Published by The Writers Coffee Shop
Available from Amazon, Kobo, Barnes and Noble, and TWCS
The rapist is caught and sent to prison, but when Berg gets closer to the family devastated by his depravity, their behavior doesn’t add up.
As Berg fights to prevent another murder, she crosses the line between hero and villain—and there’s no turning back.
Author Bio:
Praise for Broken:
I have been diagnosed with clinical depression/situational depression years ago. It is very important that I mention this prior to reviewing “Broken” by Vanessa Skye. . . as it is very pertinent to where my mind was just prior to starting this novel. I had a depression breakdown about a week before starting this book. Little did I know, when requesting this book for review from Net Galley, that I’d be reading a book that reflects my soul at current state.
Biggest plus of this book was the creative use of song lyrics before the start of each chapter. So poignant, so stark, so dead on. The way the author writes about depression the lives within the main character is so gut twisting, I too found myself hard to breathe.
“Berg”, the main character, is a detective who is so deeply whittled with wounds from childhood it literally incapacitates her every aspect of life: Living, Breathing, Loving and accepting Love, Communicating, Sleeping. She’s a wreck of a woman… She’s BROKEN. However, the pain and abuse from childhood makes her ONE HELL OF A DETECTIVE. Her senses are sharp. She sees things her male counterparts cannot. She has the highest closure rate on cases.
However, your detective skills become questionable when she tries to juggle love and her heart, her past, a new partner that is relentless about sleeping with her, and an ADA who’s a total narcissistic bitch. The characters in the book are so well written you either hurt for them, hate them, or love them.
Vanessa Skye is a strong, poetic, articulate author. Broken is a second part novel, from the “Edge of Darkness” series. I have not read the first novel, “The Enemy Inside.” The author did a fine job of creating a second book that reading the first one is not required. This is a great stand alone book, which has areas of reflection into the first novel. I would love to read this book, as I’m highly attracted to the main character, her flaws and the author’s ability to bring it all to life.
I am so very impressed with this book. It gripped my innards and ripped them out, little by little, each time Vanessa wrote about the deep, sinking, killing feeling depression has on a person.
*** Goodreads review
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Summary:
A mother is murdered in an apparent robbery.
A young woman is raped and beaten in a home invasion.
Chicago Detective Alicia “Berg” Raymond doesn’t believe in random crime and is certain both cases are more than they seem—but can she trust her instincts, or is she too distracted by the feelings she has for former partner and new boss? For Berg, the need for justice burns deep and fills the emptiness where therapy and relationships fall short.
She’s certain the husband knows more than he’s willing to admit, but the trap to catch the killer is the loophole that sets him free.
The rapist is caught and sent to prison, but when Berg gets closer to the family devastated by his depravity, their behavior doesn’t add up.
As Berg fights to prevent another murder, she crosses the line between hero and villain—and there’s no turning back.
Vanessa Skye has always had a love of words and spent her school years writing poetry, speeches, and fictional essays.
After completing a Bachelor of Arts in print journalism and studying psychology at Charles Sturt University, Vanessa got a job at Australia's largest publisher of regional and agricultural news and information, Rural Press, where she worked as a journalist in the central west of New South Wales for four years.
Thousands of stories later, Vanessa decided to move back to Sydney and try her hand at public relations while studying for a master’s degree in communication.
Skip forward a few years and Vanessa was once again joyfully studying various psychology subjects while managing a Sydney public relations firm. Enthralled with examining the motivations behind people’s actions, Vanessa realized what she really wanted to do in life was combine her love of words with her fascination for human behavior. So Vanessa quit public relations to begin the significantly more impoverished life of a professional writer.
Inspired by a recurring dream, Vanessa wrote her crime fiction debut, The Enemy Inside, which challenges the concept of justice, asks if the need for vengeance sometimes justifies murder, and explores whether you can ever heal from childhood abuse. Broken is her second book in this series. In her spare time, Vanessa wrote a short story, The Piece, which was published in February 2012, by Dark Prints Press as a part of the 'One That Got Away' dark fiction anthology.
Vanessa now works as a freelance writer, lives in Sydney’s northern beaches, and tries to immerse herself in salt water at least once a day.
Vanessa now works as a freelance writer, lives in Sydney’s northern beaches, and tries to immerse herself in salt water at least once a day.
Praise for Broken:
I have been diagnosed with clinical depression/situational depression years ago. It is very important that I mention this prior to reviewing “Broken” by Vanessa Skye. . . as it is very pertinent to where my mind was just prior to starting this novel. I had a depression breakdown about a week before starting this book. Little did I know, when requesting this book for review from Net Galley, that I’d be reading a book that reflects my soul at current state.
