What is Jeannette de Beauvoir reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Jeannette de Beauvoir, author of Asylum: A Mystery.

Her entry begins:

I just finished a re-read, actually, of Rebecca Stott's Ghostwalk, a brilliant novel (hence the second read—it's worth going back to!). Writer Lydia Brooke has been commissioned by her former lover to finish a book his mother had begun writing before she was mysteriously drowned. Brooke find herself in effect investigating two separate series of murders: in the 17th century, several people died who stood between Isaac Newton and the fellowship he needed to continue his studies at Cambridge, while in the present day, people who offended a radical animal rights group seem to be the ones targeted. Ghostwalk centers around a real historical mystery (like me, Stott looks to the past for her mysteries!) involving Newton's...[read on]

About Asylum, from the publisher:

Martine LeDuc is the director of PR for the mayor's office in Montreal. When four women are found brutally murdered and shockingly posed on park benches throughout the city over several months, Martine's boss fears a PR disaster for the still busy tourist season, and Martine is now also tasked with acting as liaison between the mayor and the police department. The women were of varying ages, backgrounds and bodytypes and seemed to have nothing in common. Yet the macabre presentation of their bodies hints at a connection. Martine is paired with a young detective, Julian Fletcher, and together they dig deep into the city's and the country's past, only to uncover a dark secret dating back to the 1950s, when orphanages in Montreal and elsewhere were converted to asylums in order to gain more funding. The children were subjected to horrific experiments such as lobotomies, electroshock therapy, and psychotropic medication, and many of them died in the process. The survivors were supposedly compensated for their trauma by the government and the cases seem to have been settled. So who is bearing a grudge now, and why did these four women have to die?

Not until Martine finds herself imprisoned in the terrifying steam tunnels underneath the old asylum does she put the pieces together. And it is almost too late for her...in Jeannette de Beauvoir's Asylum.

Visit Jeannette de Beauvoir's website.

Writers Read: Jeannette de Beauvoir.

--Marshal Zeringue