Grievance: A Novel

Written by Christine Bell

Narrated by Shannon McManus

Winner of the International Thriller Writers Award.

Christine Bell’s haunting and suspenseful novel draws readers into the world of a grieving widow stalked by a stranger bent on stealing away everything she has left—even her past.

After weathering the first gut-wrenching year since her husband’s death, Lily Declan is trying to move past her grief and find a place of healing for herself and her two young sons.

But when a strange sympathy letter arrives, the quiet life Lily has rebuilt from her sorrow comes under stealthy, sinister attack. On her wedding anniversary, an intimate bridal gift is delivered to her door. Then, a bizarre home invasion shatters her sense of security, and a mysterious Facebook memorial appears. Like a hungry ghost, someone seeks to claim her love and loss as their own, to erase Lily from her own life and possess her beloved forever, in an embrace of macabre devotion.

As more threats follow, Lily’s home and family are no longer her safe haven, and it’s become difficult to tell friend from foe. But after everything she’s already lost, she won’t give up her memories—or her family—without a fight.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brilliance Audio
• Release date: Jul 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781536669305

Christine Bell

Christine Bell’s first novel, Saint, was optioned for a feature film and praised by the Philadelphia Inquirer as “a brilliant first novel, an extraordinary book.” The Seven Year Atomic Makeover Guide, a short story collection, was described by the New York Times as “accessible, entertaining and infused with the improvisation energies of a writer who refuses to play it safe.” Bell’s next novel, The Perez Family, was made into a film directed by Mira Nair and named Notable Adult Fiction of the Year by both the American Library Association and the New York Public Library, as well as Notable Book of the Year by the Philadelphia Inquirer and the New York Times, who hailed it as “a loud, gaudy sentimental heartbreaker of a book, a triumph.” Bell lives in the Central California Coast area with her husband, writer J. F. Freedman, and their family.

Reviews for Grievance

[Donna Benoit · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

It was not what I expected. The story was more about working through grief with a little mystery added in. At the end the mystery becomes the focus of the book and I thought it was too far fetched. Not for me.

[maowangvater · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Lily Declan is grieving. It’s approaching the one-year anniversary of her husband’s death. The anxiety and torment resulting from accompanying him through chemotherapy and his long wasting away have been replaced by the disorientation, pain, anger, depression, and hypersensitivity of grief. It’s a time when many others think you should have gotten over it by now. It’s also a time when a rude stranger hitting your car in a parking lot can send you into an angry rage. These are common experiences for the bereaved, but Lily has an additional concern, she’s been receiving unwanted and unexpected gifts from someone, that are both benign and bizarre: a valentine from someone claiming to be one of her husband’s former girlfriends, an anonymous gift of a sexy nightgown, a free landscaping job and house cleaning including a rearrangement of her furniture. Bell’s portrait of grief and the setting of her novel in middle Tennessee are vividly accurate, and the book’s nail-biting, page-turning conclusion kept this reader wide-awake until midnight. Five stars for both accuracy and thrills!