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Seduction
During her decade in prison, Kate Fitzgerald has learned a few 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.
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.
496 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2005
17 people are currently reading
338 people want to read
About the author
Catherine Gildiner
11 books688 followersCatherine has written two best selling memoirs. The first is called TOO CLOSE TO THE FALLS and was on the best seller's lists for two years. It is about working full time from the age of four.
Her next memoir AFTER THE FALLS covers her teenage and college years where she got involved in civil rights and was investigated by the FBI.
COMING ASHORE, her final memoir is coming out this fall. It is about her years at Oxford, The U.S. and finally Canada. This book shares the joy of those few years in your twenties after you leave home and before Adult responsibilities crowd in.
She has also written a novel, SEDUCTION, a thriller about Darwin and Freud. It was chosen by DER SPIEGAL as one of the ten best mysteries.
She is a unique writer in that she was a psychologist for many years and only became a writer at the age of 50. Shows anything is possible.
She lives in Toronto with her husband and has three grown sons.
Her next memoir AFTER THE FALLS covers her teenage and college years where she got involved in civil rights and was investigated by the FBI.
COMING ASHORE, her final memoir is coming out this fall. It is about her years at Oxford, The U.S. and finally Canada. This book shares the joy of those few years in your twenties after you leave home and before Adult responsibilities crowd in.
She has also written a novel, SEDUCTION, a thriller about Darwin and Freud. It was chosen by DER SPIEGAL as one of the ten best mysteries.
She is a unique writer in that she was a psychologist for many years and only became a writer at the age of 50. Shows anything is possible.
She lives in Toronto with her husband and has three grown sons.
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August 5, 2016Fun book about Freud and Darwin that I might have enjoyed more if I hadn't met the author and she hadn't flirted with my then husband.
November 7, 2018
A novel that's marked by a number of very visible failings but that I nonetheless enjoyed a very great deal.
It's the very early 1980s. Kate Fitzgerald, having served nine years to date for murdering her husband, is granted a TA (temporary absence) by the prison psychiatrist, Dr. Garbonne, on condition she work on behalf of a major international Freudian society to investigate the behavior of its high-profile playboy chairman, Anders Konzak, who's threatening to reveal bombshell information that would destroy Freud's reputation, and the school of psychoanalysis as a whole. Since Kate has spent her years in solitary confinement studying Freud and Darwin, she'd seem ideally qualified for the job . . . except that Garbonne insists she work with an ex-con PI, Jack Lawton, and teamwork has never been Kate's forte.
Soon there's a murder, and Kate is the obvious suspect. Then there's another: likewise. She's convinced this is all part of some elaborate plan to pin the crimes on her, since it'd be easy enough to slam her back in the slammer and throw away the key. ("Slam her back in the slammer." I've picked up the habit from reading the book. Gildiner uses this form of quasi-repetition a lot as a literary device. Most of the time I wallowed happily in it; occasionally it irritated me.) She doesn't know if she can trust Jackie Lawton -- perhaps he's part of the plot? She knows for certain, after nine years of being fruitlessly analyzed by him in the Big House, that she can't trust Garbonne.
Prickly, paranoid, highly intelligent, at a guess borderline autistic, Kate is a hard person for the world to like, although some have no difficulties. For example, she gets on like a house on fire with Anna Freud, Sigmund's youngest daughter, who nursed her father through his final years, now nurses his reputation and legacy, and herself did hugely important, groundbreaking work, especially in the field of child psychiatry. (By the time of her death in 1982 she was being tipped as a possible Nobel laureate.) Others to whom Kate warms and who warm to Kate are Bozo, a maverick, wildly eccentric Freudian researcher whose ideas Konzak has been plagiarizing, and Shawna, Bozo's flaky, hash-brownie-guzzling, jewelry-artist housemate.
