Cornelia Read – författare

Madeline Dare has finally escaped the drudgery of backwoods Syracuse, New York. But when her husband's job offer falls through, Maddie is forced to work as a teacher at Santangelo Academy, a boarding school for emotionally disturbed teenagers in the Berkshires. Behind the ornate gates of the academy, she discovers a disturbing realm where students and teachers must abide by the dean's bizarre therapies. From her first day, Maddie doubts Dr. Santangelo's credibility, and she's not afraid to voice her concerns. The response she receives is even more alarming - many of her colleagues are devout followers of the dean. A chilling event confirms Maddie's suspicions, but leaves her feeling trapped within a school full of crazy people. Shut off from the outside world, Maddie will form unlikely alliances with a small group of rebellious students, whose inclination to resist authority may actually be her salvation.

The smart-mouthed but sensitive runaway socialite Madeline Dare is shocked when she discovers the skeleton of a brutalized three-year-old boy in her own weed-ridden family cemetery outside Manhattan. Determined to see that justice is served to the perpetrators, Madeline finds herself examining her own troubled personal history, and the sometimes hidden, sometimes all-too-public class and racial warfare that penetrates every level of society in the savage streets of New York City during the early 1990s. She is aided in her efforts by a colorful assemblage of friends, relatives and new acquaintances, each one representing a separate strand of the patchwork mosaic city politicians like to brag about. The result is a gripping narrative that relates the causes and consequences of a vicious crime to the wider relationships that connect and divide us all. In INVISIBLE BOY Cornelia Read depicts, with sensitivity, eloquence and powerful emotion, the unstable fault lines of family, friendship, and society at large.

Madeline Dare trades New York's gritty streets for the tree-lined avenues of Boulder, Colorado when her husband Dean lands a promising job. Madeline, now mother to beautiful toddler twin girls and a full-time homemaker, has achieved everything she thought she always wanted but with her husband constantly on the road, she's fighting a losing battle against the Betty Friedan riptide of suburban/maternal exhaustion, angst and sheer loneliness. A new freelance newspaper gig helps her get her mojo back but Boulder isn't nearly as tranquil as it seems: there's a serial arsonist at large in the city. As Madeline closes in on the culprit, the fires turn deadly - and the stakes tragically personal. She'll need every ounce of strength and courage she has to keep the flames from reaching her own doorstep, threatening all she holds most dear.

Madeline Dare, a former blue blood looking for the right ticket out of her blue-collar community, has just stumbled upon a set of military dog tags at the site of an unsolved 20-year-old double murder. Eerily, the name on the tags is that of her favourite Oyster Bay cousin, the golden boy of a vindictive branch of her family that has resented her since she followed her heart and married Dean, a farmer-genius who's as far from high society as humanly possible. In her efforts to clear her cousin's name, Maddie finds herself trapped in a minefield of explosive, long-buried family secrets and her search for the truth triggers a string of grisly new murders. The trail of blue blood will stretch from posh Long Island back to the derelict smokestacks of Syracuse - and right to Maddie's own door.