction is smart and entertaining -- brainy fun for a cold winter's night."
--The Globe and Mail

"Book-review clichés come to mind: "I couldn't put it down," "compulsively readable," etc. Seduction is a fast-paced modern novel filled with snappy dialogue, exotic settings and juicy intellectual plums, somewhat in the manner of The Da Vinci Code."
--Montreal Gazette

"A stylish suspenseful romp through psychoanalytical academia."
--The Bay Street Bull

"Seduction is certainly a romp, and the author's pleasure in writing it comes across, a rare enough literary event. Her devotion to the subject matter is apparent."
-National Post

"A fast-paced intellectual thriller . . . Dr Gildner's insights about the desires that motivate us will keep you hooked."
-Chatelaine

"Seduction introduces crime fiction to literary mystery. . . . An addictive thriller that combines a crash course on Freudian theory with an old-fashioned detective story . . . Seduction is written with the kind of wit and intelligence reminiscent of another page-turner, The Da Vinci Code."
-The Hour (Montreal)

"A psychologically deep novel that combines two ex-cons, Anna Freud, and ambitious archivist and a zany catalogue of characters."
-Elle (Canada)

"A snappy pageturner of a debut."
-Ottawa Citizen

Praise for Too Close to the Falls
"Memorably and skillfully told. . . Anyone who ever was, or has, a child considered different
in some way will enjoy this book."
--The Globe and Mail

"Richly detailed and absorbing, Too Close to the Falls has only one real fault. It ends too soon."
--Toronto Life

"A fascinating childhood is no guarantee of a fascinating memoir. It still takes a gifted writer to translate the past into a work of art, and Gildiner is a gifted writer."
--Toronto Star