You have here all the ingredients for an intellectual murder mystery rooted in scientific history, but I'm reluctant to offer that as a description for Seduction. (The title refers to Freud's abandoned seduction theory, whereby he postulated that female hysteria was a product of women having been seduced incestuously in childhood by their fathers.) Yes, there's a murder mystery -- and one with a very unexpected, thoroughly satisfying solution -- but it seems to me Gildiner is merely using this as a framework upon which to hang lots of fun speculation about what might really have gone on during the early years of psychoanalysis, whatever the orthodox history books now say. She offers us a very plausible alternative suggestion as to the identity of the celebrated psychoanalytical subject Anna O., generally supposed to have been the social pioneer Bertha Pappenheim. And, most fascinating of all at least so far as this reader's concerned, she offers us an alternative explanation of the origins of psychoanalysis itself, both the theory as a whole and most of its intellectual pillars. Throw in lots of other merry speculations about the history of this particular science (or, really, as it's now generally acknowledged, pseudoscience) and . . . yes, it's pretty obvious why this novel appealed so much to me.
(The comparison, in a couple of review extracts cited on the cover, to Dan Brown's oeuvre is just plain daft. Gildiner should sue.)
Yet, as noted, Seduction has some pretty obvious flaws. There are various anachronisms, the most obvious being the use of a cellphone in 1982. Clearly someone pointed out this particular howler to Gildiner because there's the most abjectly hamfisted attempt to pass it off as not really a howler at all, with Kate complaining bitterly that she has to use an extra-large purse to carry the thing, etc. In fact, the first publicly available cellphone didn't become available until the following year, 1983; I encountered a prototype around that time or perhaps even into the tail end of 1982, but Kate would have been more right than she knew to complain about the cumbersomeness: the thing was about two-thirds the size of a car battery and of comparable, albeit somewhat lesser, weight. It also didn't come fitted with an autodialer (which Kate wonders if she'll "remember" how to use). I'm not sure why Gildiner didn't simply write the cellphone out of the plot; it'd not have been hard.
I spotted several further anachronisms; I'm sure there were others I didn't catch.
I've mentioned (parenthetically above) the habit of repeating words for effect, not always pleasingly. There's also an odd and disorienting use of tenses, with most of the text being written as per standard in the past tense but, every now and then, a sentence or two in present tense. I came to the conclusion those sentences were intended as Kate's thoughts, perhaps initially designed to be set in italics. But in a couple of cases that explanation didn't seem to work. Whatever the truth, those intertensual lurchings surely disrupted the flow of my reading.
Did I mention the truly dimwitted passage on page 328 where Kate tries to equate Freud's psychoanalysis with Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection? Kate's argument borrows from the playbook of creationists like Ken Ham: you weren't there millions of years ago to see what things were like, evolution isn't experimentally falsifiable, and it and psychoanalysis are both "still theories" . . . revealing, it'd seem, that Gildiner, despite being a practicing psychiatrist, doesn't know what a scientific theory is.
There are also odd changes of tone. Again, I rather liked these, but they did weaken the integrity of the novel as a whole. For example, while most of the novel is told fairly straight -- although leavened with Kate's excellent one-liners and snarky observations -- the section involving Bozo and Shawna, during which Kate unwittingly consumes some of the latter's hash brownies, opts instead for a sort of happy, surreality-tinged wackiness, as if someone had stuck a bit of John Philip Sousa into the middle of a Beethoven symphony.
Suspicion is a novel for which the word "quirky" could have been invented: it's a one-of-a-kind. I found it thoroughly engrossing and a very rewarding read. Alas, it seems to be Gildiner's sole foray into fiction.
It's the very early 1980s. Kate Fitzgerald, having served nine years to date for murdering her husband, is granted a TA (temporary absence) by the prison psychiatrist, Dr. Garbonne, on condition she work on behalf of a major international Freudian society to investigate the behavior of its high-profile playboy chairman, Anders Konzak, who's threatening to reveal bombshell information that would destroy Freud's reputation, and the school of psychoanalysis as a whole. Since Kate has spent her years in solitary confinement studying Freud and Darwin, she'd seem ideally qualified for the job . . . except that Garbonne insists she work with an ex-con PI, Jack Lawton, and teamwork has never been Kate's forte.
Soon there's a murder, and Kate is the obvious suspect. Then there's another: likewise. She's convinced this is all part of some elaborate plan to pin the crimes on her, since it'd be easy enough to slam her back in the slammer and throw away the key. ("Slam her back in the slammer." I've picked up the habit from reading the book. Gildiner uses this form of quasi-repetition a lot as a literary device. Most of the time I wallowed happily in it; occasionally it irritated me.) She doesn't know if she can trust Jackie Lawton -- perhaps he's part of the plot? She knows for certain, after nine years of being fruitlessly analyzed by him in the Big House, that she can't trust Garbonne.
