About the Book

Book: Fragments of Fear
Author: Carrie Stuart Parks
Genre: Suspense
Release date: July 23, 2019

From award-winning author Carrie Stuart Parks comes a new novel with danger that reaches from a New Mexico Anasazi archaeological dig to micro- and nano-chip technology.

Evelyn Yvonne McTavish-Tavish to her friends-had her almost perfect world in Albuquerque, New Mexico, come to a crashing end with the suicide of her fiancé. As she struggles to put her life back together and make a living from her art, she’s given the news that her dog is about to be destroyed at the dog pound. Except she doesn’t own a dog. The shelter is adamant that the microchip embedded in the canine-with her name and address-makes it hers.

Tavish recognizes the dog as one owned by an archaeologist named Pat Caron because she did a commissioned drawing of the two of them months earlier. The simple solution is to return the dog to his owner, but she arrives only to discover Caron’s murdered body.

After meeting undercover FBI agent Sawyer Price the mystery deepens as more people start disappearing and Tavish becomes a target as well. Her only solution is to find the links between microchip technology, an Anasazi site in the desert, her fiancé’s death, a late-night radio show, and the dog. And the clock is ticking.

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My Thoughts:

I was glued to the pages of Fragments of Fear which is an action packed thriller that does not stop or slow down till the final pages.

Evelyn McTavish, or Tavish, is a lost soul who is very rich yet is searching for answers about life, wanting to find true love, and has no self-esteem at all. I am glad that she did have a healthy dose of self-preservation at least as she really needed it in the twists and turns on the rollercoaster ride her life decides to embark upon.

This story has a lot of puzzle pieces that by the end fit all together to give a good picture of the story that you just read. I was hooked from page one, and like Tavish could not rest until she had some answers. And she needed them a plenty.

Tavish had a problem with herself, so much so that when she started living a healthier lifestyle she did not see the outside changes that were happening to her. I understood that word picture, that she was overweight yet did not notice that she began losing weight and that everyone else was seeing her differenty. Her self-image was one that was cloaked in shame, lonliness, and self-pity. She was still wearing her “fat” clothes when she wasn’t that size anymore. I think the visual really helped as Tavish was changing on the inside as well. I get that and the book was all the more meaningful for it.

I received a copy of this novel from the publihser. I was not required to post a positive review and all views and opinions are my own.

About the Author

Carrie Stuart Parks is a Christy finalist as well as a Carol Award-winning author. She has won numerous awards for her fine art as well. An internationally known forensic artist, she travels with her husband, Rick, across the US and Canada teaching courses in forensic art to law-enforcement professionals. The author/illustrator of numerous books on drawing and painting, Carrie continues to create dramatic watercolors from her studio in the mountains of Idaho.

More from Carrie

Using Art to Solve Crime: Techniques Used by Forensic Artists Since 1981, I’ve been a forensic artist—an amazing feat since I’m only . . .um. . . well, younger than that. In those years, I’ve seen some shifts and trends, but some things have never changed. Despite the overwhelming prevalence of computers in almost every other field, they have never been able to replace a trained forensic artist. Artists have an amazing toolbox of techniques we use to gather the information we need to help solve crime.

The pencil. Any forensic artist worth her weight in graphite knows the power of the lowly pencil and a sketchpad. Law enforcement would love a photographic image of the suspect, but all we have to work with is memory…and memory is faulty. The more the image looks perfect, the more imperfect it is for helping to identify a suspect. We want the drawing to just suggest a likeness and eliminate those not similar.

Now that we brought up the subject of memory, a forensic artist needs to understand how memory works. The average witness will remember between four and five facial features. When they describe the person they saw, they will do so from their strongest memory to their weakest memory, from most important to least important. We listen carefully to the order of facial features.

Whole vs Parts. We don’t look at faces as individual parts, although a particularly outstanding nose or Marty Feldman eyes might catch our attention. We will remember the face as a whole, with the proportions of the face an unacknowledged part of that. Forensic artist prefer to use reference photographs where the whole face is viewed.