Tor Books is set to release Rhodi Hawk’s debut novel, A Twisted Ladder, as a mass market paperback at the end of this month.
Description: Psychologist Madeleine LeBlanc has spent her whole career trying to determine the cause of her father’s schizophrenia. She always felt that she could unravel its origins and cure the man who left her and her brother, Marc, to practically raise themselves on the Louisiana Bayou. But when Marc takes his own life on a fishing boat in the middle of Bayou Black, Madeleine embarks on a journey into her family history – to a time when the antebellum era was crumbling, and the line between servant and master was starting to fade. And the more she pries the more she reveals her family’s dark past, rife with conjured demons and river magic gone awry. Madeleine’s only hope to save herself is to face the ghosts of the past, the dangers of the present, and the twisted ladder that links them all together.
“It’s a Southern Gothic thriller that follows two threads, one that runs from 1912-1927 on a homestead along the Mississippi River, and one set in modern day,” says Hawk. “The story centers around a New Orleans psychologist, Madeleine LeBlanc , whose father is schizophrenic and whose brother has just committed suicide. But, she’s starting to uncover signs that there may be something more to the recurrence of mental illness in her family, something that leads her down a path into the darkest, most extraordinary reaches of the human psyche.”
Dark Scribe has a nice online interview with her here: Rhodi Hawk
