A mysterious death buries painful, shocking secrets for twenty-five years ...
A happily married man with three small children decides one day he no longer wants to live. He gives himself leukemia and nine months later is dead.
This is the conundrum Lisa Sitteroff is determined to solve regarding her dead father—the tale her mother, Ruth, told Lisa and her two brothers, Rafferty and Neal, throughout their childhood. But Lisa, now thirty and watching Raff suffer from the ravages of bipolar illness, believes if she can solve this puzzle, she might somehow save her brother. For Raff’s pain is intrinsically tied up with feelings of parental abandonment.
What starts as a noble goal for Lisa soon grows into a vicious family war, wreaking destruction on Lisa’s marriage. Lisa discovers details of her parents’ relationship that her mother has long hidden. Shocking clues appear as Lisa reads a letter her father, Nathan, wrote before he died, prompting her to visit Nathan’s former boss, Ed Hutchinson. From him, Lisa learns that her engineer father helped design a generator run by radioactive materials. Ed lets slip that Nathan participated in a dangerous secret experiment, a fact her mother discounts as Nathan’s cause of death. Accusations and excuses fly. Yet, how much of what Lisa uncovers is true? Is truth solely subjective?
Lisa sifts through layers of lies as she journeys into her father’s story, seeking to understand this man she never knew. Meanwhile, her mother responds in fury and tries to destroy Lisa’s life, determined to keep Lisa from uncovering her dark secrets.
Conundrum explores the rocky landscape of betrayal and truth, asking whether a search for truth is worth the high cost. An intense women's fiction novel about love, family, and relationship.
Genre: FICTION / Contemporary WomenConundrum is a powerful women's fiction story in similar style to author Jodi Picoult. It has sold thousands of copies and often rides up the Amazon best-seller lists. It is actively marketed and promoted, and currently the audio book is in production with Audible.
Chapter 1
June 1986
The conundrum went like this:
A man walks into a nondescript restaurant tucked away in an alley. It’s taken him years to find such a place, and his agitation is palpable. He orders albatross—broiled. With trembling hands, he picks up his fork and knife and slices off a piece of the seared white flesh. Juices drip onto his plate as he brings the morsel to his mouth. The aroma nauseates him as he squeezes his eyes shut and bites down.
The man’s weathered face relaxes. He sighs, sets the knife and fork down on the starched linen tablecloth, and places a hand over his heart, as if to calm its beating.
He smiles at the waiter, who bows politely and attends to the other diners. Relief washes in absolution. He raises his eyes to heaven and whispers, but no one hears him.
“Thank God, I’m free.”
Of all the wacky conundrums Raff piled on us over the years, that was the hardest—if I discounted the convoluted tale of the surgeon who performed a highly skilled operation, yet was supposed to be missing an arm. It took Neal and me three days of battering Raff with desperate yes-or-no questions to arrive at the answer. I remembered him gloating, sporting that sixties’ Beatles haircut so popular back then, his black straggly bangs falling into his brooding pubescent eyes. He never relinquished hints—even when we begged out of frustration. Even when we beat him with pillows and punched his arms as hard as we could. Raff loved to wield his secret knowledge over us measly peons of his intellectual kingdom, a king with the power to wave his scepter and send dissenters to the gallows of humiliation—something he often did.
And the answer was so simple, as most of those conundrums were.
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French
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Already translated.
Translated by Louise Chaumont
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Portuguese
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Translation in progress.
Translated by andre diogo weber
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Spanish
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Translation in progress.
Translated by Paula Sobral
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