Prickly, paranoid, highly intelligent, at a guess borderline autistic, Kate is a hard person for the world to like, although some have no difficulties. For example, she gets on like a house on fire with Anna Freud, Sigmund's youngest daughter, who nursed her father through his final years, now nurses his reputation and legacy, and herself did hugely important, groundbreaking work, especially in the field of child psychiatry. (By the time of her death in 1982 she was being tipped as a possible Nobel laureate.) Others to whom Kate warms and who warm to Kate are Bozo, a maverick, wildly eccentric Freudian researcher whose ideas Konzak has been plagiarizing, and Shawna, Bozo's flaky, hash-brownie-guzzling, jewelry-artist housemate.
You have here all the ingredients for an intellectual murder mystery rooted in scientific history, but I'm reluctant to offer that as a description for Seduction. (The title refers to Freud's abandoned seduction theory, whereby he postulated that female hysteria was a product of women having been seduced incestuously in childhood by their fathers.) Yes, there's a murder mystery -- and one with a very unexpected, thoroughly satisfying solution -- but it seems to me Gildiner is merely using this as a framework upon which to hang lots of fun speculation about what might really have gone on during the early years of psychoanalysis, whatever the orthodox history books now say. She offers us a very plausible alternative suggestion as to the identity of the celebrated psychoanalytical subject Anna O., generally supposed to have been the social pioneer Bertha Pappenheim. And, most fascinating of all at least so far as this reader's concerned, she offers us an alternative explanation of the origins of psychoanalysis itself, both the theory as a whole and most of its intellectual pillars. Throw in lots of other merry speculations about the history of this particular science (or, really, as it's now generally acknowledged, pseudoscience) and . . . yes, it's pretty obvious why this novel appealed so much to me.
(The comparison, in a couple of review extracts cited on the cover, to Dan Brown's oeuvre is just plain daft. Gildiner should sue.)
Yet, as noted, Seduction has some pretty obvious flaws. There are various anachronisms, the most obvious being the use of a cellphone in 1982. Clearly someone pointed out this particular howler to Gildiner because there's the most abjectly hamfisted attempt to pass it off as not really a howler at all, with Kate complaining bitterly that she has to use an extra-large purse to carry the thing, etc. In fact, the first publicly available cellphone didn't become available until the following year, 1983; I encountered a prototype around that time or perhaps even into the tail end of 1982, but Kate would have been more right than she knew to complain about the cumbersomeness: the thing was about two-thirds the size of a car battery and of comparable, albeit somewhat lesser, weight. It also didn't come fitted with an autodialer (which Kate wonders if she'll "remember" how to use). I'm not sure why Gildiner didn't simply write the cellphone out of the plot; it'd not have been hard.
I spotted several further anachronisms; I'm sure there were others I didn't catch.
I've mentioned (parenthetically above) the habit of repeating words for effect, not always pleasingly. There's also an odd and disorienting use of tenses, with most of the text being written as per standard in the past tense but, every now and then, a sentence or two in present tense. I came to the conclusion those sentences were intended as Kate's thoughts, perhaps initially designed to be set in italics. But in a couple of cases that explanation didn't seem to work. Whatever the truth, those intertensual lurchings surely disrupted the flow of my reading.
Did I mention the truly dimwitted passage on page 328 where Kate tries to equate Freud's psychoanalysis with Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection? Kate's argument borrows from the playbook of creationists like Ken Ham: you weren't there millions of years ago to see what things were like, evolution isn't experimentally falsifiable, and it and psychoanalysis are both "still theories" . . . revealing, it'd seem, that Gildiner, despite being a practicing psychiatrist, doesn't know what a scientific theory is.
There are also odd changes of tone. Again, I rather liked these, but they did weaken the integrity of the novel as a whole. For example, while most of the novel is told fairly straight -- although leavened with Kate's excellent one-liners and snarky observations -- the section involving Bozo and Shawna, during which Kate unwittingly consumes some of the latter's hash brownies, opts instead for a sort of happy, surreality-tinged wackiness, as if someone had stuck a bit of John Philip Sousa into the middle of a Beethoven symphony.
