Pay the Piper: A Novel

Joan Williams

Dis 2014 · Open Road Media

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The electrifying story of a woman whose search for love and fulfillment brings her to the very brink of disaster

Laurel Wynn is haunted by her insecurities. Raised in a backwater Mississippi town by an alcoholic mother, she is now the author of largely ignored novels and the unhappy wife and mother of an upper-middle-class New England family. She continues to hold out hope, however, that the right kind of love might change everything for the better. When she begins a correspondence with Hal MacDonald, a wealthy Mississippian incarcerated for the accidental murder of his stepson, Laurel comes to believe that she has finally found a partner passionate and charismatic enough to make her feel whole.
 
Enthralled by Hal’s ardent letters and their brief jailhouse meetings, Laurel leaves her husband and child to move back to the South. But when Hal is finally released, the fantasy romance she imagined quickly turns into a nightmare. At fifty-three years old, Laurel is in life-threatening danger and must find within herself the courage and the determination not just to survive, but to set herself free once and for all.

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Joan Williams (1928–2004) was an acclaimed author of short stories and novels, including The Morning and the Evening, a finalist for the National Book Award, and The Wintering, a roman à clef based on her relationship with William Faulkner. Born in Memphis, Tennessee, and educated at Bard College in upstate New York, Williams was greatly influenced by the legacy of her mother’s rural Mississippi upbringing and set much of her fiction in that state. Her numerous honors included the John P. Marquand First Novel Award, a grant from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.