Carol LaHines launches "The Vixen Amber Halloway," w/ Crissa-Jean Chappell

Join us as we celebrate the launch of The Vixen Amber Halloway, a jailhouse confessional, a dark comedy, an oeuvre of women’s rage, a suspenseful revenge fantasy, and a moving portrait of one woman’s psychological breakdown.

Author Carol LaHines will be joined by writer Crissa-Jean Chappell for a conversation, reception, and signing.

Preorder your copy!

About the book

Ophelia, a professor of Dante, is stricken when she discovers that her husband, Andy, has been cheating on her with a winsome colleague, Amber Halloway. What follows is Ophelia’s figurative descent into hell as she obsessively tracks her subjects, performs surveillance from her beat-up Volvo, and surreptitiously moves into the foreclosed property next door to Amber’s. Spying on the lovers, Ophelia is tormented anew by the abandonment of her mother at age eight, and becomes increasingly estranged from the reality of her surroundings. The escalating tension comes to a crisis, however, when Andy and Amber become engaged.

Advance Praise for The Vixen Amber Halloway

"LaHines’s fascinating narrator, Ophelia, is decidedly pathological. And here’s the surprise—she’s also sympathetic, humorous, intelligent—a deeply damaged woman telling her tale to a prison psychiatrist in preparation for a hearing before a parole board, but it’s not a confession.... The novel raises questions about diagnoses of mental disorders, possible treatment, and the appropriateness of incarceration." —NPR Podcast, Baum on Books

"A heart-wrenching account of one soon-to-be-ex-wife's psychological breakdown... a compulsive read." —Katrīna Biele, Long. Sweet. Valuable, Medium.com

"The Vixen Amber Halloway is dark and compulsive reading. Following a woman's descent into madness after her husband leaves her for another woman, this compact and complex novel pulls you into the mind and delusions of a woman as she slowly devolves while you watch, helpless to stop it." —Mary Webber O’Malley, bookseller at Skylark Bookshop

"Carol LaHines has invented here a compulsively readable and craftily constructed tale of murder and mayhem. Her wonderfully original unreliable narrator tells a story that will make you laugh and cry and perhaps remember Humbert Humbert in Lolita" — Sheila Kohler, author of award-winning novels including Cracks and Open Secret

About the author

Carol LaHines' debut novel, Someday Everything Will All Make Sense, was a finalist for the Nilsen Prize for a First Novel and an American Fiction Award. Her fiction has appeared in numerous literary journals including Fence, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Denver Quarterly, Cimarron Review, The Laurel Review, Permafrost, and redivider. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and recipient of the Lamar York Prize for Fiction. Her short stories and novellas have also been finalists for the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction from Sarabande Books, the David Nathan Meyerson fiction prize, the New Letters short story award, and the Disquiet Literary Prize, among others. The Vixen Amber Halloway is her second novel.

About Crissa-Jean Chappell

Crissa-Jean Chappell was born in Miami and now lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her debut young adult novel, Total Constant Order (HarperTeen) is a NYPL Book For The Teen Age and a VOYA Perfect Ten. Chappell’s second novel, Narc (Flux Books) is currently optioned for film. More Than Good Enough (Flux Books) is a Florida Book Awards medalist, which Kirkus calls, "compelling and emotionally nuanced." Snowbirds (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers) "...will keep readers on their toes…an engrossing mystery,” School Library Journal. Sun Don't Shine (Fitzroy Books) was released in January 2024. She holds a PhD and MFA from the University of Miami and is a professor of creative writing at Lehman College. When she misses South Florida, she talks to the parrots in Green-Wood Cemetery. Visit her at www.crissajeanchappell.com.