Multiple wounds : a novel

Holly Troy is a multiple, one of those damaged souls with dissociative identity disorder who spins out personalities like spiders spin webs - knock one down and another will replace it. This daughter of a classics scholar has other selves that are no mere mortals: they include Nemesis, Pandora, the Fates, Cronos, Eris, and Eurydice - and one frightened five-year-old child. Holly is a beautiful and talented artist whose only sanctuary is her art. But now her gallery owner has been murdered and her body left in a garden surrounded by Holly's sculptures. The horror is that Holly doesn't know where she was when the killing occurred. She doesn't know whether she witnessed a murder or even committed one that night. In fact, she's not even certain who she was when the killing occurred. When Detective Orson Cheever was assigned to investigate the murder of gallery owner Bonnie Gill, the gods were not smiling. He's spent the last twenty years solving the bloody puzzles that murderers leave behind. His tools: intelligence and the facts. This time, faced with a woman who is a little girl one minute, Cronos, the murderous father of the gods the next, and all three Fates in one body the minute after that, he realizes that he is going to have to find a new way to work. A way that will allow him to blindly feel his way between past and present, between myth and reality. He also knows that he will have to solve the too human puzzle that is Holly before he can even begin to know who killed Bonnie Gill. Holly Troy's mind is a complex maze of myth and reality, multiple personalities vying for time in the spotlight. As an artist, she is creative and compelling. As a witness, she is painfully unreliable, unsure of even which person she was the night of the murder. Even Holly can't be sure of her own innocence. Homicide detective Orson Cheever never thought he would find himself playing psychologist to a Greek goddess in a modern-day murder investigation, but many of Holly's personalities come straight from classical mythology, from Cronos and Pandora to the Fates. As Cheever attempts to unravel truth from myth, he learns that there is even more to Holly than meets the eye. One personality in particular - that of a five-year-old girl - hits a little too close to home, and Cheever is forced to finally pull back the dark curtains of his own past in order to uncover the truth in this psychological thriller Artist Holly Troy seems to be the key to discovering what really happened the night an art gallery owner was murdered, but her dissociate identity disorder proves problematic for homicide detective Orson Cheever