Apart at the Seams won third place in the 2024 Daphne DuMaurier Kiss of Death competition for unpublished suspense. With international intrigue, it is set in San Francisco, London, and Antwerp. The book is near completion. It will appeal to lovers of Riley Sager’s Survive the Night and Lisa Jewell’s None of This is true.
Synopsis
Either Violet’s paranoia is back or someone is hunting her.
After struggling with schizophrenia half her twenty-eight years, PhD student Violet suddenly wins the validation of a neuroscience award. Of course, she’s thrilled—there’s just one problem. The ceremony is 6,000 miles away in London, and she just started new antipsychotic medication.
To steady herself and buy some confidence, she blows her savings on a glittering dress from a thrift shop, preening for her sister’s camera. But when the snapshot winds up on social media, the psychopath hunting the dress’s concealed riches begins stalking her.
Violet is halfway to Heathrow Airport when she can’t find her carefully packed medication. Within a day, she experiences her first hallucination in years. Then she begins to suspect she’s being followed, a sensation eerily similar to her old paranoia. Until it becomes starkly real…