When We Were Married - #2 - Second Acts
by Daniel Quentin SteelePublish: Jan 18, 2012Series: When We Were MarriedRomantic SuspenseBook Overview
BETRAYAL, DIVORCE AND COURTHOUSEMAYHEM WAS ONLY THE BEGINNING.
Four words ended their marriage.
In the wake of those four words, the 18-year marriage of Jacksonville Assistant State Attorney William Maitland and University of North Florida Professor Debbie Maitland ends in a painful divorce.
As Volume Two begins, Maitland faces the greatest challenge of his professional life as he must stand against the African American community, the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office and his own boss in his prosecution of a heroic black cop who killed three men during a home invasion.
AND he must decide whether to undertake a court case he almost certainly cannot win against a cold blooded murderer who beat his ex-wife and his unborn son to death.
AND he must prepare for a possible prosecution of a kingpin in a Mexican drug cartel.
But for their part, the shadowy men in Mexico must decide if they are prepared to take on “The Angel of Death,” as Maitland has become known.
And they will soon find they are challenging a man at whose back stands a deadly criminal organization.
The Colombian Crime cartel is headed by the legendary Old Man. And if they strike at Maitland, the Colombian crime lord has put the Mexicans on notice that he can and will reach into the deserts of Mexico to strike at their heart.
In his personal life, Maitland has transformed himself from the flabby couch potato who lost the love and lust of his wife, Debbie Maitland/Bascomb, to a younger man.
But he now finds himself facing the question of what to do about Aline des-Jardins, the married French woman he has fallen in love with.
Aline has followed him to Jacksonville. He walked away from her once before, because she is married to a French federal prosecutor he considers a friend.
But now that Aline is in Jacksonville, can Maitland send her away again? Can he do the right thing, especially when he isn’t sure anymore what the right thing is?
While Maitland is preoccupied with professional challenges and Aline’s presence, Debbie is finding that beauty is no shield against loneliness and pain.
A woman who has never lacked for male attention, in the wake of her divorce she’s lost a husband and a lover, is estranged from her children, besieged by would-be seducers, and trying to find her footing in a new career.
She’s done what she knows to be the right thing in seeking a life apart from Bill Maitland, but doing the right thing hasn’t protected her from psychosomatic illnesses, nightmares involving a dead aunt, and emotional distress that leads her to the office of empathetic psychiatrist Dr. Ernst Teller.
As she tries to understand why she can’t break the emotional ties to a man she believes left her long before she left him, she finds herself becoming increasingly closer to writer Clint Abbott.
As the world of crime and brutal violence circles closer to their life in Jacksonville, Bill Maitland and Debbie Bascomb are learning that sometimes being divorced and apart can be as painful and confusing as being trapped in an unhappy marriage.
Is it possible to have a Second Act in two lives ripped apart by neglect and obsession and betrayal and lies? Or is it too late to ever go back?