Suspicion is a novel for which the word "quirky" could have been invented: it's a one-of-a-kind. I found it thoroughly engrossing and a very rewarding read. Alas, it seems to be Gildiner's sole foray into fiction.
July 28, 2020
This book has themes that reflect on the author's 1983 York University Psychology PhD thesis on the relationship between Freud's and Darwin's ideas and scientific theories. However in many ways it is a conventional murder mystery. The narrator is a character with some similarities with the author especially her interest in Freud and Darwin, but also with the sort of fanciful differences one might expect of the hero of a murder mystery. The narrator is a woman convicted of killing her husband, who has mastered Freud while serving a long sentence. The setting is 1983 right when the author had finished her own PhD and the narrator is from Toronto and a fair chunk of the action occurs there. There is also a hard boiled ex-con male detective she is teamed up with to investigate an expert on Freud who is promising to reveal things about Freud that will rock the psychoanalytic establishment to its core. The investigation spirals into the requisite murder and mayhem.
The tale is in many ways very conventional and by the numbers detective story, but as mentioned with the twist that it is about both the history of psychoanalysis and that the characters and their motives are constantly being framed in psychoanalytic terms. The characters are often a bit stock, but the two leads are well drawn. As someone with a Phd in the history of science (even if in much different subjects) I recognized many of the intellectual themes and peculiarities of academic life referenced and enjoyed the exercise of transforming the matter of a doctoral dissertation into this intriguing literary exercise.
The sin of presentism (the historical fallacy of judging the past by present lights) is alluded to a few times in the novel. Presentism is a sin for a history, but less so for a novel. Still I could not help but notice when the narrator is baffled by the power suits of women of the early 80s, still makes breezy references to Star Wars and Fawlty Towers (phenomenon that appeared while the narrator was in prison). Likewise I felt that some of the intellectual and social themes that came up (from homosexuality to the Milgram experiments) might be framed more as they were seen in 2005 rather than 1983. In terms of plot holes I could not help but notice that the narrator travels the world despite not having stopped to renew her passport after ten years in jail and the difficulty of someone still serving time gaining legal entry to any other country. The most fanciful thing to me was that anyone thought that an attack on Freud as a charlatan would have as much heft as then story imagines, given how often he was already attacked on such a basis by the 1980s. The narrator of the story is officially positive about Freud, but so many criticisms of Freud and classic analysis are included, often given by the narrator, that the support is actually equivocal at best.
The story contains much deliberate apocryphal stuff about Freud and Psychoanalysis often very fanciful stuff indeed. Yet I think it gives an interesting taste of some of the ideas around the study of psychiatry and the study of historical science. There is even a little Karl Popper, falsificationism and the philosophy of science thrown in.
The tale is in many ways very conventional and by the numbers detective story, but as mentioned with the twist that it is about both the history of psychoanalysis and that the characters and their motives are constantly being framed in psychoanalytic terms. The characters are often a bit stock, but the two leads are well drawn. As someone with a Phd in the history of science (even if in much different subjects) I recognized many of the intellectual themes and peculiarities of academic life referenced and enjoyed the exercise of transforming the matter of a doctoral dissertation into this intriguing literary exercise.
The sin of presentism (the historical fallacy of judging the past by present lights) is alluded to a few times in the novel. Presentism is a sin for a history, but less so for a novel. Still I could not help but notice when the narrator is baffled by the power suits of women of the early 80s, still makes breezy references to Star Wars and Fawlty Towers (phenomenon that appeared while the narrator was in prison). Likewise I felt that some of the intellectual and social themes that came up (from homosexuality to the Milgram experiments) might be framed more as they were seen in 2005 rather than 1983. In terms of plot holes I could not help but notice that the narrator travels the world despite not having stopped to renew her passport after ten years in jail and the difficulty of someone still serving time gaining legal entry to any other country. The most fanciful thing to me was that anyone thought that an attack on Freud as a charlatan would have as much heft as then story imagines, given how often he was already attacked on such a basis by the 1980s. The narrator of the story is officially positive about Freud, but so many criticisms of Freud and classic analysis are included, often given by the narrator, that the support is actually equivocal at best.
