author
Helen Montague Foster
Lost Graces &
The Silent Hen
Lost Graces &
Lost Graces
Psychiatrist Dr. Nancy Thomas prefers to believe there is no such thing as knowing too much about a human being, but after someone shoots a colleague, her fear mounts, and she learns disturbing secrets that force her to rethink her approach as a therapist.
Despite insurance denials and cautions from a supervisor that Grace and Alan are too ill for her to continue treating safely, Nancy struggles to provide good care. Has her own past clouded her judgement? With her husband away, her children grown and gone, colleagues dying, and her anxiety surging, she fears she may become prey to a serial killer.
Set in the late 1990’s in Richmond, Virginia in a landscape of changing health care policies, Lost Graces by Helen Montague Foster was inspired by the city’s reactions to the real-life Southside Strangler and Beltway Snipers. This richly imagined psychiatric thriller invites readers into head of the kind of psychiatrist who does therapy.
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The Silent Hen
The Silent Hen is fiction based on events of WWII, written by Helen Montague Foster as a tribute to her parents and other courageous men and women of the OSS, whose secret struggles and relationships continue to impact the world.
This morally complex story follows a Jewish child sheltered by a Muslim couple in Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia, and a Virginia woman named Lucy whose conscience compels her to enlist in the OSS, forerunner to the CIA, for service in Egypt.
After an OSS man in love is severely injured in a parachute drop, he and the child, Bella, begin a harrowing journey to Egypt, where Lucy’s resemblance to Bella’s murdered mother will confront them with decisions for which there are no easy answers.
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About the author
Helen Montague Foster, MD is a retired psychiatrist, formerly a clinical professor in the department of Psychiatry at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she completed her medical training. She majored in English at George Mason College with the plan of becoming a physician or writer, and during her long career as a psychiatrist/psychotherapist she has been inspired by the people she has known along the way. Her writing has appeared in JAMA, Tuck Magazine, Rattle, the Pharos, Hektoen International, Big River Poetry Review, The Richmond Times Dispatch, and Harper’s Weekly. Her debut novel, The Silent Hen, is her tenth novel manuscript.
Quotes
She bent her head to examine the little photo and extended her palms so the others could see. The picture was of a face close enough to her own to startle her.
If the Japs raided, they would be sitting ducks, but the sea was beaten with a vast sheen of reflection and a kind of living translucence superimposed on the opacity of depth. It was as if the presence of the ocean and this bereft man from Yugoslavia, the land of Margie’s relatives, had stripped away her emotional skin.
Though she didn’t recognize him, his tears made her weep too, and they stood face to face, wordless, her throat in spasm as if she’d encountered
her father or Uncle Walton.
They made their way down a path that Bella had not known. It led to a small stream where they dipped in their tin cups and drank.
Mud swirled from the bottom of the stream when her cup touched it, but the water she dipped was clear and cool as well water, and with each swallow, she felt stronger.