Redemption Lake by Susan Clayton-Goldner
Tucson, Arizona 1989 – Eighteen-year-old Matt Garrison is harboring two terrible secrets: his involvement in the drowning death of his 12-year-old cousin, and a night of drunken sex with his best friend’s mother, Crystal, whom he finds dead the following morning. Guilt forces Matt to act on impulse and hide his involvement with Crystal.
Detective Winston Radhauser knows Matt is hiding something. But as the investigation progresses, Radhauser’s attention is focused on Matt’s father. Matt’s world closes in when his dad is arrested for Crystal’s murder and Travis breaks off their friendship. Despite his father’s guilty plea, Matt knows his dad is innocent and only trying to protect his son. Devastated and bent on self-destruction, Matt heads for the lake where his cousin died—the only place he believes can truly free him. Are some secrets better left buried?
Redemption Lake is a novel of love and betrayal. It’s about truth and lies, friendship and redemption, about assuming responsibility, and the risks a father and son will take to protect each other. It was a finalist for the RONE award for best mystery.
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Author Bio:
Susan Clayton-Goldner was born in New Castle, Delaware and grew up with four brothers along the banks of the Delaware River. She is the mother of two children and grandmother to five. Susan has been writing poems and short stories since she could hold a pencil and was so in love with writing that she was a creative writing major in college.
Prior to an early retirement which enabled her to write full time, Susan worked as the Director of Corporate Relations for University Medical Center in Tucson, Arizona. It was there she met her husband, Andreas, one of the deans in the University of Arizona’s Medical School. About five years after their marriage, they left Tucson to pursue their dreams in 1991–purchasing a 35-acres horse ranch in the Williams Valley in Oregon. They spent a decade there. Andy rode, trained and bred Arabian horses and coached a high school equestrian team, while Susan got serious about her writing career.
Through the writing process, Susan has learned that she must be obsessed with the reinvention of self, of finding a way back to something lost, and the process of forgiveness and redemption. These are the recurrent themes in her work.
Her poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies. A collection of her poems, A Question of Mortality was released in 2014. Her novel, A Bend in the Willow was released in 2017 and is a Readers’ Favorite Best Books of 2017 winner. She has just finished a 12-book mystery series, the first of which is set in Tucson, the remainder set in Ashland, Oregon.
After spending 3 years in Nashville, Susan and Andy shared a quiet life in Grants Pass, Oregon, with her growing list of fictional characters, and more books than one person could count.
Andy died in early 2021 from a massive brain bleed. For a while, Susan was unable to write about anything except grief. Being honest about her own journey through grief helped her so much. She told it the way it really was—how it felt to wake in the middle of the night alone and reach for a hand that was no longer there. She wanted to rid herself of the fear and shame of facing the pain and allowing others to see. So, she vowed not to run away from it, but to confront it head-on. This loss rearranged everything in her world, showed her how very fragile and random life can be.
She came to realize that when a heart breaks, it cracks open and makes room for new thoughts, feelings, concepts, and eve new people to enter. Susan is not the same woman, or the same writer, she was before Andy’s death. Hopefully she has come out on the other side of the grief a stronger, better person. More resilient. More grateful. Maybe even more compassionate and kind.
There are gifts in every aspect of life, even grief, if we take the time to look for them. When she isn’t writing, Susan enjoys making quilts and stained-glass windows. She says it is a lot like writing–telling stories with fabric and glass.
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