The story contains much deliberate apocryphal stuff about Freud and Psychoanalysis often very fanciful stuff indeed. Yet I think it gives an interesting taste of some of the ideas around the study of psychiatry and the study of historical science. There is even a little Karl Popper, falsificationism and the philosophy of science thrown in.
July 24, 2025
An interesting whodunnit about the circle of people surrounding Freud and Darwin and the coverups people will do to preserve the images of their heroes.
Kate Fitzgerald kills her husband and ends up in prison and frequently in solitary as she is one of those characters who causes trouble for herself. While there, she reads a lot of Freud and Darwin (as has the author) and manages to be let out to do a detective job for her sketchy psychiatrist to identify who is threatening Freud’s image. She gets partnered with an ex-con with a mysteriously huge group of people working for him (no wonder why he needs the perdiem) who do all sorts of protection work worldwide and research as well. Meanwhile he and Kate wander around asking people questions and not sharing what they find out with each other. They feel attraction but Jackie holds back and threatens to fly into a rage if they get cozy because of something in his past which of course he won’t share.
All of this “people not talking to each other” is put down to no one being sure who the guilty party is as bodies start to pile up here and there. The sketchy psychiatrist funds international travel and 4 star hotels for weeks while they stumble around, looking at old documents and revealing everyone. This is never adequately explained.
Kate, whose family disowned her after the murder, somehow owns a large condo in New York with all mod cons, as they say. It’s maintained during her prison time with some sort of fund. Maybe her parents are dead? I’ve forgotten how this is explained. The “Friends” conundrum?
The author obviously knows a great deal about Freud and Darwin and that makes the book interesting, though the premise doesn’t seem to hang together when described. Because it’s fiction, I wonder how much of the historical relationships are true…
There are hidden Nazis, revealed homosexuals, people somehow surviving on nothing and incredible wealth. A lot of dust on old manuscripts. Lots of guilt.
And flowers and china. Lots of Wedgewood china. Because of course Kate knows all about it despite years as a student followed by years in jail.
Still, Gildiner writes well, and one does get pulled along. This book was sorely in need of an editor, however- much of the talk about the big F and D could have been shorter, and it is SO frustrating to have a book where people go around alternately keeping secrets too long and spilling their entire histories from birth.
Kate Fitzgerald kills her husband and ends up in prison and frequently in solitary as she is one of those characters who causes trouble for herself. While there, she reads a lot of Freud and Darwin (as has the author) and manages to be let out to do a detective job for her sketchy psychiatrist to identify who is threatening Freud’s image. She gets partnered with an ex-con with a mysteriously huge group of people working for him (no wonder why he needs the perdiem) who do all sorts of protection work worldwide and research as well. Meanwhile he and Kate wander around asking people questions and not sharing what they find out with each other. They feel attraction but Jackie holds back and threatens to fly into a rage if they get cozy because of something in his past which of course he won’t share.
All of this “people not talking to each other” is put down to no one being sure who the guilty party is as bodies start to pile up here and there. The sketchy psychiatrist funds international travel and 4 star hotels for weeks while they stumble around, looking at old documents and revealing everyone. This is never adequately explained.
Kate, whose family disowned her after the murder, somehow owns a large condo in New York with all mod cons, as they say. It’s maintained during her prison time with some sort of fund. Maybe her parents are dead? I’ve forgotten how this is explained. The “Friends” conundrum?
The author obviously knows a great deal about Freud and Darwin and that makes the book interesting, though the premise doesn’t seem to hang together when described. Because it’s fiction, I wonder how much of the historical relationships are true…
There are hidden Nazis, revealed homosexuals, people somehow surviving on nothing and incredible wealth. A lot of dust on old manuscripts. Lots of guilt.
And flowers and china. Lots of Wedgewood china. Because of course Kate knows all about it despite years as a student followed by years in jail.
Still, Gildiner writes well, and one does get pulled along. This book was sorely in need of an editor, however- much of the talk about the big F and D could have been shorter, and it is SO frustrating to have a book where people go around alternately keeping secrets too long and spilling their entire histories from birth.
