"Before his wide, disbelieving eyes a grotesque apparition, a tattered, bedraggled, but menacing vision materialized in the room, at once real enough, but at the same time, murky, insubstantial, disembodied."
What Jennifer Saw by Hal Schweig Black Rose Writing
book review by Carol Anderson, D.Min., ACSW, LMSW
Jim Harris, the patriarch of his family and father of four children, is beloved by all in his hometown of Monroeville, Missouri, where he works as a real estate developer and is a town leader. The family is one of traditional values, and the children are exceptionally talented and well-behaved. Yet lurking beneath the facades of Jim and his wife Mary Beth are characters with significant dysfunction. When Jim is murdered in his home, the skeletons flow out of the closet in this supposedly healthy family. Leading the way in exploring this murder is Kay Cutler, a reporter for the Monroeville Clarion. Besides the murder of Jim, the town that considers itself "The Camelot of the Midwest" is just as rife with pathology as the Kennedy Camelot story for which it is compared. Including political strife and a police officer who is deranged himself, this story of the horrors within the family is intersected with the horrors regarding the city's leaders and police force.
This book has it all—intrigue, adultery, apparitions, murder, sociopaths, misogynists, mental illness, ethical misconduct, abuse, terror, and evil. With sometimes creepy detail, the reader is taken on a journey through the flawed family members and into the town of Monroeville, where the outright denial of of its sins is rampant. It has surprising twists which keep the reader engaged throughout the entire book. The exploration of multiple personality disorder (MPD) is somewhat accurate (although MPD is a condition now called dissociative identity disorder or DID) and adds an exciting component to the story. The author uses significant poetic license regarding confidentiality and ethics, some inaccurate facts regarding the illness, and the authenticity of the psychiatrist character is questionable. However, if you can overlook this as well as a few editing flaws, the book provides for interesting reading and a novel plot line.