MENTOR PROGRAM UPDATE
MWA/NY was privileged to have two New York-area agents express interest in getting a look at the two top projects submitted to this year's recently concluded Mentor Program. And we're proud to introduce to you the recipients of that honor. Meet MWA/NY members Karen Laugel and Joan Kane Nichols, as they describe their work-in-progress.
Karen Laugel
Karen Laugel is a practicing pediatrician in Connecticut, recognized in Working Mother magazine for initiating a nighttime acute care center for children and The New York Times for her physician-patient advocacy efforts. She garnered regional and national media attention for launching a countrywide patient's rights organization in 2000, for which she was recognized with an American Medical Association Emerging Leaders Award the following year. Dr. Laugel's first novel, Ring of Lies, is currently placed in "The Top Ten" of Amazon's 2008 Breakthrough Novel Contest. Her writing credits include a humorous non-fiction article published in a parent's magazine, First Steps, as well as numerous awards in writing competitions. Her three chapter novel excerpt won first prize in SEAK's 2003 Medical Fiction Writing Competition, and three of her short stories placed in the top ten honorable mention in the Florida Freelance Writer's Association 2005 Short Story Competition. She is a member of Mystery Writers of America, Romance Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, and the International Women's Writing Guild. She is currently writing her second novel in the Kate Sorenson series, Hit and Run, a romantic medical suspense involving a battle between faith healers and science. She has three children and lives with her husband in Woodbridge, Connecticut.
» Ring of Lies
Ring of Lies is a 90,000 word medical suspense set in present day New England about the perils of obsessive love. Dr. Kate Sorenson, a dedicated pediatrician trapped in a bad marriage, suspects that the saintly mother of a teenage patient is poisoning her daughter. A second child mysteriously falls ill, a mother's support group looks sinister, and a nurse's suicide may be murder. Kate is certain the nurse's killer is the woman practicing Munchausens by proxy on her patients.
Conflict explodes when Kate must escape her destructive marriage as she faces her patient's mother in court. When 'male' DNA proves the mother innocent of murder, Kate launches a new investigation. She uncovers three possible suspects: the anesthetist befriended by her husband, her hotshot future partner, and the trauma surgeon who loves her. In her battle for the truth, Kate must face the dangers of obsessive love in her personal life before she can save her patients' lives and ultimately her own.
Joan Kane Nichols
Starting with All But the Right Folks, a young adult mystery published in 1985, Joan Kane Nichols has been writing fiction and nonfiction for young people for over twenty years. Her young-adult biography of Mary Shelley was listed as one of the New York Public Library's Books for the Teen Age. She's recently branched out into adult fiction. "Treasures," her first published short story, appears this spring in the literary journal Farfelu. A Novel by Dickens is her first adult mystery. In a former life, she taught college English and literature, the same profession for which her heroine is preparing herself. After that she switched to educational publishing where she's worked as a writer and editor ever since. Somewhere along the way, she also managed to acquire four children and six grandchildren. A lifelong New Yorker, she has spent the past winter holed up on Cape Cod, writing. At various times, she's lived in New Orleans, Long Island, Connecticut, and Boston, where she'll be returning to spend some time this spring.
» A Novel by Dickens
What would Charles Dickens, who always championed the poor at the expense of the rich and uncaring, have made of the hordes of homeless people who covered the sidewalks of Manhattan's gentrifying Upper West Side in the waning years of the 20th century? Since this is the question that prompted A Novel by Dickens, a literary mystery set in London, Boston, and New York, it is by no means unintentional that echoes of Oliver Twist, Bleak House, and other novels by Dickens haunt its pages. The story begins sometime in 1870s London when an unnamed woman, an intimate of the recently deceased Charles Dickens, hides a bound manuscript, the words Dora Finching by C. Dickens inscribed on the cover, in a tapestry bag. Over one hundred years later, Golda Pipps, a middle-aged librarian from New York, finds the manuscript in an antiquarian London bookshop, steals it from under the nose of Jamaican-born Sebastian Clove, the shop's owner, and brings it home. But not for long. Is the manuscript an unpublished novel by Dickens? Lots of people want to find out. Their quest leads to unexpected consequences: a middle-class woman finds herself homeless; a homeless little girl finds a home; her father finds himself in jail; a graduate student finds a lover; a guilt-ridden young man tries to find redemption; and a charred body is found in the ashes of a Guy Fawkes Night bonfire. It's up to graduate student April Flowers to descend into a contemporary Dickensian underworld to find the manuscript, the murderer, and the truth of her own heart.