You’re not alone. Someone’s waiting. Someone’s watching…Someone’s listening.

Admit it: deep inside, or at a shallow level, seeing the downfall of someone who seems bloated with unearned success? You see it all the time scrolling through social media comments after a pompous celebrity stumbles from a scandal. Or when someone is accused of being wrong or crazy. A public pedestal may rise above in fame but it can be easy target for stones.

Flip the view and what if you were one being wrongly accused? When everything you have worked for has crumbled away? When your reputation and prestige has been irreversibly maligned?

With this flip, we see Dr. Faith Finley experience her skyrocketing success from her work dissipate in the aftermaths of a malicious rumor and then a car accident involving herself and her husband, Liam. Both of which are horrible except for one alarming oversight. Everyone reports that she was alone in the accident.

In Someone’s Listening, it becomes a novel of how much weight a woman can carry in times of chaos. Dr. Finley juggles the fallback of her psychologist career from the malicious accusations which resulting in losing her radio show and overall credibility. This malicious accusation is a pretty horrific on it’s own. It’s the kind of rumor that it is near impossible to come back from as the public will instantly defend the accuser. In the eyes of the public, this is an instant call to arms to protect.

So while she is trying to retain her humility dealing with that, her sanity is further question as she is adamant that her husband was with her during the crash. There is no blood trail, no witness, and she was at the wheel. Liam is gone. Money has even been transferred out of her account. For all eyes concerned, her husband left a no-good wife who was capable of despicable acts. Yet this is is not the Liam she loved and married. They were not perfect but she knew Liam.

Just to test her further strength, she’s now getting threatening notes. Notes with words such as ““Secure your new home. Consider new window and door locks, an alarm system, and steel doors…”

It is pretty much her against the world.

Throughout the book, it is honestly hard to relate and believe Dr. Finley. Her strong asset of being confident and strong is also her annoying trait. She is so confident that she sometimes is just overly focused on one aspect instead of the overall picture. With each page turn, we are also questioning if we’re following and trying to support an actual crazy person? Especially since she seems to be very dependent on Klonopin, a drug that is used to treat panic attacks.

That is just a lot for one person to handle. So even though she’s trying to handle it all herself, she does reach out to someone from her past and a new friend to help. Although, as we keep going in the novel, this may not have been the best choice.

Someone’s Listening has enough chill to make you sneak a look around when you’re reading outside on the beach but not enough to lock yourself inside. There is a steady rise in suspicions but not enough to clearly indicate who the culprit is. Once the reveal happens, it’s a rapid pace of cause of and effect. It’s not very satisfactory considering how much hell Faith had to go through but there is an answer to the crazy.

If there was a lesson or word of warning in this novel, it would be trust. Trust in yourself to know what is right and also trust in your family and friends. Especially those who will still sit and share a glass of wine when everything around you is gone.

Faith is unbreakable in her conviction and loyalty. Even her iron-clad clasp on Doctor-Patient confidentiality is worth applauding. Yet for her career in helping people, she is wary to accept help from others. Well, except for her neighbor. Always be way of overly friendly neighbors in an apartment. That neighbor was too clingy for comfort.

At the end of the novel, no matter how much you related to Faith, she didn’t deserve it one bit. She was dedicated to her career and despite the lucrative book deals and radio show, she genuinely sought to help. Good intentions and all can still have a way to nip you in the worst way.

Someone’s Listening is available from Harlequin

EXCERPT:

PROLOGUE

WHEN I WAKE UP, IT’S BLACK AND STILL; I FEEL A light, icy snow that floats rather than falls, and I can’t open my eyes. I don’t know where I am, but it’s so quiet, the silence rings in my ears. My fingertips try to grip the ground, but I feel only a sheet of ice beneath me, splintered with bits of embedded gravel. The air is sharp, and I try to call for him, but I can’t speak. How long have I been here? I drift back out of consciousness. The next time I wake, I hear the crunching of ice under the boots of EMTs who rush around my body. I know where I am. I’m lying in the middle of County Road 6. There has been a crash. There’s a swirling red light, a strobe light in the vast blackness: they tell me not to move.

“Where’s my husband?” I whimper. They tell me to try not to talk either. “Liam!” I try to yell for him, but it barely escapes my lips; they’re numb, near frozen, and it comes out in a hoarse whisper. How has this happened?

