Set in the American South, The Hiding Place Girl is a painfully truthful telling of a girl’s secret adolescence and young adulthood. (Please note that this novel contains sexually explicit scenes.)
When she was a child, Renae and a boy named Patrick were friends. They shared adventures. They shared secret hiding places. But they never told each other about the secret worlds hidden inside their houses. Their sharing stopped one fall afternoon when Patrick walked home from school and found something terrible waiting for him there. After that day, what his family had hidden away was out in the open for all to see.
Years later, Renae’s father dies suddenly. Staring at his casket in the funeral home, she tumbles back in memories to untangle the connections between herself as a young girl and the woman she has become. Her memories begin with Patrick, and in them she finds that the fearful choices she made when they were childhood friends are the choices she’s been making ever since. Because the hidden world inside the house she grew up in has been following her around.
The Hiding Place Girl is Robin’s first novel. She wrote it over the course of several years while working in Washington, DC. (If you happen to be from that general area and you noticed a woman in a black car pulled over on the George Washington Parkway or in Old Town Alexandria, scribbling furiously on a well-worn note pad, that was probably Robin, writing lines and scenes as they came to her while driving back and forth over the Potomac River bridges to work each week.)
Two follow-on novels are planned for The Hiding Place Girl, and Robin is writing another series of novels under her own name. The first of these will be published in the summer of 2013.
Robin was born in Kentucky. She’s also lived in Louisiana, Kansas, Virginia, and in England. Among other things, she’s been a convenience store checkout clerk, bank teller, scuba diver, office manager for a mightily dysfunctional construction company, graduate student in clinical psychology, and a director of corporate relations. She’s now dividing her time between the U.S. and England, where she’s enjoying the Thames and the pubs while her husband John is doing some work in London.
For sample chapters of forthcoming novels, please send a note to hiding.place.girl@gmail.com. You’ll only receive samples and news of novels being published by Robin Martin/Robin Billings. Your email address will not be shared with anyone else, and it won’t be used for any other purpose. (Robin hates spammy-waste-of-time emails just as much as you do!)
For Robin’s blog, a list of discussion questions and other things, please visit: http://robinmartin.webs.com/.
Please visit Robin’s Facebook author page: http://on.fb.me/WZrWCi for more frequent updates and the occasional chat.
(This is a sponsored post.)