Death Knot [TRADE PAPER ]

Eleanor Armitage has isolated herself in the small town where she’ s chosen to live. Her job selecting fabrics for a designer makes it possible for her to work and travel without much personal contact with others. She’ s not unhappy; she’ s just, by desire, totally disengaged from what we would consider “ normal” life. But when Eleanor witnesses a particularly ugly crime, that event pulls at her and, as she follows various aspects of what she has seen, she’ s released from her self-imposed prison and welcomes friendship and even romance."'Before the murders,' says Eleanor Armitage, 'I was just sort of waiting to die. I wasn’t terminally ill and I certainly wasn’t suicidal, but there was nothing going on in my life, nothing to keep me interested.' There’s a couple of past traumas that have sent her into this depression, one recent and one going back to her teenage years, but she’s too numb to think about either. An invisibly respectable middle-aged woman in the tiny Texas town of Lost Pines, Eleanor has no human contact except for casual acquaintances she has met on her daily strolls (prescribed by the doctor who also issues her Citalopram) along a local river path.  All that changes when she happens upon one of those acquaintances, an elderly gent named Farley, beating a teenage boy to death with his cane.

So the first question is not who or how, but why; hence, uncommon mysteries unfold. Farley, a retired schoolteacher, has always had clairvoyant insight into the futures of “certain children” he has taught—and now can demonstrate peculiar knowledge of Eleanor’s past. As she learns more, the question arises, could a clairvoyant actually provoke an assault he’s foreseen by trying to preempt it?  Can a once-conjoined twin sympathetically experience the murder of his