I think of the party and how I hate driving at night, and how I was careful not to drink too much. I nursed a glass or two, stayed in control. Liam had a lot more. It wasn’t like him to get loaded, and I knew it was his way of getting back at me. He was irritated with me, with the position I’d put him in, even though he had never said it in so many words. I wanted to please him because this whole horrible situation was my fault, and I was sorry.

When I wake up again I’m in a hospital room, connected to tubes and machines. The IV needle is stuck into a bruised, purple vein in the back of my hand that aches. In the dim light, I sip juice from a tiny plastic cup, and the soft beep of the EKG tries to lull me back to sleep, but I fight it. I want answers. I need to appear stabilized and alert. Another dose of painkiller is released into my IV; the momentary euphoria forces me to heave a sigh. I need to keep my eyes open. I can hear the cops arrive and talk to someone at a desk outside my door. They’ll tell me what happened.

There’s a nurse who calls me “sweetie” and changes the subject when I ask about the accident. She gives the cops a sideways look when they come in to talk to me, and tells them they only have a few minutes and that I need to rest.

Detective John Sterling greets me with a soft “Hello, ma’am.” I almost forget about my shattered femur and groan after I move too quickly. Another officer lingers by the door, a tall, stern-looking woman with her light hair pulled into a tight bun at the base of her skull. She tells me I’m lucky to be alive, and if it had dropped below freezing, I wouldn’t have lasted those couple hours before a passing car stopped and called 911. I ask where Liam is, but she just looks to Sterling. Something is terribly wrong.

“Why won’t anyone tell me what happened to him?” I plead. I watch Detective Sterling as he picks his way through a response.

“The nurse tells me that you believe he was in the car with you at the time of the accident,” he says. I can hear the condescension in his voice. He’s speaking to me like I’m a child.

“They said ‘I believe’ he was? That’s not a— That’s a fact. We came from a party—a book signing party. Anyone, anyone can tell you that he was with me. Please. Is he hurt?” I look down at my body for the first time and see the jagged stitches holding together the bruised flesh of my right arm. They look exaggerated, like the kind you might draw on with makeup and glue for a Halloween costume. I close my eyes, holding back nausea. I try to walk through the series of events—trying to piece together what happened and when.

Liam had been quiet in the car. I knew he’d believed me after the accusations started. I knew he trusted me, but maybe I’d underestimated the seeds of doubt that had been planted in his mind. I tried to lighten the mood when we got in the car by making some joke about the fourteen-dollar domestic beers; he’d given a weak chuckle and rested his head on the passenger window.

The detective looks at me with something resembling sympathy but closer to pity.

“Do you recall how much you had to drink last night?” he asks accusingly.

“What? You think…? No. I drove because he… No! Where is he?” I ask, not recognizing my own voice. It’s haggard and raw.

“Do you recall taking anything to help you relax? Anything that might impair your driving?”

“No,” I snap, nearly in tears again.

“So, you didn’t take any benzodiazepine maybe? Yesterday…at some point?”

“No— I— Please.” I choke back tears. “I don’t…” He looks at me pointedly, then scribbles something on his stupid notepad. I didn’t know what to say. Liam must be dead, and they think I’m too fragile to take the news. Why would they ask me this?

“Ma’am,” he says, standing. He softens his tone. This is it. He’s going to tell me something I’ll never recover from.

“You were the only one in the car when medics got there,” he says, studying me for my response, waiting to detect a lie that he can use against me later. His patronizing look infuriates me.

“What?” The blood thumps in my ears. They think I’m crazy; that soft tone isn’t a sympathetic one reserved for delivery of the news that a loved one has died—it’s the careful language chosen when speaking to someone unstable. They think I’m some addict or a drunk. Maybe they think the impact had made me lose the details, but he was there. I swear to God. His cry came too late and there was a crash. It was deafening, and I saw him reach for me, his face distorted in terror. He tried to shield me. He was there. He was next to me, screaming my name when we saw the truck headlights appear only feet in front of us—too late.

Published by Graydon House Books

Author Bio:

Seraphina Nova Glass is a professor and Playwright-in-Residence at the University of Texas-Arlington, where she teaches Film Studies and Playwriting. She holds an MFA in playwriting from Smith College, and has optioned multiple screenplays to Hallmark and Lifetime. Someone’s Listening is her first novel.

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