June 27, 2022
Прелъстяване - Катрин Гилдинър
Страхотна книга ! Не с 5,а с 10 звезди бих я оценил. Страхотно съчетание между трилър , развиващ се в повече от една държава ,криминале наподобяващо тези на Агата Кристи с многото потенциални заподозрени и с неочаквания убиец, разкрит след внимателен прочит на дребните детайли. А самият факт,че се прокрадват и интересните теории,свързани с психоанализата и връзката,която се прави между Фройд и Дарвин,прави тази творба особено добра.
А цялата драма е за това,че директорът на Академия "Фройд" във Виена излиза със сензационни разкрития ,че "бащата на психоанализата" Зигмунд Фройд е измамник ! Със задачата да разкрият какво точно крие въпросния директор,биват натоварени Джаки (бивш затворник и агент на ЦРУ ) и Кейт (настояща затворничка,убила съпруга си ,защото бил алкохолик и прекарала време��о си докато излежава присъдата си четейки материали на Фройд и дори изнасяла лекции ,под въоръжена охрана, разбира се ). Те,разбира се,са крайно противоположни като личности,не могат да работят в екип ,но нямат избор иначе може и да не оцелеят,защото всеки човек,с когото се среща Кейт,умира...А някой дебне самата нея ,колкото по-навътре влиза в материята .
И извод от самата книга - "Всеки крие нещо. "
Страхотна книга ! Не с 5,а с 10 звезди бих я оценил. Страхотно съчетание между трилър , развиващ се в повече от една държава ,криминале наподобяващо тези на Агата Кристи с многото потенциални заподозрени и с неочаквания убиец, разкрит след внимателен прочит на дребните детайли. А самият факт,че се прокрадват и интересните теории,свързани с психоанализата и връзката,която се прави между Фройд и Дарвин,прави тази творба особено добра.
А цялата драма е за това,че директорът на Академия "Фройд" във Виена излиза със сензационни разкрития ,че "бащата на психоанализата" Зигмунд Фройд е измамник ! Със задачата да разкрият какво точно крие въпросния директор,биват натоварени Джаки (бивш затворник и агент на ЦРУ ) и Кейт (настояща затворничка,убила съпруга си ,защото бил алкохолик и прекарала време��о си докато излежава присъдата си четейки материали на Фройд и дори изнасяла лекции ,под въоръжена охрана, разбира се ). Те,разбира се,са крайно противоположни като личности,не могат да работят в екип ,но нямат избор иначе може и да не оцелеят,защото всеки човек,с когото се среща Кейт,умира...А някой дебне самата нея ,колкото по-навътре влиза в материята .
И извод от самата книга - "Всеки крие нещо. "
April 15, 2008
Kate Fitzgerald is a rather unique individual. She is on a temporary release from prison where she was serving time for killing her husband. Why did Kate kill her husband? Was she abused? Did she come from a poverty stricken background? Was she uneducated with no real life skills?
No, in fact, Kate isn't even sure why she killed her husband. Her search for answers to this exact question led to extensive self analysis and eventual fixation on the work of Freud. In turn, her passionate study of Freud led to a temporary release from prison to do research on the subject.
Beyond the bizarre life of Kate Fitzgerald, my favorite part of this book was Kate herself. This is an extremely strong, intelligent, driven woman full of wit and a flaw filled realistic nature.
No, in fact, Kate isn't even sure why she killed her husband. Her search for answers to this exact question led to extensive self analysis and eventual fixation on the work of Freud. In turn, her passionate study of Freud led to a temporary release from prison to do research on the subject.
Beyond the bizarre life of Kate Fitzgerald, my favorite part of this book was Kate herself. This is an extremely strong, intelligent, driven woman full of wit and a flaw filled realistic nature.
October 20, 2016
Gildiner is a very good writer. I read her previous book of memoire and enjoyed it. This work of fiction is also well-written. I like the idea of setting it in the real world of Freud and Darwin. This is what kept me interested to the end. I found the final murder solution (no spoilers) to be just a bit too fantastic to be believable.
December 16, 2008
After really liking Gildiner's memoir "Too Close to the Falls," I was disappointed by this overly long mystery that didn't really hang together. By the end, I didn't really care whodunnit. The Freudian theory and history was interesting, but didn't really make it a worthwhile read.
