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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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.

Want more? Check out the rest of my article at THE STRAND MAGAZINE

My Review

Despite having gravitated away from them for a while now due to other reading commitments, thrillers remain among my favorite genres. Finding ones that are clean (and Christian), however, can be a challenging task, so when given the opportunity to read and review “Fragments of Fear”, I jumped at the chance. The cover certainly seemed perfect for summer, with a desert landscape in smoldering shades of orange and yellow and a woman in the foreground running and looking over her shoulder. Fittingly, we were experiencing a heat wave when I began reading it.

With “Fragments of Fear”, Carrie Stuart Parks creates a twisty mystery with some unique characters. Evelyn McTavish, who goes by Tavish, is not your typical heroine. Wealthy? Yes. Glamorous? Not so much. Since her beloved grandmother’s death, Tavish seems to have lost herself, and this feeling is only compounded by her fiancé’s suicide. She doesn’t share her grandmother’s faith, instead dabbling in a mixture of New Age customs, and yet Proverbs 3:5 seems to speak to her from her grandmother’s epitaph. When she gets a call from an animal shelter to come and pick up her dog, which is microchipped with her information even though she has never owned a dog, she is thrust headlong into a situation that becomes more convoluted and perilous by the minute.

Parks leads readers down a series of trails, some of which turn out to be dead ends, keeping the plot moving forward at a constant pace and making this a difficult book to put down. No one is trustworthy, and the possibilities of what is transpiring and whether events are connected or not feed the uncertainty. The inclusion of the archaeology and especially the art elements enhances and adds dimension to the narrative. An aspect that I found particularly interesting was the fine art concept of negative space and how it can be applied to circumstances in daily life. Although I thought that the faith and spiritual components of this novel could have been more fully developed, Tavish’s religious journey was still nice to witness. This is a book that will appeal to both Christian and secular readers, with its combination of mystery, intrigue, light romance, and finding who you were meant to be.

I received a complimentary copy of this book through CelebrateLit and was not required to post a favorable review. All opinions are my own.