Stay

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Devastated by her lover's death in a slaying that was her fault, Aud Torvingen has sequestered herself in an isolated Appalachian cabin she's painstakingly rebuilding. Grief is Aud's only companion--a grief so acutely and powerfully evoked that it's almost another character in this brilliant and multifaceted novel. Reluctantly drawn back to the world by her oldest friend, whose fiancée has gone missing, Aud agrees to investigate, and quickly tracks the missing Tammy Foster to a Soho loft. She also finds Geordie Karp, the psychopath who turned Tammy into a sexual and psychological slave and has already chosen his next victim, a 12-year-old girl who's been smuggled into the country and sold to Karp.

Stopping Karp, a task for which Aud is uniquely suited, tests her strength and her sanity; by transforming her grief into vengeance, she's forced to come to terms with the violence and brutality that are as central to her character as tenderness, sensuality, and vulnerability. Tautly plotted and pulsating with energy, this is a novel that won't let go, alternately searing and shocking as well as soaring with lyrical prose that's close to poetry in places. Aud, Nicola Griffith's complex protagonist who made her first appearance in The Blue Place, is never less than compelling in this stunning sequel. --Jane Adams


From Publishers Weekly
Griffith (The Blue Room; Slow River) opens her latest on the roof of a cabin in a North Carolina mountaintop forest, moving from a wide focus on a primordial wilderness to acute closeups of particular delicious sights and smells. Even before we learn the barest details about tall, blonde, singular Aud ("rhymes with shroud") Torvingen, we are seduced by her awareness, competence and her relish for the physical details of life. We learn that she has slipped off to this forest to rebuild an old cabin because she is grieving profoundly for her lover, Julia, who died in a hail of bullets. An old friend unexpectedly shows up asking for help tracking down his fiancee, who has gone missing in Manhattan, and the deft way Aud secures the cabin and travels (stopping outside of town to stow her pick-up truck and slip into an elegant Eileen Fisher outfit) reveals that this is a woman with a very sharp edge. Once Aud, a former Atlanta police officer, finds her friend's lover in a loft downtown, the action kicks into high gear and we are taken inside a character who is as brutal as she is sensitive, as wildly and exuberantly violent as she is bereaved. Yet as Griffith is enthralling us with each utterly convincing yet surprising turn, she also allows Aud to move forward emotionally. What makes Griffith's work especially satisfying and exciting is the way her extraordinary protagonist demolishes false human boundaries just as surely as she demolishes bad people. Aud is hugely complex and unique, and Griffith deserves a huge following. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
This is the second title in Griffith's mystery series (following The Blue Place, 1998) featuring six-foot-tall, twentysomething Aud Torvingen, an independently wealthy, retired Atlanta police lieutenant. Aud, once a cold-blooded killing machine, feels responsible for the death of her lover, Julia. Blindsided by grief, she throws herself into renovating her isolated North Carolina cabin. Then a longtime friend begs her for help in finding his missing girlfriend, Tammy, and Aud faces the double challenge of reentering civilization and tracking Tammy down in New York City. Aud finds a frightened, submissive woman quite unlike the Tammy she knew before. When Tammy finally reveals the full extent of her treatment at the hands of a sadistic sociopath, Aud returns to New York City and a violent encounter with Tammy's abuser. Griffith knows how to build her scenes, and her precision results in a taut, compelling plotline. Even more impressive is the complicated, supremely capable character of Aud, given to great bouts of grief punctuated by brutal moments of violence. This is one tough detective. Joanne Wilkinson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Book Description
Aud (it rhymes with "shroud" ) Torvingen is six feet tall with blond hair and blue eyes. She can restore a log cabin with antique tools or put a man in a coma with her bare hands. As imagined by Nicola Griffith in this ferocious masterpiece of literary noir, Aud is a hero who combines the tortured complexity with moral authority.

In the aftermath of her lover's murder, the last thing a grieving Aud wants is another case. Against her better judgment she agrees to track down an old friend's runaway fiancée--and finds herself up against both a sociopath so artful that the law can't touch him, and the terrible specters of loss and guilt. As stylish as this year's Prada and as arresting as a razor at the throat, Stay places Nicola Griffith in the first rank of new-wave crime writers.


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Ex-Atlanta cop Aud Torvingen's friend Dornan owns a profitable string of cafes, but he can't keep his hands on his fiancee. Soon after she accepted his engagement ring, business developer Tammy Foster signed on as a consultant with a firm putting up a mall in Florida. Then the calls began: She'd be another week longer, no, three weeks, four; she'd gone to New York to learn from Geordie Karp, the psychologist advising the clients how wide to make the aisles and where to put the most profitable merchandise. Now, nothing, so Dornan wants Aud (The Blue Place, 1998) to round up Tammy and bring her home. Sunk in mourning for her lover Julia, whose shooting death she blames on herself, Aud is in no mood to take on another case, or even leave her shambles of a home. But it turns out to be surprisingly easy for Aud to locate Tammy in New York, and not all that difficult to persuade her shell-shocked quarry to leave. When Tammy recovers enough to start talking about her sexual thralldom to the monstrous Karp, however, Aud realizes her job has only begun. Aud will have to recover the evidence of her enslavement Karp is holding over Tammy, neutralize the evidence of dozens of other equally sordid affairs, and somehow release Luz Bexar, Karp's nine-year-old "wife-in-training," from the foster family that's tending her in backwoods Arkansas. Powered by grief and righteous rage, Aud succeeds in all these tasks and more-far more than some readers will want-in a darkly revealing, furiously entertaining adventure.


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