Jerry Bolton's Mother's Revenge

center Mother's RevengeSettling of scores comes to the bayou! In my psychosexual novel, Mother's Revenge, Kathy Albertini, 26, has finally shaken off the shackles of her father's shadow. She loves her papa, Angelo Albertini, self-made Mafiosi godfather of the southern gulf coast, but she has tired of having had her life path paved for her by his "connections." She wants to make it on her own and she does. She has a job that she likes at The Times-Picayune, a newspaper in New Orleans. She is happy. But Kathy hasn't been as efficient at shaking off the terrible secret and shame of Karen, her mother. A mother who was locked away, inside a room at Moss Manor--the pre-Civil War mansion Kathy called home--to waste her life away alone and unloved. Angelo meted out this punishment for Karen's part of a shocking adultery. Memories of her mother's fate and Kathy's secret feelings that she was somehow responsible, cause nightmares to visit her on a regular basis. Coupled with these feelings of guilt, is her determination to never be compared to her mother, and she goes to sexual excesses--weekends only--with multiple partners to drive that point home to herself and anyone else who is paying attention. The nightmares. They are the only thing which prevent Kathy's world from being perfect. She is tormented by real and painful segments from the past; beginning the day Angelo shut the door on her mother in her room of shame. She does have Barry Colton, an aw shucks kind of guy who hasn't had the nerve to try for a kiss the three months they have been seeing each other every Sunday. He is her return to normalcy after the weekends of unrestrained behavior. Arriving into this picture is John Leveritt, new cub reporter at The Times-Picayune. Kathy is overwhelmed by this handsome, too-good-to-be-true man. Soon he becomes her all. The nightmares disappear. She is in love for the first time in her life. Her life, now, is perfect. Of course, into this near perfect world comes danger from the past, when Shawn Deveroux, who blames Kathy's father for the murder of his own mother many years past enters her life. Shawn is about revenge. Kathy eventually ends up on a houseboat in the middle of a swamp, stripped naked and chained to an old rusty anchor. Shawn is quite enough to contend with, but soon Kathy is confronted with other personalities hiding inside the insanity; Shawn's own mother and even himself as a small boy. Mother's Revenge has the feel and ambiance of South Louisiana as its backdrop.