A Gentle Thief

Maddie Johnson loved Shakespeare. Unlike everybody else she knew growing up, she seemed to understand him, enjoy him, more with every reading. It was partly because of this love that she drove from her home in rural Pennsylvania to college at Southern Utah University, home every summer to the Utah Shakespearean Festival. It was partly that, and partly the desire to get as far away as possible. Maddie thought being in Utah would help her forget, that the stark beauty of the scenery and the power of the metaphor would be enough to clear her. They weren't. In her freshman year, she met and, after graduation, married a much older man, Robert Able, the first person Maddie had ever known who understood her love of Shakespeare. At 21, Maddie felt too young to be married. At 23, she felt too young to be divorced. Maddie couldn't blame her divorce on Con Sullier. Maddie found herself falling for this irresistibly distant man while she was still married to Robert. Con was an rock jock at a small town radio station. He was consistently dissatisfied with his job, each consecutive new girlfriend he acquired, and his life in general. When he flirted with Maddie one night at the Shakespearean Festival, he just wanted to shake things up a little. He wanted a thrill. Later, he tried to understand why Maddie pushed him away, why she seemed to love running from everyone more than toward him, why she hid in books and baths and hated to drive anywhere. Maddie thought of leaving Utah, leaving Con and Robert and everyone who knew either of them, but her 5th grade English students kept her there. Their open faces, and the home her father had bought her in the red rock canyon, kept her in the small Utah town with one very wide main street. Maddie was found dead on January 1, 1984, two days after she broke up for good with Con Sullier. Her neighbor, Junior Kemler, found her on that cold morning, cradling a gun to her chest, a bullet hole in her right temple. Twenty years later, Maddie's father still believes his daughter did not take her own life. He has spent two decades and a small fortune trying to accomplish a single objective - to convince the Utah State Medical Examiner to change the death certificate of his daughter to read "homicide" instead of "suicide." He is a tender and desperate man in his 70's when he meets a young lawyer over the telephone named Sophie Brownlie. A Gentle Thief is the story of Sophie's first compelling case, the story of Maddie's tortured heart, the story of a small town in love with the unlikely combination of rodeo and Shakespeare, a story of faith and belief in love and family. It is the story of choices, of unexpected friendships, of people not turning out to be who they appear to be. The novel unfolds in two time periods, 2004 as Sophie becomes obsessed with helping the father of a girl who died 20 years before prove that she didn't kill herself, and 1983 as a tortured and lonely young Maddie moves closer and closer to the day of her premature death. After considering several possible suspects, you begin to believe that the Utah Medical Examiner may have been right all along. May have been.
About the Author: Amanda Dickson is a radio announcer, author, newspaper columnist, and speaker based in Salt Lake City. Amanda earned her B.A. in English and her Juris Doctorate at the University of Utah. She practiced law for a brief time before returning to her first love of radio. Amanda taught Mass Communication Law at the University of Utah, becoming a favorite professor among the students. Amanda published her first book in the fall of 2007, Wake Up to a Happier Life. Her second book, Change It Up, came out in October of 2009. Her new book, Friends for Life, is due out in January of 2012. Amanda is married and the step-mother of three children, Cameron 18, Ashley 21 and Laurel 22. She is also the indulgent mother of two children, Ethan age 6 and Aiden age 4. For more info, go to www.amandadickson.com.