Exacting Hope: Memoir of a Forgotten Child

He contacts a former student-turned-reporter for help but before the meeting he is viciously murdered. Mark Daniels, his wife Sara, and Don Sanchez are plunged into a wicked web of cover-ups, lethal experiments, and the worst kinds of evil. They must expose the truth or die trying.

From beginning to end, I was on the edge of my seat, wondering how everything was going to turn out. Davis ends the story with enough closure to make this novel stand on its own but, open enough to continue into a series. If that is what he decides, I would be delighted to keep reading. The book is difficult to set aside, and even more difficult to forget. There was no way we could have known this would happen. For the sake of a story I put her life at risk. I just ignored the consequences. I swear Mark; I never imagined this could happen Don looked up, first gazing down at the parking lot, then facing Mark.

We have to do something, now. Now that they have their fingers in the newspaper, they will try to stop the story from being released.

He can still help us, as long as he understands his chain of command has been compromised, he can be our eyes within the PD. Davis Michell Plested and J. Collected Short Fiction Stories is a collection of the author's fictional writing—his Retribution Lanyon For Hire: Wanted A fearless ranch owner must reunite with the rugged outlaw who stole her A Guardian Revealed Ruled by the moon. Caves In The Rain A bereaved father stumbles across evidence of an old murder and tries to His theatrical connections, his library with its absorbing gazetteers and high-shelved "adult" reading, his sense of etiquette and of the unsaid, ally him symbolically with the realm of the imagination.

Richard's English mother, Connie, a showgirl who gave up her career to get married, is treated with no such reverence. Her "cold, rain-sodden" family, in contrast to the cultured and exotic Wollheims, is a void. Her own mother "knew nothing, she read nothing, and she displayed no interest in, nor did she have any understanding of, others".

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Connie is true to family type. At finishing school, aged 18, "she visited her last museum, and did her last reading". She is brilliantly but mordantly characterised by her bookish son. Even the momentary opening of a door at the wrong moment would necessitate repeating the whole process again from the beginning. Wollheim never says that he hated his mother, but the dry, penetrating wit of this portrait, drawn largely in negatives, conveys an almost incredulous irritation.

Mystery/Suspense

The psychological interest of such obsessive-compulsive behaviour is barely explored. Not a single kind thing is said about her. But the account itself is unforgettable. Wollheim makes clear that "everything I have lived through either has been completely forgotten or is as yesterday". Passages of childhood offer themselves to his adult inspection in hallucinatory detail, and with a sense that if something is remembered it is for a reason.

Germs is evidently the work of someone encouraged by long experience of psychoanalysis to read his childhood with special care.

His fear of inundation, by liquid, sound and smell, is traced to a complex of feelings about his body and its defects. Lavatorial functions are charged with magical significance.

There is a remarkable passage on his childhood fantasy of communicating thoughts to his father through their both urinating in the same lavatory without pulling the chain. The day he learned to wipe his own arse, a procedure described in scrupulous detail, is a lasting reference-point: In Wollheim's hands the sentence - often half a page long, full of sinuous purpose and subtle qualification - takes on extraordinary interest as he searches for the precise colour and purport of a childhood memory.

The effect is of intellectual exactness given expression as a work of art. For all the book's rigour it is its poetry - the play of charged imagery, the sense of something impalpable that outlasts analysis - that one most remembers. There is a brilliant section about a fox-terrier called Nobby that he won, and of their walks together in a semi-wild area of sand, gorse and blackberry bush known as the Black Fence, from the tall corrugated-iron fence that closed off the undeveloped tract beyond it.

Nobby's escapes under the fence, and his returns bloodied by adventures the young Richard can only imagine, are occasions for much fear and frenzied prayer.

But it is the unremarkable landscape itself that endures for Wollheim, remembered in every detail, and becoming indeed the pattern for thought in later life, "the involuntary backcloth to much thinking in my mind, particularly of an abstract kind".