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"I have spent the winter at my summer place," begins the narrator of this startlingly original literary chiller. Juliana Durrell Smythe, known for her "female in jeopardy" performances on film, fears her roles are proving prophetic. As an actress, she is accustomed to rescue. In movies, " "Having known the comfort of muscled arms, I still expect, without reason, to be carried to safety and ultimately, to be loved ." But confined to her frozen “wedding cake” Victorian lake house, Juliana discovers the discrepancies between film and actual jeopardy. "The police have not turned out to be kindly, potential lovers..." She must walk the fault line of fiction and confront the mysterious and violent end of her marriage. An atmosphere of danger descends with the snow. The men who enter Juliana's life seem suspect; her predicament shadowed by the distress of her housecleaner. How much did she see? How much does she know? Juliana is haunted by her past roles and the history of her romantic lakehouse, built for a wedding in l899. Her aching love story becomes entwined with that of the original Victorian bride's. To survive, Juliana is forced to connect the nineteenth century legacy of the lost "Frozen Girls", seven young women found dead on the lake beside her house—to the current despair of the off-season Adirondack resort. In a snowscape of dazzling beauty and acutely observed sociological deterioration, Juliana must enact the role that will save or cost her own life. On its sheer surface, Dreams of Rescue is a perilous marital mystery that dares re-imagine the thriller in which its heroine stars. At its crystalline depths, the question is not "Who done it? But who are we?" When does passion become possession? Is anyone truly safe? Plumbing the secrets of two centuries and two "child" brides, the novel combines the suspense and psychological insight of Daphne DuMaurier’s Rebecca with contemporary hairpin turns. Cunningham has written a hypnotic novel that will transport the reader into a brilliantly evoked world that becomes both reverie and nightmare. With its hard-chiseled realities and incandescent images, Dreams of Rescue is a new take on a classic form, that shatters convention and will entrance readers long after it stunning finale.
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