Touched by Fatality, a novel by Anne Bellegia
Caitlin McPherson lived a life most would envy. Married to wealthy biotech wunderkind Jeff Llewellyn, she was confident of her place in the world. Science seemed to hold the answers to everything—perhaps even immortality. But following her husband’s sudden death from a tragic falling accident, Caitlin found herself a young widow, shattered by her loss and hectored by the media.
In search of privacy for her recovery, Caitlin flees to a small town in the California desert, and reinvents herself as a massage therapist. As she forms new ties, she struggles to reconcile her old and new lives. But there is no escaping fatality. She becomes enmeshed in a puzzling murder investigation and begins to question the circumstances of her husband’s accident. The nature of reality, she soon discovers, may not be as concrete as she once believed.
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About the Author
I have transitioned to writing after a 40-year career in product marketing within the healthcare industry, an industry fueled by the human hope for the elusive silver bullet to delay or prevent mortality. Along the way I treated myself to massage training and now volunteer in the realms of lifelong learning, aging services, and end-of-life planning.
Touched by Fatality, my first novel, began with a shiny floor in a public restroom. The reflected image of a woman in an adjacent stall was remarkably detailed, prompting the thought, what if she were doing something criminal?
It struck me that we all create stories from what we observe, and often the stories we tell ourselves are fiction, not the truth. Our imaginations embellish the behaviors of others with assumptions about their motivations. We can never really know, but that doesn’t stop us from incorporating our beliefs into our perceptions of reality.
Characters, actions and possible motivations grew out of that shiny floor into a narrative that resembled a murder mystery titled Rub Out. My characters lobbied for more complexity and an exploration of deeper themes such as loss and grief, aging, dying, and mental health, and Touched by Fatality emerged. I’m intrigued by the dance between Self and Other and the many ways we seek—and avoid—intimate connections as we navigate our temporal existence.
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Social Media
I’m that person who was an early adopter of the internet for marketing and communications purposes. Yet I have balked—stubbornly and perhaps irrationally—at becoming a utilizer of social media, not even to promote Touched by Fatality. This is despite the advice of many successful authors that social media is the way to build one’s “platform.”
I know, I know. I have a website, a blog, an Amazon author page, so why not Facebook and LinkedIn, at least? Frankly, I don’t think I will spend the time to do these well. So don’t look on this site for my Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest icons—yet.
In the meantime, does anyone think it’s kind of creepy to be on hold with a government agency and have to listen to a recorded message that asks us to like them on Facebook?
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Fiction vs. Reality
The first words contained in almost every novel are some version of “This is a work of fiction…” Rarely do we stop and think that our capacity for fiction is perhaps the most defining hallmark of Homo sapiens, more so than big brains, bipedal locomotion, use of tools, and even [...]