July 19, 2008
Wonderful fun book; murder mystery with Darwin and Freud at the center!
November 27, 2018
Second time that I have read this book and I still like it. The characters are strong and vivid.
September 14, 2024
Hard to evaluate this book. Is it a 3? A 5? A very clever story with a ton of information about Freud in the mix, of which the author is an avowed expert. This story moves along swiftly and is quite compelling, to the point where it becomes hard at points to be sure who are real people and which are invented. The two main protagonists are themselves seriously flawed people (or victims of mistreatment by their fathers, how Freudian), and this adds to the story, or distracts, depending on your point of view. To me it’s excessive. It also provides a platform for Gildiner to show off her expertise.
She is clever in the way she depicts her flawed characters, a mix of irony and absurdity, particularly the main character narrated in the First Person, evidently Gildiner herself. You wonder if she is actually describing herself, and her thesis of Freud’s ‘discoveries’. At times, especially in the first hundred pages, her clever and cynical similes and metaphors become excessive and annoying.
She is clever in the way she depicts her flawed characters, a mix of irony and absurdity, particularly the main character narrated in the First Person, evidently Gildiner herself. You wonder if she is actually describing herself, and her thesis of Freud’s ‘discoveries’. At times, especially in the first hundred pages, her clever and cynical similes and metaphors become excessive and annoying.
April 6, 2021
3.5 As a murder mystery, not bad, full of repartee and red herrings. But the bit about Freud , my overwhelming feeling was, “ who cares” except for the people directly involved in his life. Lots of psychological history of the theories of Freud and Darwin, and I do mean lots, some definite plot holes, but overall a good read.
April 14, 2025
A hint of excitement and intellectually balanced read!
Most definitely above anything I have read...the impact of nurture or lack of and the shaping of the mind by experience...A beautifully balanced thriller!
Most definitely above anything I have read...the impact of nurture or lack of and the shaping of the mind by experience...A beautifully balanced thriller!
December 7, 2017
I found it really slow going in the beginning but it got more interesting and moved faster in the 2nd half. I put this down several times but glad I persevered and finished it.
February 7, 2019
Tedious, pretentious, and about 250 pages too long.
December 10, 2020
"anyone can look serene if she makes her world small enough that she can control all of it" .
May 31, 2021
very interesting
July 24, 2021
Can't wait for the next book!!!
February 18, 2025
If you like a complicated murder mystery filled with Freudian psychobabble, this book is for you.
May 1, 2023
This book is such a ride! And the trippy Freud discussion on the rooftop patio at the Bam Boo is icing on the cake! Funny, gripping, and my gosh our heroine Kate is endlessly fascinating. I hope this is the start of a series. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
March 9, 2017
2.5 ** really, and minus another one unless you have more than just a passing knowledge of Freud and the development of psychoanalysis. As a mystery story it repeatedly commits the crime of hiding the clues from the reader until the detectives' reveal. Characters are cardboard, though some of the minor characters are quite amusing as satire. I also disliked that the author offered no credit/comment for a variety of the ideas she used e.g. Jeffery Masson, author of The Assault on Truth who is the model for a character murdered early and insulted often as a womanizing mental lightweight.
April 25, 2014
What started as an interesting book quickly eroded into pretentious meandering drivel. Where to start?
If you're with a man in a car, he grabs your arm, and jerks you so you cut your head on the roof of the car, also giving you a black eye, would you find yourself in a restaurant with him 2 hours later, cracking wise? Let alone be romantically intrigued by him?
The Montreal Gazette on the cover claims the book has "snappy dialogue". No, it does not. Characters talk about Freudian theory for lengthy passages of the text in the most pedantic and condescending way. And I say that as someone who actually likes Freudian theory. Additionally, weird verbal patterns repeat, making dialogue tortuous. One chunk featured multiple sentences starting, "I mean" which irritated to no end.
Or how about a first person narrator who has solved the murder, but won't tell her fellow characters, or the reader?
What pretends to be smart is actually quite dumb. The hero finds a letter that explains so much. Two paragraphs in, I get the point. The letter goes on for several pages.
