A nail-biting psychological thriller that had me keep questioning what is really going on?

Ruby was a young child when her father left her in a well one coincidentally Ruby Falls. She became all the talk on the news.

She has grown up to be a soap opera star, but lands a dream role in the move Rebecca.

She goes to Italy and marries an exotic man named Orlando. They move to LA and that’s when things got twisted. What is reality and what is acting…that was my question the entire time.

You won’t be able to guess what happens, but poor Ruby was deeply traumatized by her dad abandoning her at such a young age.

This is a must read if you enjoy psychological thrillers that keeps your mind spinning. Plus isn’t this cover gorgeous!!! ( )

An Actress with Daddy issues seeks a new Hollywood beginning in “Ruby Falls”

Lights, camera and action take center stage in Deborah Goodrich Royce’s new psychological thriller, “Ruby Falls” (Post Hill Press). Soap Opera star Ruby Eleanor Russell has daddy issues, and who wouldn’t after being abandoned by her father on an underground tour of Ruby Falls in Tennessee. He simply released her hand, and six-year-old Ruby was alone in the mist with a group of strangers. The childhood trauma has since influenced every aspect of her present life in the late 1980s, and she’s intent of starting fresh with a whirlwind marriage to British aristocrat Orlando Montague, the starring role in a gothic remake of DuMaurier’s Rebecca, and a new rose-covered cottage in the Hollywood Hills.
Life continues to be rosy as she befriends a psychic cat-lady neighbor, Dottie Robinson, adopts Bel, one of Dottie’s kittens, Howard her agent dotes upon her, and Orlando opens a glamorous antique shop in Los Angeles. Then...
In the gothic tradition, Ruby shortly enters an Alice through the Looking Glass existence. As in the movies, reality and fantasy blur, where every word, action and thought can be interpreted from contrasting perspectives. Ruby/Eleanor, who is a dedicated actress, becomes more and more embedded in her movie role as Lavinia Lange, and her actual life assumes a surreal quality echoing that of the tormented, innocent bride. Orlando, whom she married after knowing him for only weeks, suddenly becomes possessive and suspicious of her. He accuses her of concealing her father’s media-grabbing disappearance, and her real name. (She’s abandoned Ruby–who was lost in Ruby Falls–to adopt Eleanor as her name). And she suspects him of having an affair and seeking to steal a valuable family heirloom, a secretary.
Ruby/Eleanor’s deeply engrained fear of abandonment and growing paranoia threaten her new marriage and her new career. She wonders whether she is reliving Rebecca or Gaslight, where the manipulative husband intentionally toyed with his hysterical wife to make her believe she was crazy. She also wonders whether she is the unnamed heroine in Rebecca or the evil Mrs. Danvers? Most important, after twenty years missing, her obsessions over whether her father will ever return to her, and whether he left any clues to his whereabouts, swirl out of proportion.
In “Ruby Falls,” Royce incorporates her experience as an actress in daytime drama (Silver Kane, evil half-sister to Erica Kane on All My Children), television (21 Jump Street, St. Elsewhere, 90210) and in the movies (Out on a Limb) to take the reader backstage at the soaps and on the soundstages of Hollywood. Through her haunting references, Royce pays homage to Old Hollywood greats like Hitchcock, Truffaut and Cary Grant as her protagonist, Ruby/Eleanor, searches for answers about her past and present, and grapples with the tension between reality and imagination.
In “Ruby Falls,” Royce has crafted Ruby/Eleanor as a wily protagonist with many layers of fact and fiction. Each suspenseful page peels away another layer of Ruby/Eleanor’s facade until her true core is exposed. We learn Ruby loved her enigmatic father more than anyone else in the world, and she mourns him every day of her life. We learn that in acting, she can step into another person’s shoes to escape her past, and that her tragic memories are fluid and open to her distorted interpretation. And that she, too, is an enigma which keeps us turning the page.
Royce leaves the reader wondering whether her protagonist was the innocent child Ruby abandoned at the falls or whether she is the emotionally fragile Eleanor who struggles to survive every day. “Ruby Falls” will enthrall readers who love clever, twisty psychological thrillers, and the fabulous Hollywood ending will leave them wanting more. ( )