Indelible, by Kristen Heitzmann

Kristen Heitzman

I have to start by saying that Indelible is a novel written for women.  That's not to say I didn't like it, and certainly not to say that it's a bad book, but it held much more appeal for my feminine side than for my masculine side.  First, the female characters.  The main character is a sculptor with a gift (or disability) of eidetic memory, which helps her sculpt beautifully by memorizing faces and features, but which occasionally hinders her with images locking into her vision.  She can see again by sculpting the image away.  The sculptor becomes friends with another gifted artist, a blind painter, a single woman.  Another woman pines for her ex-boyfriend, her husband's best friend and business partner.  The male characters: muscular mountain men with jutting chins and chiseled features.  In other words, we have damsels in distress and their knights in shining armor.  This is certainly not a bodice-ripper--the relationships are chaste--but the romance is definitely there.

The story opens with one of the rugged mountain men rescuing the sculptor's nephew from jaws of a mountain lion.  The boy's dad is a pro baseball player, so the rescue gets some press, drawing the attention of a strange stalker.  The stalker dresses like a demon and quotes from Paradise Lost.  It's not as weird as Heitzman makes it sound, but as the romance develops between the sculptor and the mountain man, the stalker gets closer to their peaceful mountain town, disrupting their idyllic lives.

Heitzman spends a lot of time dealing with the hurts of her characters: the sculptor's debilitating gift, the blind woman, the little boy who loses an arm, the mountain man's professional-ski-career-ending injury, his loss of his little brother, the ballplayer's shallow wife, some love triangles in the little town, the painful past of the stalker.  It's melodramatic, to be sure, but she does manage to weave it all together into a pretty decent story.  I would definitely recommend it for female readers; male readers might find that they enjoy it as well!

More about the author at her web site.  Look at the pictures from her writing window.  You'll be jealous.