The tone of the book goes from dry to screwball without warning. Characters named Bozo and The Wizard come out of nowhere. While I welcomed the change of pace (I was getting bored) it was a left turn out of nowhere.
The resolution is embarrassingly unsatisfying and wraps up so neatly it made me furious. The peril the hero faces simply disappears.
I managed to finish the book, which I guess says something. More than once I almost stopped. But, honestly, I wanted to know where the book was going. Not so much because I was compelled by the plot. I just wanted to know what the heck the point of this whole thing was.
Yes, I did not like this book.
If you're with a man in a car, he grabs your arm, and jerks you so you cut your head on the roof of the car, also giving you a black eye, would you find yourself in a restaurant with him 2 hours later, cracking wise? Let alone be romantically intrigued by him?
The Montreal Gazette on the cover claims the book has "snappy dialogue". No, it does not. Characters talk about Freudian theory for lengthy passages of the text in the most pedantic and condescending way. And I say that as someone who actually likes Freudian theory. Additionally, weird verbal patterns repeat, making dialogue tortuous. One chunk featured multiple sentences starting, "I mean" which irritated to no end.
Or how about a first person narrator who has solved the murder, but won't tell her fellow characters, or the reader?
What pretends to be smart is actually quite dumb. The hero finds a letter that explains so much. Two paragraphs in, I get the point. The letter goes on for several pages.
The tone of the book goes from dry to screwball without warning. Characters named Bozo and The Wizard come out of nowhere. While I welcomed the change of pace (I was getting bored) it was a left turn out of nowhere.
The resolution is embarrassingly unsatisfying and wraps up so neatly it made me furious. The peril the hero faces simply disappears.
I managed to finish the book, which I guess says something. More than once I almost stopped. But, honestly, I wanted to know where the book was going. Not so much because I was compelled by the plot. I just wanted to know what the heck the point of this whole thing was.
Yes, I did not like this book.
September 19, 2023
You for sure have to give this book a chance because the plot line may seem confusing if you don't have at least a little bit of knowledge on Freud and his theories. Unlike some of the reviewers, I really enjoyed the book because of the possible thesis it provided. Of course I won't take this book as the truth but it gives you something to think about. I loved the main character because of how flawed she was. Not to mention that the sexual tension between her and her sexy partner didn't get in the way of her solving the mystery. The romance was there but it wasn't the highlight of the story and I preferred that the author chose to explore the characters and psychoanalyze them (especially since this book is about Freud and psychoanalysis).
August 27, 2012
I just couldn't swallow the set-up (convicted murderer jetsetting around the globe with an ex-con private detective with seemingly unlimited resources, characters named Bozo and The Wizard, Freudian psychoanalysts obsessively and murderously devoted to the reputation of their founder) or the resolution here. There are just too many dangling threads in what should be more tightly plotted to work; the absurdities just became too many for me in the end. And the dialogue is sometimes thumpingly awkward info-dumping.
December 20, 2007
I wish this site had a way of rating how BAD some books are. I thought this was the silliest book I had read since the ridiculous "The Sparrow". I think you should be able to identify this as negative stars, too. That way I could avoid stinkers. I heard Too Close to the Falls (her memoir) was good. Maybe she should stick to non-fiction.
October 22, 2023
I loved this book, as I have with every book this author writes. I've read them all except Good Morning Monster, which just won Georgian Bay Reads. I won a door prize at the event that included Good Morning Monster & had a brief interaction with the author and have been kicking myself ever since as I didn't realize who she was until I got home. 😞
August 18, 2012
Exactly that~it was okay. It just didn't grab me. The plot was very disjointed, the main characters were engaging but the take on Anna Freud~uh uh. I'm going to try her other books (autobiographical) which have been recommended to me.
October 8, 2012
BAREly ok. Her explanation and pieces of education regarding the work of Freud were amazing, and obviously her background. But when she added fiction to the mix, the characters and writing were trite, almost ridiculously childish, and unbelievable.
October 31, 2012
Great writer.. Loved her idea of making a mystery out of Sigmund Freud's Seduction Theory. Darwin, the Wedgewood family, Anna Freud, the Nazi party....they are all here.
August 13, 2013
Overall I enjoyed this book. But there were times I felt it dragged and was giving too much information. I liked the Freudian connection.
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