Book Signing with Local Thriller Author Rhys Lovell
Books will be available for purchase during the event, but we do have copies of his books in stock at the shop now!
About Catharsis:
The rage room. Want to kill your spouse and get away with it? What about your employer? Your priest? At Chicago’s Catharsis, you can do just that—in a controlled simulation, using the latest technology in cloning—and no one gets hurt. No one dies. In the mid 21st century, the rage room has become the most sought out method of destruction therapy for the wealthy elite. Owen Valack is the CEO who runs Catharsis, a corporation built on the backs of his father and grandfather. Now, decades after its inception, a new technology is being pioneered at Catharsis, substituting living breathing replicants as victims instead of outdated and unrealistic holograms. And Owen, in the midst of a bitter divorce, has decided to use his wife’s replicant as the prototype. But the replicants, unlike the crude holograms that came before, fight back with surprising strength and agility. A shocking discovery is made when the simulated murder of a second replicant seems to coincide with the grisly death of its human counterpart swimming 2,000 miles away at Malibu Beach. Pete Malinowski, a beat cop, gets a call to respond to a reported drowning. Inexplicably, what he finds is a man clearly dead, but not from drowning. Suspecting a homicide, he begins an investigation that leads him from Malibu Beach to Council Grove, Kansas, and finally back to Chicago to ferret out the truth of what’s really happening behind closed doors at the premier Chicago rage room.
About the Author: Rhys Lovell is a theatre artist who has acted and directed in Chicago and throughout Central Illinois for over forty years. He is the author of the full length plays, Pangaea Fell and The Imaginist, and a short one-act play titled Shatter. Currently, he serves as the Artistic Director of the Heartland Theatre Company in Bloomington/Normal, Illinois. He is married with two grown children and a sweet, but neurotic dog named Fiddler. Catharsis is his first novel.