Biggest plus of this book was the creative use of song lyrics before the start of each chapter. So poignant, so stark, so dead on. The way the author writes about depression the lives within the main character is so gut twisting, I too found myself hard to breathe.
“Berg”, the main character, is a detective who is so deeply whittled with wounds from childhood it literally incapacitates her every aspect of life: Living, Breathing, Loving and accepting Love, Communicating, Sleeping. She’s a wreck of a woman… She’s BROKEN. However, the pain and abuse from childhood makes her ONE HELL OF A DETECTIVE. Her senses are sharp. She sees things her male counterparts cannot. She has the highest closure rate on cases.
However, your detective skills become questionable when she tries to juggle love and her heart, her past, a new partner that is relentless about sleeping with her, and an ADA who’s a total narcissistic bitch. The characters in the book are so well written you either hurt for them, hate them, or love them.
Vanessa Skye is a strong, poetic, articulate author. Broken is a second part novel, from the “Edge of Darkness” series. I have not read the first novel, “The Enemy Inside.” The author did a fine job of creating a second book that reading the first one is not required. This is a great stand alone book, which has areas of reflection into the first novel. I would love to read this book, as I’m highly attracted to the main character, her flaws and the author’s ability to bring it all to life.
I am so very impressed with this book. It gripped my innards and ripped them out, little by little, each time Vanessa wrote about the deep, sinking, killing feeling depression has on a person.
*** Goodreads review
Discuss the aspects of your research style, and how you push
yourself to keep writing?
yourself to keep writing?
Sometime I wonder why I picked crime fiction to write, there could not be a genre more outside my field of expertise, or one more research-heavy. But as all authors will tell you, the story wanted to come out as is, so I just had to go with it!
While the first book in the Edge of Darkness series, The Enemy Inside, and the subsequent second book in the series, Broken, are both crime fiction, they both required different research.
The Enemy Inside was very much forensics-driven, as many of the clues the reader is given happen either at the crime scene, or around the autopsy table. My background is in journalism and public relations, and while I’ve always loved a good cop/crime show, my experience in this area was zero! (You might be interested to know that much of the stuff on shows like CSI is amazingly accurate, however, they do take some artistic license for some of it. I mean, if they had to wait around weeks for DNA to come in, it wouldn’t make for much of an exciting show, would it?).
My process of writing is that my first draft is a bare storyline only. Only later do I go back and fill in the descriptions and details. So after I wrote the first draft of The Enemy Inside, I thought I was basically done. Little did I know that the real work was about to begin!
I found that every aspect of the storyline had to be researched and checked meticulously, from the way the autopsies are done, to the way evidence is collected at a crime scene and chain of custody is preserved. And while Google may well be a great tool for some things, I really couldn’t rely on it for those kinds of details. So Amazon became my friend. I ordered textbook after textbook and read and re-read them continuously. I used to drag one of them ‘Fundamentals of Criminal Investigation’, which is the size of two large house bricks, around with me to cafes all over Sydney as I was finessing the details in The Enemy Inside. The baristas would see me coming lugging my back-breaking books and start laughing heartily as they made my caffeine infusions, and they often asked what an introverted, mother-of-two was doing writing about such nasty things as bondage, sex, and violence!
But the result is that it is all very much true-to-life; I have taken very little artistic license in it beyond the fictional story itself. Of course, the research ended up taking twice as long as the actual writing. It’s just as well I didn’t know this when I started to write The Enemy Inside after having the inspiring dreams, as I probably would have taken a sleeping pill and told my brain to shut the hell up.
Because I’m apparently a glutton for punishment (or just an idiot) Broken is different again. Instead of forensics, it takes a criminal justice system focus as it is more of a psychological thriller. So I read many textbooks about the American criminal justice system (I am Australian, so I couldn’t even draw on the knowledge I have of my local justice system, as the two are quite different—yet more evidence to be placed on the ’Vanessa is an idiot’ pile).
In both instances, the rough storylines I had outlined in the first drafts had to be changed to fit in with the reality of the system in which I am writing. But in all cases, this lead both books to exciting, interesting and dangerous places and the books are far better for it.
As for motivating myself to write, I treat it like I would any other job. I’m on maternity leave at the moment from my journalist position, so I make sure that I set aside time to write while the baby is sleeping. I always do this, even if I don’t feel inspired, because creativity flows from the doing, not from the thinking about doing! If I waiting around to feel ‘inspired’ I wouldn’t have written four books.
The Enemy Inside and Broken are both available from Amazon, Kobo, Book Depository, Booktopia and on the TWCS website. Check out Vanessa’s blog at http://vanessa-skye.com
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